We may not actually make anything, but when it comes to scamming, we’re innovative.
by schwim on Jun.23, 2010, under Spam
I often bitch about the lack of innovation when it comes to scammers of late. I’ve seen the same thing over and over. So much so, that I’ve reached the point that I don’t even amuse myself any longer(hence the lack of recent content). Hey, don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Ah, but I found a guy that has rekindled in my heart the hope that we may see some new and innovative scams soon.
Recently, I read an article that laid out a method of searching mp3 directories across the web for music. I followed the instructions and damned if I didn’t find results for all the searches I made. I was pretty impressed, but seeing as how I don’t download music illegally, it wasn’t of much use to me, so I quickly forgot about the bookmark. Until today. I was trying to download one of the free albums from ytcracker, but the page he directs you to is inaccessible. Then I remembered this incredible link I found, so I fired it up and gave it a spin. Which led me to Wally.
Meet Wally( wallywashis.name ).
Remember that article I told you I read, concerning how to search mp3 directories? Well, Wally obviously read this article as well. As a result, he has packed his directory full of files with names bearing thousands of song titles(most of which would be illegal to download).
Doing a search for ytcracker brought me to his site. Seeing the normal directory structure, I clicked the album I wanted and was rewarded with links to files bearing the song names. Clicking a song name however, sends you to a login page. Well, that can’t be a big deal, right? All he wants is a username and password. He’s not even looking for an email address. Enter a username and password and click submit… and I’m presented with this page. For those that don’t want to take the time to submit a bogus login/pass, here’s the content:
Wally says:
To help support downloads you must complete this free offer before your account will work. You will not be able to download until you complete the survey or free offer.
Thanks, –Wally
How does this work?
Once the advertiser determines that the info you entered is real (usually instantly) my server will recieve a message from the advertising company and your account will be activated.
I have a different question. Can you help me?
Please email me if you have any other problems or questions. I will be glad to help.
I want the easy way out. If I email you and beg, will you let me in?
No, please do not waste your time. It is quicker and easier to fill in the form than to wait for my reply that says ‘No!’. It would be nice to let you in without this, but bandwidth costs have become too much.
On this page, Wally sends you to an ad server that he’s an affiliate for.
Oh, and you were so close to having that song too.
Well, I’m sure if I had been looking for something other than free music I could get anywhere else, I might suspend my disbelief and actually waste precious moments of my life filling out a bogus car loan application in an effort to get the music I wanted so badly. Which makes this scam such an ingenious endeavour. Say you visit Wally’s page with his hundreds of thousands of links looking for Metallica. You won’t find them on his front page directory listing, but a simple search will result in hundreds of links. Only having obscure listings on his static page keeps him from drawing attention of people with the horsepower to put him in jail for life. A human search for anything illegal however will provide you results to salivate by.
Wally conveniently explains the fact that he only lists legal and obscure downloads while making you search for illegal music in his blog:
My complete collection currently contains 797,707 albums composed by roughly 170,000 artists. Naturally, browsing this number of files is overwhelming so I can only list a limited number of artists/bands in each directory. To list all of those files in one directory would create a several hundred megabyte html file. Needless to say, that would be a waste of my bandwidth and your time.
Wally just doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time.
So let’s think about this. You want to download illegally obtained music and happen upon Wally’s site. You want this music so badly that you’re willing to waste a portion of your life earning him a referral fee while visiting his affiliate link. Now, Wally tells you that their server is going to hook you up by telling Wally’s server that you were a good boy and asked someone how you could get clearer skin. Here’s what really happens, however. Ready? Wait for it:
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing is going to happen after you make Wally a few bucks. Why does he need to do anything? What are you going to do? Are you going to tell someone that you tried to download some music illegally but didn’t get what Wally promised you?
So, think about this. For the effort of creating thousands of bogus links, Wally is making some dough a tiny bit at a time. He’s not likely to be carted away to prison for sharing music illegally because he’s not sharing music. He’s providing links with the names that contain the text of songs, albums and artists. That’s not illegal. The genius is in not taking anything tangible away from you. Wally caused you to waste a few minutes of your time, which leaves people feeling more like a fool than a victim and they will likely go about their business, resuming the search for illegal music.
Do you still have even a glimmer of hope that Wally is the real deal, simply being persecuted by ignorant and cynical luddites such as myself? Well, let’s take a gander at his picture again:
Man, that looks like one honest face. Like seriously honest. In fact, that may be the most honest-looking face on the planet. Hey, don’t take my word for it. Just read the article which explains that this is a computer-generated image based on the facial traits that are considered to look the most trustworthy.
Thumbs up to you, Wally. You may be a scamming piece of shit, but you do it with style.
June 23rd, 2010 on 3:02 pm
Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean it’s not real. For all you know, these files are stored outside of the United States. The world doesn’t revolve around your legal system.
June 23rd, 2010 on 3:35 pm
You know what, you’re absolutely right. The world doesn’t revolve around the U.S. legal system. I am almost certain that Chicago, IL does, however.
Wally’s domain name points to the following IP: 74.122.197.19, which is in turn pointing to a server located in Chicago, IL. His hosting was purchased through Ubiquity Servers( http://www.ubiquityservers.com ), which in turn is collocating their server space from Continuum Data Center ( http://continuumdatacenters.com/ ). (Mental note to Ubiquity Servers: Don’t use Wally as a reference, since he’s telling everyone how expensive your hosting is in his blog)
Even if the links pointed to offshore servers, the fact that the html files facilitating the download of copyrighted songs are residing on a server in the US would put Wally’s ass in a world of hurt if he were actually allowing you to download any copyrighted music at all. The RIAA sues dead people, pets and those that don’t even own computers. You think some dude pointing to hundreds of thousands of files is going to go unnoticed?
I’m hurt that you would think that I didn’t do my homework.
June 23rd, 2010 on 3:52 pm
Dude, you’re a little late to the game. Sound of Darkness beat you to the punch by 6 months. http://thesoundofdarkness.blogspot.com/
June 23rd, 2010 on 3:55 pm
What can I say? I don’t get out much.
July 20th, 2010 on 4:45 am
I literally Lol’d my way all through your review. It’s really golden–really. I hope you’re a writer because you should be. You described the entire operation spot-on. I had come across Wally’s shenanigans some months back. Although I don’t remember how it actually went down, I believe I just backed out of it once I saw surveys were involved, since in my experience they just keep coming one after another while unpacking loads of spyware in the process. True to form, I have not forsaken my search to illegally download this particular album which I previously believed Wally to be in possession of. But you’re right about not wanting to attract attention–I only stumbled across Wally after alot of assiduous searching. Thus I am now perilously close to actually prying open my wallet and aquiring this music honestly . . . !
July 20th, 2010 on 10:18 am
Hey, don’t go making rash decisions and buying a new shiny CD! Think about this before you purchase anything:
I purchase 5-10 cds a month and have done so for a very long time. I have a lot of main stream music produced under labels that support and fund the RIAA, but have not given them a dime while purchasing these cds. The way to do this is to visit Amazon.com, find the album you want, click used and purchase a “like new” used cd from a vendor with 98% rating or higher. You end up with a cd that still has that “new cd” smell and you don’t help fund the next lawsuit against someone charged with downloading illegal music.
As for your mp3 searches, if you’re using a search string like the one I linked to, there’s a way to remove his site from your results, but that might be a moot point. I searched for a few albums in Google, and wally is no longer coming up. As well, I found this at the bottom of the page:
So, it seems that the RIAA is working on putting an end to finding music through the search engines and that maybe Wally was the first site to get nixed from the results.
Man. I feel really bad for him.
November 21st, 2010 on 7:50 am
Excellent work Mr. Bond, but I am afraid you are too late and have only graced the surface of my devious nature. Kudos to you on your discovery of the photo. How did you uncover it? You should have mailed me before authoring this. You missed a few spots.
November 21st, 2010 on 10:37 am
Too late is my middle name. Well, it’s two names, so I guess you’d have to say it’s my second and third name. As for your devious nature, if you didn’t have one, I wouldn’t get the thousands of visits from people that aren’t smart enough to see your site for the scam that it is. I get so much traffic because of people trying to find a magic login for your site that I’m considering forcing them to fill out a survey before they can read this article. You know… to cover the exorbitant hosting costs and all.
Tineye image reverse search. To be honest, it’s obvious that the image has either had a shitload of postprocessing done or that it was completely created from scratch. I just had to find where else it was used. Once I translated the page, I actually lol’ed. Big points for that to you.
Most people treat their scams like McDonald’s secret sauce. We all know it’s thousand island dressing, but nobody is allowed to say it. I write the 419′ers because it’s fun. The fun of writing this for your site was the mystique. I didn’t do it as a public service announcement. Anyone that falls for your site deserves to lose some minutes of their life and I can only hope that you become so wealthy that you can hire rich people to wipe your ass with original Picassos before being carried to your chambers, where your harem of concubines await to feed you Reeses Cups while solving all of your crossword puzzles.
August 17th, 2011 on 3:31 pm
This is a real piracy website, hosted in Germany. It has been banned from most US hosting companies. Think about it: why would any host ban a customer, if they weren’t really into piracy?
The owner is just creating smoke to avoid legal trouble.
August 17th, 2011 on 4:10 pm
You are so wrong, wrong people everywhere are amazed at how wrong you are.
Bonus points to you for completely missing where he actually hosts the site in the comments.
August 22nd, 2011 on 6:20 am
Seems like wallywashis.name can’t stay at one host for a very long time. This hints that the site is actually offering music. If it was fake, they wouldn’t bother to take it down.
wallywashis.name is currently hosted by hostjava.net
The current ip address of the website is: 46.4.238.198
August 22nd, 2011 on 9:29 am
I was going to respond with even more irrefutable proof that Wally’s site is completely bogus, but since everyone else that posts doesn’t see any reason to actually find an inkling of proof to support their side(OMG he moved hosts! He’s sharing files illegally!), I simply can’t be bothered any longer. I do however have an idea on how to resolve this.
If anyone…. anyone at all can share with me a working login & pass ( json.studley@gmail.com ), I will modify this post to speak of Wally’s nefarious and illegal sharing of music and my apology to the community at large for leading so many people astray. Until that happens, everyone else can stop posting comments concerning Wally’s legitimacy.
Surely, out of the millions of people that are getting music from Wally, one will be happy to share his login. Or hey! If you don’t want to wait and want to prove me wrong, why don’t you just fill out that little survey so you can get your login and rub my nose in how right you are. I’ll be over here holding my breath.
TLDR: provide a working login or STFU.
August 23rd, 2011 on 3:20 pm
@ schwim
For all we know, the posts that claim the site is working “as advertised”, could be from the site’s owner himself.
So, you should go ahead with posting proof that the site is completely bogus, I am interested to know.
August 23rd, 2011 on 4:04 pm
The seeding of the blatant advertisements for the site is quite obvious. I know I give most intardnet users too much credit, but really, it’s so painfully obvious that the site is a scam that I die a little inside every time I come across someone that lacks the cognitive skills necessary to see it for what it is.
There’s some MusicBrainz IRC chatlogs out there where people are poking fun at wally’s site because he lists music that’s in the musicbrainz catalog but that doesn’t actually exist other than the demo tape that the poster is in possession of. Wally simply copied every registered title from the MB site and added a log in system.
I’m still holding my breath in anticipation of a working login of course. Any time one of the billions of people using Wally’s site wants to settle the issue once and for all.
August 24th, 2011 on 6:32 pm
I got a working login all right, but why would I want to share it with you? I spent a few minutes clicking on ads for it. If you want yours, do the same. Simple as that, really.
August 24th, 2011 on 6:34 pm
In case all the text confuses you, for clarification, you fall under the STFU category.
August 27th, 2011 on 1:04 am
Schwim, you’re absolutely right. I tried for days to get into the site by filling out the surveys and my login and password was never allowed in. It’s definitely a scam.
August 27th, 2011 on 12:31 pm
Have you read the blog on that site? Crazy stuff. The guy must be really desperate for traffic.
August 27th, 2011 on 3:18 pm
Yes, it’s pretty comical. For those of you that don’t want to fill out his affiliate survey to not get any music, you can now sign up via his affiliate link to Firstload to not get any music.
Luckily I’ve managed to make not getting any music a cost-free affair, so it’s working out great for me. If my method of not getting music ever fails me however, I will definitely pay Wally to not get music. He’s got such a streamlined system, it’s hard to find fault in it.
September 14th, 2011 on 8:30 pm
Schwim, you are not only right, but you’re incredibly handsome too, I bet.
You’re dreamy.
September 19th, 2011 on 7:49 pm
Hold on a minute. Why would he set up a bogus Firstload account? What do I miss in this scam? Is it to lure more visitors in? Please explain, I don’t want to waste time trying to get a working account for nothing…
September 19th, 2011 on 8:41 pm
For the same reason he wants you to fill out surveys. He provides an affiliate link for Firstload signup, meaning he makes a bit more dough every time someone signs up using his link.
In short, to answer your question, to make more money.
October 4th, 2011 on 4:10 am
So you are telling me Firstload don’t mind paying him a cut for any signup, although they know the scam?
October 4th, 2011 on 8:55 am
Damnit, I forgot to ask the proprietors of Firstload this very question the last time I had lunch with them.
I’m supposed to meet them for a game of cricket this weekend. I promise I’ll try not to forget again.
October 6th, 2011 on 9:58 am
Hey schwim, check this out:
http://pastebin.com/uvzMmFPP
Your thoughts on this? Could be true?
October 6th, 2011 on 10:40 am
Very doubtful, for some very obvious reasons:
1) Downloading music would result in a civil lawsuit by the recording industry, not a criminal lawsuit by a law enforcement agency. This means that you wouldn’t go to jail, but simply be sued for monetary compensation. The police don’t have anything to do with this type of suit and frankly have bigger things to worry about than if you’re illegally downloading Celine Dion’s greatest hits.
2) Although downloading has been tried in the courts as infringement against artists’ rights, it’s actually the uploading that the labels go after, for a couple reasons. One, if you own the music that you’re downloading, it’s not illegal. Secondly, uploaders are much easier to track. So, in the case of Wally and you, the person most likely to ever have action taken against them is Wally.
and Tres) If it was a honeypot, the creators would have never installed a hurdle that made it impossible to actually break the law. It’s not illegal to fill out a survey and nobody has ever downloaded a single song from Wally’s site. Therefore, there’s nothing to prosecute. All they need to do is download a P2P program and grab one of the hundreds of thousands of people still sharing music.
October 7th, 2011 on 4:43 pm
Thanks for the article, God only know how many people would never have figured it out as obvious as it is. I’m pretty sure it would be impossible for him to have that volume of music though. I’m just stunned how many people seem to think this site is legit, it would just be begging for the RIAA to shut it down.
October 8th, 2011 on 9:15 am
The most common search term that brings visitors to this site is “wallywashisname password”. Last month alone, over 1,000 people came from Google alone looking for a password. This is of course, just to give you a small idea of how gullible our fellow netizens are.
We won’t get into the feasibility of storing the amount of music his site lists. It would be like debating the amount of fairy dust that Tinker Bell can carry.
October 8th, 2011 on 10:04 am
Hey thanks for this very helpful page, you saved me from wasting time on this. What do you mean he can’t have that volume of music? I don’t see a lot of directories. Not enough to need more than, say, 50-60 GB space.
October 8th, 2011 on 1:28 pm
Well, I see your problem. You haven’t used Wally’s handy-dandy search function. You will have a problem finding a band that isnt listed. In fact just enter a random word into the search. Wallord lists the music brains catalog in its entirety, so if it ever got a catalog number, its listed on his site.
I figure it would take enough petabytes to make Google cringe. Of course his site only consists of a few pages. His WordPress install takes more server space than his bogus directory does.
October 9th, 2011 on 11:44 am
I check these comments for a few laughs now and again. Police honeypot? I never know what Ol’ Wallord is up to when I log off. He generates fresh controversy like roaches in my ash tray.
1. I hate WordPress and PHP.
2. The DB is just under 1gb compressed.
3. I have only posted here under SPECTRE and have not ‘seeded’ any ads.
4. “The guy must be really desperate for traffic.” In the same way some of you sit at a cubicle with desperation. I resent the implication. I get plenty of traffic. Hows your commute?
I am needing some more context on that pastebin link. Wtf is that ?
October 9th, 2011 on 7:10 pm
I was speaking of your followers, which often post here speaking of their successful signups and song downloads, which you and I both know is bullshit.
It’s good to hear from you again. I hope you’re coming close to rivaling Mr. Gates for having more money than you know what to do with.
October 15th, 2011 on 9:05 pm
There is a certain album profile on a certain open source music database that a certain programmer created to test a certain feature of the database. It has never been released, because it has never been recorded. It’s just a bogus album profile with fake titles and so on.
Well, guess what? It’s on wallywashis.name right now.
So, unless the scammer actually decided to record this album himself, this site has no actual files to provide.
October 16th, 2011 on 2:16 pm
Ha ha ha ha…come on…who signs up for that kind of shit?
What kind of self hosted website advertises that it has the Rolling Stones available for anyone to grab…?
I don’t think they are a honeypot for the cops. Cops don’t give a shit about piracy. They may be a honeypot for RIAA, to cross-check ip addresses. But RIAA doesn’t represent indie labels, so I don’t think they would use their catalogs as bait. There is enough big names on major labels’ catalogs to draw the attention of people who are looking for a quick fix.
January 31st, 2012 on 2:55 pm
ok ok, just silent, I think everibody knows that site was a joke since tha first time was tryin’ to download music in it, but now, what I wanna know?…. SOMEONE KNOWS THE USER/PASS WORDS? have to be one!!!
January 31st, 2012 on 2:59 pm
and look this blog now… none of the passwords work, of curse:
http://wallywashispasswords.blogspot.com/
January 31st, 2012 on 3:30 pm
Of course none of the passwords work. It was established over a year ago that it’s a bogus site.
February 1st, 2012 on 2:04 pm
Now he claims that he has made a usenet newsgroup “alt.bin.wallywashis-mirror” (first it was alt.bin.wallyfile) where he uploaded all his mp3 files.
For some reason the guy also answers his e-mails. His google profile photo.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-YAPuAUuD1l8/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/o2jFuVrcGJU/s200-c-k/photo.jpg
February 1st, 2012 on 2:15 pm
All the feats of altruism and yet here we sit, 20 months later, still waiting for a single provable instance of successful acquirement of a song.
February 2nd, 2012 on 11:47 pm
Schwim,
You know that I appreciate this article. You wrote it using intelligence and humor. There are some other people who have written alarmist and misinforming articles. These people should take the time to educate themselves instead of spewing nonsense.
I understand that some individuals are not happy with my work. They do not have to enjoy it. They have the freedom to buy the album in a store, or pirate it elsewhere.
While I will not specify the volumes of traffic I receive here, rest assured that it is sufficient. The average visitor spends about 2 minutes on that site. How much of that time is spent looking at surveys, I do not know.
The behavior of some of my detractors (excluding yourself) is bordering on obsessive. If these people feel so upset over computers and Internet, ones and zeroes; They should take some time to go offline. Try enjoying nature for a change. Smoke some pot, have sex, exercise, relax, and enjoy your lives instead of obsessing about the 2 minutes you lost on my site. Wally is not real. There is no reason to get bent out of shape over a fantasy.
If the biggest hurdle detractors are facing in their lives happens to be my website, they should count themselves as lucky. Before going all out as an Internet tough guy, haters should ask themselves where they source this moral authority from? Are they priests sent to us by God to pirate music online?
Schwim, you know I am open to criticisms, but some people need to take a few steps back for their own mental health. They have become obsessed.
Thanks again for your informative article,
W
February 3rd, 2012 on 8:40 am
Hi there Wally,
I figured I’d hear from you soon as I got an email forward from one of your detractors yesterday and figured it would remind you to check the comments
. After all this time, you still have the knack to incense a bunch of people trying to steal music. The irony of this has never been lost on me.
It seems that the majority of people that contact me are surprised by my nonchalant attitude in the face of the minutes of their lives that they can never have back. As I told the gentleman that wrote me yesterday:
“Today in the online world, there are people that try to hurt you, people that try to humiliate you and then people that try to take something away from you. Our friend Wallord doesn’t fit into any of those categories. He didn’t ask anyone to come to his site and fill out a survey. People volunteered to do so in the course of attempting to download copyrighted music. As I said in the article, they’ve done nothing more than waste a few minutes(or in the case of the more dense netizens, hours or days) of their life and he made a tiny bit of money during the course of that. Good for him.
I’ve done things in my life that bother me much more than it would if I had been smart enough to think of something like that before he did
”
Hope life is treating you well, Wallord.
February 3rd, 2012 on 11:33 am
What’s with the sudden turn schwim? Sure, we all love MP3′s and if we happen to stumble upon a website, which claims to be having alot of them. Even the rare, obscure, out of print albums, then of course we might actually want to grab those files. We are not “haters”. We are just a curious bunch of people, who found about hefty Mp3 site.
Now this “wally” guy is acting like he is better than the rest of us schmucks. Now we suddenly should get a life, because we are spreading the news about a fake site.
Actual artists have posted messages at his site about the pirated material which he claims to have uploaded there. The basic message is that he is sharing music illegally. Stealing from people and making money of their work.
Sure, we are damnable beings for getting excited about free MP3 files. But the thing is that this guy got us all. Not just downloaders, but musicians alike. One can only wonder how many piracy warnings this guy has gotten via e-mails and blog messages. There are plenty of messages, which he did not approve.
February 3rd, 2012 on 12:15 pm
Hi there Jeez, good to hear from you again.
I don’t think I’ve had a sudden turn, although it’s been a couple years now since I posted this, so maybe as I head toward the light at the end of the tunnel, I’m taking a more ambivalent approach towards things of this nature. I don’t think so, however.
I doubt you’ve read any of my other posts on this site, since you came here because of Wally, but if you had, I think you would have recognized the common tenet I hold, that being one of “personal accountability”. I never posted my articles as a public service announcement. I posted things because I thought it was innovative or funny(usually, the latter). I often wrote that if you fell for it, you deserved what you got. Sent your bank account details to a deposed prince in Nigeria? Well, enjoy your newly found homelessness. Found a site with an impossible amount of music which just happens to offer you access if you’ll only fill out a few hundred of these ever-repeating surveys? More power to you. Enjoy the world’s slowest growing music collection.
People that arrive at Wally’s site attempting to download music which is protected under copyright don’t have much of a leg to stand on when complaining about the chicanery of it all. Those very few people that arrived at his site and filled out a survey or 11 to get music that is freely available elsewhere? Well, maybe they’ve learned the important lesson of searching a little bit in the future, as freely available music is….. wait for it…… freely available elsewhere, most often via torrents or the author’s site. As for the creators of the music and their complaints… as I’ve stated since the very beginning, they have nothing to complain about as no music is being shared via Wally’s site.
I’ve never felt ill will toward the subject of the post and I think it shows in the article. If anything, this post originated because I felt I was such a smarty-pants for figuring out his gig. If anything, this post is evidence of my shortcomings rather than anyone else’s.
February 3rd, 2012 on 2:15 pm
What about the actual copyright owners, who think that there actually is something there? They fell for it, as much as the rest of us. I have my doubts, that they will ever fill some surveys, just to find out if their albums exist there for real or not. All they have to do, is to use that search function, and then all hell will break loose. “Why do you piece of crap pirate dude uploaded our albums without our permission” et cetera, et cetera… Who knows. Maybe he will tell them to get laid, smoke a joint and enjoy nature too, instead of whining about stealing and copyrights. That will probably make them even angrier.
People will continue to fall for it, just because finding music in MP3 format is so easy nowadays. Torrents, NZB’s, 1-click webhosters. Some host the files themselves and take 1-2 dollars per album.
February 3rd, 2012 on 2:24 pm
“What about the actual copyright owners, who think that there actually is something there?”
There’s nothing there, so no damages have been incurred. If you’re hoping they get compensated for the turmoil created by the fact that they thought at one time that their music might be available on this site, they simply need to visit the pirate bay and do a search to realize that they have a much larger issue than any one guy. Millions of people are sharing any song your heart desires at any given moment. Simply start up your torrent application, route it through a VPN and enjoy downloading any song your mind can think of with impunity.
February 3rd, 2012 on 3:47 pm
There you have it people. Don’t waste your time with wallyfiles. You will not find anything there.
http://wallywashis.name/oe/index.html
Let’s hope that wally will find a proper job one of these days.
February 3rd, 2012 on 11:56 pm
” Maybe he will tell them to get laid, smoke a joint and enjoy nature too, instead of whining about stealing and copyrights. That will probably make them even angrier.”
The majority of artists actually thank me, once I explain the nature of the site. They understand that Wally is another hurdle which makes their materials harder to pirate.
“Let’s hope that wally will find a proper job one of these days.”
When I think about the value of my autonomy, I doubt that many employers could afford my time.
Check this book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk
It outlines some of the merits of individualism through non-participation. The wiki summary misses the metaphorical points. I generally agree with the author’s premises about the value of contributing to social order. As a comedy, the ideas are not presented in the kind of dull format you might expect for the topic.