A cautionary, comprehensive look at money and its virtual discontents.
A scholarly investigation of the role of online tokens, which “are both more and less than money.”
O’Dwyer, an Irish lecturer in digital cultures, examines a question that yields complex answers: What is money, and how does it differ from other significations of value? A classic example of the latter are the giant stones of Yap, the Micronesian island, which have been shorthanded as “primitive” money. Not quite so, writes the author: The stones are really “value contracts” that constitute “an invisible ledger held in trust by the Yapese community.” When one fell into the sea while being transported from a neighboring island, all agreed that the stone retained its value as a measure against which to gauge transactions. Consider how blockchain works, and consider how “non-fungible tokens” are given a value that doesn’t align with commonsense economics, and those primitive measures suddenly don’t seem so primitive after all. Today, writes O’Dwyer, tokens “can be used to market insubstantial things—famous people’s farts, virtual kittens, skins in Fortnite—to make ephemeral things solid enough to enter the economy,” whereas money stands for solid things that circulate in proxy, such as the bars of gold tucked away in Fort Knox. Cryptocurrency, the accoutrements players buy in Second Life, NFTs—all are something like money, yet something not like it, too. Whatever they are, O’Dwyer observes, tokens come at great cost—not to the money economy, per se, but instead to the environment. “In 2006,” writes the author, “the average Second Life avatar consumed more electricity than the average Brazilian.” What’s more, she notes, the famous anonymity of cryptocurrency is not the norm in the token world. Where cash can change hands unrecorded, most electronic transactions are so thoroughly tracked that such things as “Venmo stalking” have lately become commonplace.
A cautionary, comprehensive look at money and its virtual discontents.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781839768347
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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