When Ezra Marcus started reporting the story of Matthew Bergwall, a 23-year-old University of Miami student accused of committing $5 million in retail fraud, I was most interested in the retail-fraud part. Primarily because I didn’t really understand what retail fraud was. (Ezra patiently explained to me that it’s essentially a large-scale version of telling Amazon you didn’t receive something when, in fact, you did.) But as Ezra kept working, talking to Bergwall’s friends and former classmates, we realized the most compelling part of the story was why he got into this in the first place. Bergwall was a talented coder who probably could have gone to an Ivy League school and gotten a job at any tech company. But that path has become less and less appealing lately. (“I don’t want to be a slave to Google,” he once told a classmate.) So he went to UMiami and did … this. It’s interesting to consider which path is preferable. |
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