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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
