It is interesting how little blackmail I see, that I know is blackmail. A lot of people probably do some things they would be embarrassed by if they were made public at some degree of detail and explicitness, and it probably isn’t that hard to get evidence of these, and quite a few people seem to be amoral . Also, in order to properly embarrass someone, I imagine you would make your information relatively public, so that for instance I—Katja—should hear about some fraction of cases. Yet I very rarely receive information I know to be public for the purpose of embarrassing someone. I’m not sure I remember it ever happening. Why not?
If I imagine being morally inclined toward blackmailing someone, one salient reason to avoid it is that my wrongdoing is extremely obvious and in-the-face of the recipient, so they seem likely to react destructively, for instance by telling everyone that I’m a dirty blackmailer. It’s like stealing from right in front of someone’s face.
Another possibility is that there is a lot of blackmail, but it mostly remains private because the blackmailers mostly get the price right to have their threats heeded. This is an interesting theory, because it suggests blackmail is much more common than we observe, so people may be greatly underestimating the chance of it happening to them.
One place I have heard about blackmail occurring is from AI systems. Which is interesting, if it isn’t a thing humans seem to be doing much. What to make of that?
Cover image by Jürgen Jester from Pixabay
If you're blackmailing somebody, under what circumstances would it be in your interest to follow-through with your threat to disclose the secret?
If the victim pays up, you have no need to disclose the information, and doing so would needlessly expose you to risk of legal repercussions.
If the victim doesn't pay up, disclosing the information won't get you the money, plus it removes your only hold over the victim, plus it still exposes you to the risk or legal repercussions.
The only sort of cases I can think of where it would make sense to ever disclose the secrets would be if you foresee being able to blackmail the victim again in future and thus need to make the threat credible, or else if you expect to blackmail multiple victims who each know about the others such that disclosing one victim's secret would increase your credibility with the others.
By definition, we should only hear about blackmail when we're either directly involved or else when the secret was actually disclosed - perhaps it's just these situations that are rare, not blackmail in general?
Or, perhaps disclosing the secrets doesn't look like blackmail, but rather like "here's a scandalous fact in the public domain, we've no idea where it came from, just as we had no idea for the other 3751 scandalous facts that've entered the public domain this year"?
Yeah, tricky… I know of some blackmail that must've worked for years and was perfectly private, so it took me a long time to hear about it. But I also have a friend who is rich and reveals information about themselves that could be reputationally costly, and has been doing that for years with no bad consequences. It's really quite surprising.
As a kid I used to be very afraid of blackmail, but in my 20s I discovered that it happens vastly less often than I expected.