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 revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 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.
