A 21-year-old launches an AI app that helps people cheat technical interviews.

Two months later, he is doing half a million dollars a month.

VCs throw money at him.

Twitter calls him a genius. 

For decades, we have been conditioned to believe success equals millions or billions. If you are not sprinting toward unicorn status, you are invisible. This obsession with outsized wealth has created a culture where shortcuts are not just common, they are expected. 

Why build something honest and durable when you can promise people a backdoor to success?

Why play fair when the market rewards the opposite?

Once you accept that logic, the rise of cheating as innovation makes perfect sense. 

We are living in an era of cheating as a service. Apps that whisper answers during interviews. Platforms that script your sales calls in real time. AI that helps you game your way into jobs, clients, or contracts. 

And it does not stop with individuals. Even in compliance, one of the few spaces designed to enforce accountability, we are seeing AI tools built to help companies look secure instead of be secure. Frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 were not created to be gamed. They were designed to raise the floor of trust. Automation has its place, but when the incentive shifts from building resilience to gaming appearances, trust is hollowed out. 

Aaron Swartz tried to free academic papers, public knowledge that should have been accessible in the first place. For that, he was vilified and crushed by the system. Meanwhile, founders who openly sell tools to cheat their way into FAANG interviews are paraded as innovators. 

And here is the uncomfortable part. Today’s most celebrated technology, large language models like ChatGPT, were trained on vast amounts of public, copyrighted, and proprietary data, much of it without consent. What Aaron did was treated as theft. What LLM builders did is dressed up as progress. 

One man fought to liberate knowledge for everyone and was punished. Another generation of companies quietly absorbed the world’s knowledge and got hailed as pioneers. That inversion says everything about the values we have chosen to elevate. And those values are enforced not by reason, but by capital. 

This era runs on a simple operating system: do not ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.

Build the tool, raise the round, apologize later.

It does not matter if the foundation is weak, as long as the growth chart goes up and to the right. 

Investors have always chased returns. That is not new. What feels different today is how openly we celebrate shortcuts that undermine trust. The money will always follow the hype. The responsibility rests with us, the builders, leaders, and communities deciding what to normalize. If we claim to build for trust and resilience, then we cannot confuse cheating for progress. 

Compliance, security, and governance were supposed to make our systems stronger. Instead, they risk becoming mirrors, tools to create the appearance of strength. It is a fragile illusion, and when it cracks, trust collapses with it. 

Aaron Swartz died for sharing knowledge.

Today, we celebrate machines that ingested the whole internet without consent and call it progress. 

Not every shortcut is innovation. Not every growth story is progress.

If we care about security, trust, and real resilience, then we have to be clear: what we reward matters.