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The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto
An instant bestseller! A brilliant takedown and exposé of the great con job of the twenty-first century — the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism — being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society.
At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme—the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism—is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms.
In The End of Reality ¸ Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (“The Four”) —and shows how their tech monopolies have brought middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony. Meanwhile, the enormous amount of taxpayer money to be funneled into the dystopian ventures of "The Four," the benefits of which will accrue to billionaires, exacerbate these disturbing trends.
The End of Reality is both scathing critique and reform agenda that replaces the warped worldview of "The Four" with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.
At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme—the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism—is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms.
In The End of Reality ¸ Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (“The Four”) —and shows how their tech monopolies have brought middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony. Meanwhile, the enormous amount of taxpayer money to be funneled into the dystopian ventures of "The Four," the benefits of which will accrue to billionaires, exacerbate these disturbing trends.
The End of Reality is both scathing critique and reform agenda that replaces the warped worldview of "The Four" with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published September 5, 2023
120 people are currently reading
1670 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Taplin
13 books60 followersJonathan Taplin Bio
Jonathan Taplin’s extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band in the ’60s, producer of The Concert For Bangladesh and major films in the ’70s for Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders and Gus Van Sant, an executive at Merrill Lynch’s Media Mergers and Acquisition Group in the ’80s, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service in the ’90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. He is the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, The Magic Years: Scenes From a Rock and Roll Life and the forthcoming The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto. His commentary has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Medium, The Washington Monthly and the Wall Street Journal. He is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the Chairman of the Americana Music Foundation.
Jonathan Taplin’s extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band in the ’60s, producer of The Concert For Bangladesh and major films in the ’70s for Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders and Gus Van Sant, an executive at Merrill Lynch’s Media Mergers and Acquisition Group in the ’80s, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service in the ’90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. He is the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, The Magic Years: Scenes From a Rock and Roll Life and the forthcoming The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto. His commentary has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Medium, The Washington Monthly and the Wall Street Journal. He is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the Chairman of the Americana Music Foundation.
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September 1, 2025
So this book by Talpin is a hoot…so wrong…so hysterical…let’s go through it for its serious lack of scholarship…
“These four projects—the Metaverse, crypto currency, human travel to and colonization of distant planets, and transhumanism—are an existential risk to the world in moral, political, and economic terms.” This is Talpin’s thesis..he’s writing these elements are existential risks…I repeat this bc he spends part of the book undermining that thesis…he will point out that no one likes Zucks metaverse and crypto and nft’s are going to go to zero…
Talpin’s problem with mars colonization is it’s super expensive and not really doable…okay, and going to the moon was real expensive and the folks voted the money…but soon after America pulled back on space, offering only the cannibalized Space shuttle program…in other words…Talpin seems to think folks will just vote Mars funding on automatic…history has shown that supposition to be false.
Here’s where Talpin wants to spend tax dollars…
“One argues that the collective investment priorities of our society should go toward solving issues like the climate crisis, the mental health emergency, and the lack of affordable housing.”
I’m not going to spend time again dismantling the global warming hysteria but 3degrees by 2100 isn’t going to put a crimp in an advanced technological society. The mental health emergency seems to be a lot of sad people…it’s a real problem but one that’s going to take huge national resources seems, like all of JT’s verbiage, overblown..
Affordable housing…I’ll get to later.
“John D. Rockefeller’s extraction of rents through monopolizing oil assets is the classic case studied in business school”
Rockefeller's business dropped the cost of heating oil from 30 to 8 cents a gallon…allowing for poor folks to gain access to things like…reading at night…
“Zuckerberg’s rent extraction from controlling the Facebook accounts of three billion people is far more lucrative”
True, but data mining willing folks is not bad. I’ve probably bought a half dozen items from FB in the fifteen years I’ve used the product…I learned about Spartan races of which I partook and I bought a super cheap used deluxe workout set…damn you evil FB…
“He plans to be the extraction king of outer space. When he gets to Mars, he told Mining.com, “mining robots will be a key part of the planned colonization of the red planet.” First JT is telling us there’s no way Musk can make this work(he may be right) and the next he’s decrying mining mars…
“ thirty-two-year-old Italian army veteran named Benito Mussolini formed a new political group called Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Squad), known simply as the Fascisti.”
Mussolini’s father was a socialist…Mussolini was the editor of the leading socialist newspaper…fascism is just socialism with a strong dose of nationalism..
“It is exactly what Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are selling: nostalgia”
Umm Elon sells electric cars, internet access, moving product into space etc
Bezos supplies a giant marketplace that allows regular folks to find anything they want, find the best price, and then get their selected product the very next day…
None of the above are nostalgic.
Now JT starts to get cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs…he’ll go to his crazy place now and again
“occult lurks in the hearts of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Take for example Thiel’s commentary on Lord of the Rings; he’s all in with Sauron, the dark lord of Mordor: “Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war… Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.”
I’ve read all the Tolkien…sure the work is the founder of the fantasy feast…but it’s boring…mostly…I’d hate for JT to use my impression of LOTR as some deep indicator of my personality…or he’s free to diagnose me since that'd only be fair bc I think he’s kinda looney tunes…
“American fascist group called America First, which opposed the country’s entrance into the war against Nazi Germany.”
Important fact…90% of Americans were against American entrance into WW2 even in January of 1941…Pearl harbor really did flip Americans 180 degrees.
“So we have confronted before fascist ideas like the “great replacement” theory—which Tucker Carlson is always referencing—in the writings of those who gave birth to”
Since JT penned this 12 millions illegals crossed from the South. Thinking the Dems would be fine with these folks voting seems completely reasonable.
‘He spent much of the rest of his life searching for the Lost City of the Kalahari Desert. Despite five expeditions, he was unsuccessful. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, never forgot his grandfather’s legacy. In 2010
—Musk’s grandpa died when Musk was 3
“Rand’s view of taxes as “confiscation” would become Republican orthodoxy, and an era of deregulation that has now lasted almost fifty years was initiated.”
Well, no, there were about 60,000 pages of regulation in 1975…there’s just a little under 200,000 pages today.
“straight line can be drawn from this statement to the mask and vaccine refusal of 2020.”
The median covid death was 80 years old with 3 or more comorbidities..masks did nothing and the death rate for people under 40 or under 20 were far lower than the flu..
“His presence brought no real manufacturing expertise to bear.”
JT needs to read Isaacson’s book on musk…Elon made the Tesla manufacturing process and he built the rockets from the ground up.
“year later, NASA and the US Air Force decided to cut their dependence on Russian rockets to lift satellites into orbit, turning instead to SpaceX, and so Musk was able to save both companies.”
No, Musk initially wanted to use Russian rockets but the russkies charged far too much, so on the plane back from Russia he wrote out a spreadsheet figuring how much he could make them for.
“The four men I am writing about want this outcome—where “all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands.”
Ahh the projections of megalomania.. I’m surprised the author doesn’t claim they all want to be Sauron.
“hard-core white nationalists, figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos” Milo is the dude who wrote the biting review of the all girl ghostbuster movie…that’s it.
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Important to note Trump won his Muslim ban before scotus.
“Musk, like the other famous con man of our time”
Ev cars, satellites, rockets that return and are captured by giant arms, tunnels under Vegas, chips in your head…
I thought con men weren’t supposed to deliver the products they talked about..
Now we on to the biological portion of JTs doomsaying..
“Thiel promotes transhumanism because he is deeply afraid of death.”
Yeah, get in line…
“Gen Z, because he is afraid the New York Times is right in noting that Facebook is turning into “a Boomer-dominated sludge pit filled with cute animal videos and hyperpartisan garbage.”
JT starts to undercut his argument by pointing out that FB is only used by boomers and is not poised to take over the world…ooops
“so the rise of tech has meant the rise of income inequality.”
Huge pet peeve of mine…Income inequality is irrelevant. If a guy making a million increases his wealth by a million while the guy making 50k moves up to 100k income inequality has increased, but who cares?
The economy isn’t a static pie. One piece of a bigger pie is…bigger.
“You would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today,” Thiel said. He has never retracted this opinion, not even after the Covid-19 vaccine was developed in record time.”
Covid 19 vax was a mild therapeutic with a limited window of viability…it was not a vax in the conventional sense. The polio vax ended polio. Almost everyone who took the Covid shot, myself included, still got Covid…multiple times.
“He never mentions that in recent years Tesla has sold more than $ 6 billion in government-mandated electric vehicle (EV) credits—funds that represent the difference between a profitable Tesla and a money-losing venture.”
This is always ironic. The folks who cry about global warming who wanted their politicians to save them and who voted for these subsidies are upset now bc they were used.
“Airbnb, Lyft, and the rest of Thiel’s portfolio provided an ideology to back up the shift. Stripping workers of their rights wasn’t about corporate greed; it was the future.”
Airbnb allows folks to rent their house.
Lyft allows folks to use their cars to make money…these folks could never have made money before this…so their workers rights were zero. Their ability to make money zero.
“he then had to backpedal in the face of a mass advertiser exodus...Musk can go thermonuclear on advertisers, and they will just smile.”
Musk did go thermonuclear on advertisers telling the they could “go fuck themselves” and now they’ve almost all come back.
“The Network Contagion Research Institute reported that the use of the N-word on Twitter increased 500 percent in the twelve hours after Musk”
This has been debunked. Twitter even has a feature where you can censor any word from your feed…
“Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the two richest men in the world, pay little or no income tax”
Musk paid $11 billion in one year…he joked that he expected a lil participation trophy from the IRS..lol
“FB effectively to suppress the Black vote with ads targeted at Black voters saying that Hillary Clinton called young Black men “super predators.” Postelection polling showed a dramatic decline in the Black vote, from the 2012 election rate of 66 percent down to 59 percent in 2016. In the face of Donald Trump’s Facebook”
He supplies no source for the first claim and then makes the risible assertion that blacks didn’t vote for Hillary bc of this…umm you think participation declined bc instead of voting for the first Black president…they were voted for the Uncharismatic Hillary. You think?
“This will harden a cynicism that already exists in large parts of America. A cynicism that will convince more and more people to play all of their life, recklessly. To do what is known in gaming circles, as Int-ing, or Intentionally dying. Running madly at the boss, unworried if they are going to lose, suffer, or die.”
The above is just funny. Someone who thinks their intelligent and makes some off the wall suppositions.
Now JT is going to lament the demise of culture…
“The Avengers…again, about the compromises fine actors like Mark Ruffalo or Jackson must be making as they shout long lines of exposition to the audience about closing the portal in the universe that has allowed aliens to invade and destroy New York City….but the reality is that libertarians, who have dominated the written science fiction genre for decades, are now dominating the big-budget film business as well.”
JT never references any sci fi of the last thirty years. I doubt he’s even read the books he does mention.
“Now the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, complete with true believer libertarian heroes like Iron Man Tony Stark, has completed the libertarian takeover.
..Junot Diaz has stated, “In a few short decades, the Marvel Universe (in all its corporate manifestations) has rewired how millions, perhaps even billions, of people imagine what is possible, what is heroic, what is good.”
More abject silliness. Iron man is iron man and it’s a damn good story.. nuff said
People have been rewired to imagine what is possible? What does that even mean. Are people suddenly trying to fly, lift magical hammers?
“Imagine what is heroic”? Yes superheroes are heroic…it’s on the name.
“Imagine what is good?”
Yeah bc I was thinking that killing half the universe was a solid way to go…and then Thanos got beat down by the good guys and I knew that wasn’t good…at some point the book descends into farce.
“Musk said he was abandoning the Democrats who had been “( mostly) the kindness party” but were now the party of “division & hate.” He continued in a paranoid vein, claiming, “Political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months.”
They have obviously…Biden said Musk should be investigated and presto Musk was.
JTs final worry…the quest for immortality.
“But the core philosophy of a film like The Avengers is transhumanism, the idea that humans can be made better with technological enhancements. All of our Technocrats fervently believe in this concept, and so do the people who run Marvel…Stark is not building this technology to help the disabled or the elderly.”
I’m just going to let the above statement stand and I hope one can see its ardent lunacy.
Then after lamenting cultural decline he blames quality storytelling for …wait for it..more Trump
“The Sopranos is a choral litany of bitching and bemoaning rooted in bad faith: a refusal to take responsibility for their own actions and instead play the blame game. It’s the Make America Great Again mentality in its dormancy, Trumpiness on training wheels.”
“Trump’s appeal was to shared hatred: There are people you hate—immigrants, racial minorities, uppity women, gays, liberals of all kinds—and I hate them, too. I will be your weapon against them.”
And yet Trump got more votes,a greater percent of every ethnic group…those silly ethnics don’t know what’s good for them like JT does.
“parties stop identifying around ideology and start identifying “almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity.”
This defines the Democratic Party. But JT thinks he’s discussing republicans.
“But ultimately Zuckerberg’s vision of millions of people simultaneously interacting in virtual reality may be the biggest fantasy of all…Facebook’s way of recapturing Gen Z,.”
JT forgetting that he’s been claiming Zuck and Fb are going to take over the world.
“The 60 percent decline of Bitcoin from November 2021 to June 2022 shows he was right, because a lot of people fled the fantasy of easy cyber wealth.”
Again JT forgets Bitcoin is like the killer asteroid…and btw…bitcoin is at $95k so JT again spoke too soon.
“Does the Black Tesla worker, constantly assigned to the most menial task on “The Plantation,” feel any dignity?”
JT taking the Jeopardy category, “things that don’t exist for $200”
“In May 2022, the NFT market collapsed, with sales showing a 92 percent decline from their peak in the fall of 2021”
So NFTs are worthless, I agree, but their demise has hardly damaged america. In fact, I doubt most folks even know anything About them.
“The Federal Communications Commission awarded SpaceX an additional $ 900 million to deliver rural broadband via a network of satellites.”
The govt rescinded that contract…see reprisals against musk…and now has spent $400 million and delivered zero rural connectivity.
“A vision of mining wars backed with space weapons lies just over the horizon.”
JT talks from one side of his mouth that Musk’s mars ambitions are preposterous and then veers like a $10 hooker on five inch heels to Star Wars battles.
“the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology.”
Until capitalism and its handmaiden technology came along life was nasty, brutish, and short…the entire history of the last 400 years is human transcending their natural state…bc nature is a bitch and wants you and me dead.
“Suppose parents could add thirty points to their child’s IQ… And if you don’t, your child will be the stupidest in the neighborhood.”
Think of the value to society that could be created by a cadre of very smart people…oh wait that’s Silicon Valley. Why would we want more of that? Insert sarcasm emoji..
“Elon Musk thinks there is no downside to promising things he has no way to deliver, like full Tesla autopilot”
he pretty much has…I’ve watched 100 videos of teslas driving everywhere unaided.
“unlike most advanced democracies, we could not afford health care for all citizens or free college for anyone who couldn’t afford it.”
No one dies bc emergency rooms turn them away… it’s illegal…and we need less college. Almost 80% of folks who got community college drop out after wasting a year and thousands of dollars.
George Kennan, “two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
Aha, we finally agree…but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts JT is a proponent of the war in Ukraine…
“But even in a post-9/ 11 world, the CIA resisted breaking the law..”
False, as Snowden showed. The cia was bugging everyone’s computers.
“the Kardashians are not going to be famous forever…and just wait for their 15 minutes of fame to end.”
I don’t know. They’ve been famous now for like 20 years…
“Whether Trump or a clone like Ron DeSantis leads the Republican Party doesn’t really matter.”
See for JT Trump doesn't even matter…all republicans are fascists.
“The assault on voting, women’s, and LGBTQ rights, as well as the opposition to any kind of gun control”
I’ll guess I’ll have to wait for this to happen.
“the Supreme Court ruling outlawing abortion will not just send women back to the dark ages of dangerous back-alley medical procedures. It will be worse”
Been a few years now and in a country of about 80million fertile women I haven’t read one story about a back alley abortion…weird.
“It’s no wonder that Elon Musk was shocked when thousands of Twitter workers quit rather than submit to his version of a 996 work culture.”
They didn’t quit. He fired them…there’s a difference.
“Now science is dominating nature”
See previous comment about nature being a biyatch.
“Some have suggested that 2020 was the year when nature fought back,not just with its pandemic but also with superstorms, wildfires, and other natural disasters.”
Covid 19 came for a lab in Wuhan China..all these other mentions are JTs apocalyptic doomsaying.
“high-speed electric railways.”
See California’s giant electric railway boondoggles for my take on JTs comment.
“Don’t even think about Donald Trump, Kanye West, Elon Musk, or Tucker Carlson. They are not important to the real lives of your family and friends.”
Another moment of agreement, but JT wrote a whole book doing nothing but mentioning some of these men.
“Patagonia created its Common Threads initiative, so that any piece of its clothing can be repaired, reused, or donated and ultimately avoid landfills”
China is bringing a coal fire power plant online every week but a mid size jacket maker is going to have a measurable impact on the environment…sorry some times I have to stop typing I’m laughing so hard.
“predicted that eventually the perfection of modern advertising in creating desire for products we didn’t know we needed would make the modern American member of the middle class a gerbil on a treadmill.”
And yet, I barely buy anything that’s advertised. An American sees thousands of ads every year and buys probably a handful or two of new products.
“Homelessness is a profound assault on dignity, social inclusion and the right to life. It is a prima facie…”
JT can’t see that the democrats he votes for are the ones who fail at this again and again…Gavin Newsom has spent over a hundred million on homelessness and there’s more of it.
“Elon Musk has donated to ultra-MAGA candidates and signaled his support for the soft fascism of Ron DeSantis…Maybe we are becoming tired of global chaos agents like Musk”
Those EVs and rockets are global chaos agents and that evil Ron de Santis with all his competent handling of hurricanes…
Don’t read this book…I got it for free. That cost was too much.
“These four projects—the Metaverse, crypto currency, human travel to and colonization of distant planets, and transhumanism—are an existential risk to the world in moral, political, and economic terms.” This is Talpin’s thesis..he’s writing these elements are existential risks…I repeat this bc he spends part of the book undermining that thesis…he will point out that no one likes Zucks metaverse and crypto and nft’s are going to go to zero…
Talpin’s problem with mars colonization is it’s super expensive and not really doable…okay, and going to the moon was real expensive and the folks voted the money…but soon after America pulled back on space, offering only the cannibalized Space shuttle program…in other words…Talpin seems to think folks will just vote Mars funding on automatic…history has shown that supposition to be false.
Here’s where Talpin wants to spend tax dollars…
“One argues that the collective investment priorities of our society should go toward solving issues like the climate crisis, the mental health emergency, and the lack of affordable housing.”
I’m not going to spend time again dismantling the global warming hysteria but 3degrees by 2100 isn’t going to put a crimp in an advanced technological society. The mental health emergency seems to be a lot of sad people…it’s a real problem but one that’s going to take huge national resources seems, like all of JT’s verbiage, overblown..
Affordable housing…I’ll get to later.
“John D. Rockefeller’s extraction of rents through monopolizing oil assets is the classic case studied in business school”
Rockefeller's business dropped the cost of heating oil from 30 to 8 cents a gallon…allowing for poor folks to gain access to things like…reading at night…
“Zuckerberg’s rent extraction from controlling the Facebook accounts of three billion people is far more lucrative”
True, but data mining willing folks is not bad. I’ve probably bought a half dozen items from FB in the fifteen years I’ve used the product…I learned about Spartan races of which I partook and I bought a super cheap used deluxe workout set…damn you evil FB…
“He plans to be the extraction king of outer space. When he gets to Mars, he told Mining.com, “mining robots will be a key part of the planned colonization of the red planet.” First JT is telling us there’s no way Musk can make this work(he may be right) and the next he’s decrying mining mars…
“ thirty-two-year-old Italian army veteran named Benito Mussolini formed a new political group called Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Squad), known simply as the Fascisti.”
Mussolini’s father was a socialist…Mussolini was the editor of the leading socialist newspaper…fascism is just socialism with a strong dose of nationalism..
“It is exactly what Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are selling: nostalgia”
Umm Elon sells electric cars, internet access, moving product into space etc
Bezos supplies a giant marketplace that allows regular folks to find anything they want, find the best price, and then get their selected product the very next day…
None of the above are nostalgic.
Now JT starts to get cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs…he’ll go to his crazy place now and again
“occult lurks in the hearts of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Take for example Thiel’s commentary on Lord of the Rings; he’s all in with Sauron, the dark lord of Mordor: “Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war… Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.”
I’ve read all the Tolkien…sure the work is the founder of the fantasy feast…but it’s boring…mostly…I’d hate for JT to use my impression of LOTR as some deep indicator of my personality…or he’s free to diagnose me since that'd only be fair bc I think he’s kinda looney tunes…
“American fascist group called America First, which opposed the country’s entrance into the war against Nazi Germany.”
Important fact…90% of Americans were against American entrance into WW2 even in January of 1941…Pearl harbor really did flip Americans 180 degrees.
“So we have confronted before fascist ideas like the “great replacement” theory—which Tucker Carlson is always referencing—in the writings of those who gave birth to”
Since JT penned this 12 millions illegals crossed from the South. Thinking the Dems would be fine with these folks voting seems completely reasonable.
‘He spent much of the rest of his life searching for the Lost City of the Kalahari Desert. Despite five expeditions, he was unsuccessful. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, never forgot his grandfather’s legacy. In 2010
—Musk’s grandpa died when Musk was 3
“Rand’s view of taxes as “confiscation” would become Republican orthodoxy, and an era of deregulation that has now lasted almost fifty years was initiated.”
Well, no, there were about 60,000 pages of regulation in 1975…there’s just a little under 200,000 pages today.
“straight line can be drawn from this statement to the mask and vaccine refusal of 2020.”
The median covid death was 80 years old with 3 or more comorbidities..masks did nothing and the death rate for people under 40 or under 20 were far lower than the flu..
“His presence brought no real manufacturing expertise to bear.”
JT needs to read Isaacson’s book on musk…Elon made the Tesla manufacturing process and he built the rockets from the ground up.
“year later, NASA and the US Air Force decided to cut their dependence on Russian rockets to lift satellites into orbit, turning instead to SpaceX, and so Musk was able to save both companies.”
No, Musk initially wanted to use Russian rockets but the russkies charged far too much, so on the plane back from Russia he wrote out a spreadsheet figuring how much he could make them for.
“The four men I am writing about want this outcome—where “all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands.”
Ahh the projections of megalomania.. I’m surprised the author doesn’t claim they all want to be Sauron.
“hard-core white nationalists, figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos” Milo is the dude who wrote the biting review of the all girl ghostbuster movie…that’s it.
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Important to note Trump won his Muslim ban before scotus.
“Musk, like the other famous con man of our time”
Ev cars, satellites, rockets that return and are captured by giant arms, tunnels under Vegas, chips in your head…
I thought con men weren’t supposed to deliver the products they talked about..
Now we on to the biological portion of JTs doomsaying..
“Thiel promotes transhumanism because he is deeply afraid of death.”
Yeah, get in line…
“Gen Z, because he is afraid the New York Times is right in noting that Facebook is turning into “a Boomer-dominated sludge pit filled with cute animal videos and hyperpartisan garbage.”
JT starts to undercut his argument by pointing out that FB is only used by boomers and is not poised to take over the world…ooops
“so the rise of tech has meant the rise of income inequality.”
Huge pet peeve of mine…Income inequality is irrelevant. If a guy making a million increases his wealth by a million while the guy making 50k moves up to 100k income inequality has increased, but who cares?
The economy isn’t a static pie. One piece of a bigger pie is…bigger.
“You would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today,” Thiel said. He has never retracted this opinion, not even after the Covid-19 vaccine was developed in record time.”
Covid 19 vax was a mild therapeutic with a limited window of viability…it was not a vax in the conventional sense. The polio vax ended polio. Almost everyone who took the Covid shot, myself included, still got Covid…multiple times.
“He never mentions that in recent years Tesla has sold more than $ 6 billion in government-mandated electric vehicle (EV) credits—funds that represent the difference between a profitable Tesla and a money-losing venture.”
This is always ironic. The folks who cry about global warming who wanted their politicians to save them and who voted for these subsidies are upset now bc they were used.
“Airbnb, Lyft, and the rest of Thiel’s portfolio provided an ideology to back up the shift. Stripping workers of their rights wasn’t about corporate greed; it was the future.”
Airbnb allows folks to rent their house.
Lyft allows folks to use their cars to make money…these folks could never have made money before this…so their workers rights were zero. Their ability to make money zero.
“he then had to backpedal in the face of a mass advertiser exodus...Musk can go thermonuclear on advertisers, and they will just smile.”
Musk did go thermonuclear on advertisers telling the they could “go fuck themselves” and now they’ve almost all come back.
“The Network Contagion Research Institute reported that the use of the N-word on Twitter increased 500 percent in the twelve hours after Musk”
This has been debunked. Twitter even has a feature where you can censor any word from your feed…
“Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the two richest men in the world, pay little or no income tax”
Musk paid $11 billion in one year…he joked that he expected a lil participation trophy from the IRS..lol
“FB effectively to suppress the Black vote with ads targeted at Black voters saying that Hillary Clinton called young Black men “super predators.” Postelection polling showed a dramatic decline in the Black vote, from the 2012 election rate of 66 percent down to 59 percent in 2016. In the face of Donald Trump’s Facebook”
He supplies no source for the first claim and then makes the risible assertion that blacks didn’t vote for Hillary bc of this…umm you think participation declined bc instead of voting for the first Black president…they were voted for the Uncharismatic Hillary. You think?
“This will harden a cynicism that already exists in large parts of America. A cynicism that will convince more and more people to play all of their life, recklessly. To do what is known in gaming circles, as Int-ing, or Intentionally dying. Running madly at the boss, unworried if they are going to lose, suffer, or die.”
The above is just funny. Someone who thinks their intelligent and makes some off the wall suppositions.
Now JT is going to lament the demise of culture…
“The Avengers…again, about the compromises fine actors like Mark Ruffalo or Jackson must be making as they shout long lines of exposition to the audience about closing the portal in the universe that has allowed aliens to invade and destroy New York City….but the reality is that libertarians, who have dominated the written science fiction genre for decades, are now dominating the big-budget film business as well.”
JT never references any sci fi of the last thirty years. I doubt he’s even read the books he does mention.
“Now the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, complete with true believer libertarian heroes like Iron Man Tony Stark, has completed the libertarian takeover.
..Junot Diaz has stated, “In a few short decades, the Marvel Universe (in all its corporate manifestations) has rewired how millions, perhaps even billions, of people imagine what is possible, what is heroic, what is good.”
More abject silliness. Iron man is iron man and it’s a damn good story.. nuff said
People have been rewired to imagine what is possible? What does that even mean. Are people suddenly trying to fly, lift magical hammers?
“Imagine what is heroic”? Yes superheroes are heroic…it’s on the name.
“Imagine what is good?”
Yeah bc I was thinking that killing half the universe was a solid way to go…and then Thanos got beat down by the good guys and I knew that wasn’t good…at some point the book descends into farce.
“Musk said he was abandoning the Democrats who had been “( mostly) the kindness party” but were now the party of “division & hate.” He continued in a paranoid vein, claiming, “Political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months.”
They have obviously…Biden said Musk should be investigated and presto Musk was.
JTs final worry…the quest for immortality.
“But the core philosophy of a film like The Avengers is transhumanism, the idea that humans can be made better with technological enhancements. All of our Technocrats fervently believe in this concept, and so do the people who run Marvel…Stark is not building this technology to help the disabled or the elderly.”
I’m just going to let the above statement stand and I hope one can see its ardent lunacy.
Then after lamenting cultural decline he blames quality storytelling for …wait for it..more Trump
“The Sopranos is a choral litany of bitching and bemoaning rooted in bad faith: a refusal to take responsibility for their own actions and instead play the blame game. It’s the Make America Great Again mentality in its dormancy, Trumpiness on training wheels.”
“Trump’s appeal was to shared hatred: There are people you hate—immigrants, racial minorities, uppity women, gays, liberals of all kinds—and I hate them, too. I will be your weapon against them.”
And yet Trump got more votes,a greater percent of every ethnic group…those silly ethnics don’t know what’s good for them like JT does.
“parties stop identifying around ideology and start identifying “almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity.”
This defines the Democratic Party. But JT thinks he’s discussing republicans.
“But ultimately Zuckerberg’s vision of millions of people simultaneously interacting in virtual reality may be the biggest fantasy of all…Facebook’s way of recapturing Gen Z,.”
JT forgetting that he’s been claiming Zuck and Fb are going to take over the world.
“The 60 percent decline of Bitcoin from November 2021 to June 2022 shows he was right, because a lot of people fled the fantasy of easy cyber wealth.”
Again JT forgets Bitcoin is like the killer asteroid…and btw…bitcoin is at $95k so JT again spoke too soon.
“Does the Black Tesla worker, constantly assigned to the most menial task on “The Plantation,” feel any dignity?”
JT taking the Jeopardy category, “things that don’t exist for $200”
“In May 2022, the NFT market collapsed, with sales showing a 92 percent decline from their peak in the fall of 2021”
So NFTs are worthless, I agree, but their demise has hardly damaged america. In fact, I doubt most folks even know anything About them.
“The Federal Communications Commission awarded SpaceX an additional $ 900 million to deliver rural broadband via a network of satellites.”
The govt rescinded that contract…see reprisals against musk…and now has spent $400 million and delivered zero rural connectivity.
“A vision of mining wars backed with space weapons lies just over the horizon.”
JT talks from one side of his mouth that Musk’s mars ambitions are preposterous and then veers like a $10 hooker on five inch heels to Star Wars battles.
“the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology.”
Until capitalism and its handmaiden technology came along life was nasty, brutish, and short…the entire history of the last 400 years is human transcending their natural state…bc nature is a bitch and wants you and me dead.
“Suppose parents could add thirty points to their child’s IQ… And if you don’t, your child will be the stupidest in the neighborhood.”
Think of the value to society that could be created by a cadre of very smart people…oh wait that’s Silicon Valley. Why would we want more of that? Insert sarcasm emoji..
“Elon Musk thinks there is no downside to promising things he has no way to deliver, like full Tesla autopilot”
he pretty much has…I’ve watched 100 videos of teslas driving everywhere unaided.
“unlike most advanced democracies, we could not afford health care for all citizens or free college for anyone who couldn’t afford it.”
No one dies bc emergency rooms turn them away… it’s illegal…and we need less college. Almost 80% of folks who got community college drop out after wasting a year and thousands of dollars.
George Kennan, “two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
Aha, we finally agree…but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts JT is a proponent of the war in Ukraine…
“But even in a post-9/ 11 world, the CIA resisted breaking the law..”
False, as Snowden showed. The cia was bugging everyone’s computers.
“the Kardashians are not going to be famous forever…and just wait for their 15 minutes of fame to end.”
I don’t know. They’ve been famous now for like 20 years…
“Whether Trump or a clone like Ron DeSantis leads the Republican Party doesn’t really matter.”
See for JT Trump doesn't even matter…all republicans are fascists.
“The assault on voting, women’s, and LGBTQ rights, as well as the opposition to any kind of gun control”
I’ll guess I’ll have to wait for this to happen.
“the Supreme Court ruling outlawing abortion will not just send women back to the dark ages of dangerous back-alley medical procedures. It will be worse”
Been a few years now and in a country of about 80million fertile women I haven’t read one story about a back alley abortion…weird.
“It’s no wonder that Elon Musk was shocked when thousands of Twitter workers quit rather than submit to his version of a 996 work culture.”
They didn’t quit. He fired them…there’s a difference.
“Now science is dominating nature”
See previous comment about nature being a biyatch.
“Some have suggested that 2020 was the year when nature fought back,not just with its pandemic but also with superstorms, wildfires, and other natural disasters.”
Covid 19 came for a lab in Wuhan China..all these other mentions are JTs apocalyptic doomsaying.
“high-speed electric railways.”
See California’s giant electric railway boondoggles for my take on JTs comment.
“Don’t even think about Donald Trump, Kanye West, Elon Musk, or Tucker Carlson. They are not important to the real lives of your family and friends.”
Another moment of agreement, but JT wrote a whole book doing nothing but mentioning some of these men.
“Patagonia created its Common Threads initiative, so that any piece of its clothing can be repaired, reused, or donated and ultimately avoid landfills”
China is bringing a coal fire power plant online every week but a mid size jacket maker is going to have a measurable impact on the environment…sorry some times I have to stop typing I’m laughing so hard.
“predicted that eventually the perfection of modern advertising in creating desire for products we didn’t know we needed would make the modern American member of the middle class a gerbil on a treadmill.”
And yet, I barely buy anything that’s advertised. An American sees thousands of ads every year and buys probably a handful or two of new products.
“Homelessness is a profound assault on dignity, social inclusion and the right to life. It is a prima facie…”
JT can’t see that the democrats he votes for are the ones who fail at this again and again…Gavin Newsom has spent over a hundred million on homelessness and there’s more of it.
“Elon Musk has donated to ultra-MAGA candidates and signaled his support for the soft fascism of Ron DeSantis…Maybe we are becoming tired of global chaos agents like Musk”
Those EVs and rockets are global chaos agents and that evil Ron de Santis with all his competent handling of hurricanes…
Don’t read this book…I got it for free. That cost was too much.
April 29, 2024
This compelling book explores tech billionaires, their libertarian beliefs, and the possible repercussions of their pet projects. It is well-researched but felt more philosophical than journalistic in parts. It takes a wide, interdisciplinary lens in exploring its topic. The way the author layered in his own experiences in the entertainment, corporate and academic worlds was also really interesting. Though this was a fact-heavy book, it was a quick and engaging read. I couldn’t stop turning the pages!
April 28, 2023
A great read for those who enjoyed, as I did, CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM and SURVIVAL OF THE RICHEST.
The book makes a strong case that Zuckerberg, Thiel, Musk and the oft-forgotten fourth of horseman of the technocratic apocalypse Andreesen would condemn all Americans to live as human debit cards making micropayments in their virtual realities, both an actual one, the Metaverse, and a virtual one, ironically, that of real life itself as they've reconfigured it..
The book can feel a bit thin and repetitive at points, and it misses some opportunities, such as Andreeson being pressed on a podcast to describe exactly what the Metaverse is and being unable to really do so. (My take: It's an amusement park with no rides, food or fun, where you can talk briefly with strangers, most underage, about the lack of rides, food and fun.) I also wanted to know more about how they would compel people to join the Metaverse, such as whether FB will give VR goggles to certain schools the way Google gave out Chromebooks and Microsoft gives poor countries Office in order to create lock-in.
It's very strong, though, in showing how all four, especially the arguably neofascist Thiel, would turn America into an autocracy run by Trump if it would make them a dime--and they are counting on making way more than that. That said, it also shows that they are all profoundly incompetent despite their wealth. Zuck can't stop the slow MySpacing of FB as a result of it becoming an echo chamber of bigotry and rightwing revanchism. Musk is blowing up Twitter in a way that will take down Tesla too while his rockets have a terrible habit of simply blowing up. Thiel's Palantir couldn't find an apple on an apple tree. And Andreesen seems to excel at throwing good money at bad ideas, then throwing more good money at them. Their only real skill at this point it seems is sucking money out of the U.S. military for their hare-brained schemes, such as creating a colony Mars instead of fixing the dying Earth.
That this book is so up-to-date is remarkable when so much is changing so fast. For instance, today the wonderful newsletter Patent Drop reported that Facebook "is seeking to patent a method for tracking user engagement with content in an artificial reality space. This tech monitors user movement through a virtual reality environment, then displays additional media throughout the space depending on where you are. Along with placing ads where you move your avatar, this system also tracks engagement with those ads, checking metrics like 'minutes of experience,' interaction with the content such as shares or likes, body movement and face gestures during the experience. If you interact with an ad for a certain amount of time, have a certain reaction, or even just move past it slowly enough, this system will pick up on those nuances and feed you similar ads. It’s just like how targeted ads work on its main social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, except more intense." In other words, exactly what Taplin is predicting.
The book makes a strong case that Zuckerberg, Thiel, Musk and the oft-forgotten fourth of horseman of the technocratic apocalypse Andreesen would condemn all Americans to live as human debit cards making micropayments in their virtual realities, both an actual one, the Metaverse, and a virtual one, ironically, that of real life itself as they've reconfigured it..
The book can feel a bit thin and repetitive at points, and it misses some opportunities, such as Andreeson being pressed on a podcast to describe exactly what the Metaverse is and being unable to really do so. (My take: It's an amusement park with no rides, food or fun, where you can talk briefly with strangers, most underage, about the lack of rides, food and fun.) I also wanted to know more about how they would compel people to join the Metaverse, such as whether FB will give VR goggles to certain schools the way Google gave out Chromebooks and Microsoft gives poor countries Office in order to create lock-in.
It's very strong, though, in showing how all four, especially the arguably neofascist Thiel, would turn America into an autocracy run by Trump if it would make them a dime--and they are counting on making way more than that. That said, it also shows that they are all profoundly incompetent despite their wealth. Zuck can't stop the slow MySpacing of FB as a result of it becoming an echo chamber of bigotry and rightwing revanchism. Musk is blowing up Twitter in a way that will take down Tesla too while his rockets have a terrible habit of simply blowing up. Thiel's Palantir couldn't find an apple on an apple tree. And Andreesen seems to excel at throwing good money at bad ideas, then throwing more good money at them. Their only real skill at this point it seems is sucking money out of the U.S. military for their hare-brained schemes, such as creating a colony Mars instead of fixing the dying Earth.
That this book is so up-to-date is remarkable when so much is changing so fast. For instance, today the wonderful newsletter Patent Drop reported that Facebook "is seeking to patent a method for tracking user engagement with content in an artificial reality space. This tech monitors user movement through a virtual reality environment, then displays additional media throughout the space depending on where you are. Along with placing ads where you move your avatar, this system also tracks engagement with those ads, checking metrics like 'minutes of experience,' interaction with the content such as shares or likes, body movement and face gestures during the experience. If you interact with an ad for a certain amount of time, have a certain reaction, or even just move past it slowly enough, this system will pick up on those nuances and feed you similar ads. It’s just like how targeted ads work on its main social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, except more intense." In other words, exactly what Taplin is predicting.
November 18, 2023
Magical thinking empowered by myopic Übermensch with wishful thinking makes for a scary future especially if Trump is re-elected. Taplin writes this book with that in mind.
I just read “The Coming Wave” by Suleyman and Taplin’s book filled in some connections I did not understand from that book. Suleyman’s super AI fantasies also relates back to transhumanism and after having read this book I see why Suleyman said some of the things he did. Also, Suleyman mentioned how one of the Google engineers claimed the AI was sentient, and this book told me that person was a person of faith and believed in a soul and that could be why he reacted the way he did. Suleyman worldview is as silly as the overlords featured in this book, AI is mostly hype and the fantasies presented in this book are too and Taplin calls them out for that.
There’s a dimension to the madness that this author doesn’t properly connect. Part of the problem is that the main stream press (NYT, Washington Post, CNN…) perpetuate the mythology of the overlords being all wise and will from time-to-time sneak in labels such as Alexa or Siri have ‘artificial intelligence.’ They really aren’t; they're just good tools and anyone who fell in love with them needed psychological help.
Each of the fantasies mentioned in this book have been accepted in the press as if they were writing press-releases for the overlords. The Metaverse exist only in Zuckerberg’s head, Musk belongs on Mars, let SBF count his bitcoins while he is in prison, and Thiel can sue people who call him gay forever and a day. There is no reality to those wet dreams and they are all mockable for the absurdities that they are.
Musk shows who he really is in real time. Just yesterday (11/16/2023) he showed blatant antisemitism and doubles down on it today. Meta’s fantasies about the metaverse are laughable. Sam Bankmen Fried used ‘effective altruism’ and bribed the press to tell them he was a genius and bitcoin created real value. Taplin often would use cocktail party psychology to explain the foibles of Thiel or Musk. That hurt his story telling. There is enough ‘denial of reality’ within their magic thinking they espoused to let them tell their own incredibly naïve stories using their own beliefs as stated by them.
The flaw with this book and it was a big one, and the author acknowledges it in his conclusion: by the time this book was written these overlords were seen to be the buffoons they are. Just before the conclusion the author recommended that we stop following Tucker Carlson, for example. That’s funny because today it’s easy to say ‘who is Tucker Carlson’ because after Fox fired him, he disappeared into the ether and the last time I’ve seen him he was apologizing to Bill O’Reilly or he was interviewing Trump on X (formerly known as Twitter) as if anyone would watch that.
I don’t want to trivialize the threat the make-believe world these buffoons are trying to create. If Trump is re-elected, he will enable Facebook and X to wreak havoc on the world and consolidate his power in the process. Trump will piggyback off Musk’s Mars fantasy while disabling EV cars and he will take every penny Thiel has searching for eternal life and Trump will prop up bitcoin and sell NFTs of Melania’s hats while creating wealth for himself in the process and at the expense of everyone else including Thiel. They’ll naively align with Trump in a heartbeat, but as with all fascist he will destroy them in the process.
Taplin blames the social networks and the net in general for the hate. I would argue it has always been there and that Trump is them and they are Trump and they channel each other. The Übermensch fantasies this book warns against were obsolete before the book was published except for the existential risk that Trump poses for democracy and the world.
I just read “The Coming Wave” by Suleyman and Taplin’s book filled in some connections I did not understand from that book. Suleyman’s super AI fantasies also relates back to transhumanism and after having read this book I see why Suleyman said some of the things he did. Also, Suleyman mentioned how one of the Google engineers claimed the AI was sentient, and this book told me that person was a person of faith and believed in a soul and that could be why he reacted the way he did. Suleyman worldview is as silly as the overlords featured in this book, AI is mostly hype and the fantasies presented in this book are too and Taplin calls them out for that.
There’s a dimension to the madness that this author doesn’t properly connect. Part of the problem is that the main stream press (NYT, Washington Post, CNN…) perpetuate the mythology of the overlords being all wise and will from time-to-time sneak in labels such as Alexa or Siri have ‘artificial intelligence.’ They really aren’t; they're just good tools and anyone who fell in love with them needed psychological help.
Each of the fantasies mentioned in this book have been accepted in the press as if they were writing press-releases for the overlords. The Metaverse exist only in Zuckerberg’s head, Musk belongs on Mars, let SBF count his bitcoins while he is in prison, and Thiel can sue people who call him gay forever and a day. There is no reality to those wet dreams and they are all mockable for the absurdities that they are.
Musk shows who he really is in real time. Just yesterday (11/16/2023) he showed blatant antisemitism and doubles down on it today. Meta’s fantasies about the metaverse are laughable. Sam Bankmen Fried used ‘effective altruism’ and bribed the press to tell them he was a genius and bitcoin created real value. Taplin often would use cocktail party psychology to explain the foibles of Thiel or Musk. That hurt his story telling. There is enough ‘denial of reality’ within their magic thinking they espoused to let them tell their own incredibly naïve stories using their own beliefs as stated by them.
The flaw with this book and it was a big one, and the author acknowledges it in his conclusion: by the time this book was written these overlords were seen to be the buffoons they are. Just before the conclusion the author recommended that we stop following Tucker Carlson, for example. That’s funny because today it’s easy to say ‘who is Tucker Carlson’ because after Fox fired him, he disappeared into the ether and the last time I’ve seen him he was apologizing to Bill O’Reilly or he was interviewing Trump on X (formerly known as Twitter) as if anyone would watch that.
I don’t want to trivialize the threat the make-believe world these buffoons are trying to create. If Trump is re-elected, he will enable Facebook and X to wreak havoc on the world and consolidate his power in the process. Trump will piggyback off Musk’s Mars fantasy while disabling EV cars and he will take every penny Thiel has searching for eternal life and Trump will prop up bitcoin and sell NFTs of Melania’s hats while creating wealth for himself in the process and at the expense of everyone else including Thiel. They’ll naively align with Trump in a heartbeat, but as with all fascist he will destroy them in the process.
Taplin blames the social networks and the net in general for the hate. I would argue it has always been there and that Trump is them and they are Trump and they channel each other. The Übermensch fantasies this book warns against were obsolete before the book was published except for the existential risk that Trump poses for democracy and the world.
November 19, 2024
Man, this book was spot on. Too bad the American people did not head some of his advice. Alas, we find ourselves in a desperate situation as a nation and I am pretty concerned after reading this that technologists will play an even larger unfortunate role in our societal collapse than even I could have imagined.
This book looks at Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, and Mark Zuckerberg's involvement in not only pursuing their own strange narratives within the tech space but the dynamics within our current US governmental system. It is not a pretty future built for you within these pages which basically highlights big tech's desire for you to forget planet Earth because it is not possibly saved by focusing on the metaverse and Mars colonization (which will never happen in our lifetimes, lets be real...but your tax dollars continue to overwhelmingly pay for it).
Overall this is a scathing look at the technocratic world view, which is very bleak for everyone except themselves. If you voted red, you will see this as propoganda but I promise, it is a stark calling for the American people to wake up and hold their government more accountable before the opposite happens right before our very eyes.
This book looks at Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, and Mark Zuckerberg's involvement in not only pursuing their own strange narratives within the tech space but the dynamics within our current US governmental system. It is not a pretty future built for you within these pages which basically highlights big tech's desire for you to forget planet Earth because it is not possibly saved by focusing on the metaverse and Mars colonization (which will never happen in our lifetimes, lets be real...but your tax dollars continue to overwhelmingly pay for it).
Overall this is a scathing look at the technocratic world view, which is very bleak for everyone except themselves. If you voted red, you will see this as propoganda but I promise, it is a stark calling for the American people to wake up and hold their government more accountable before the opposite happens right before our very eyes.
September 6, 2023
An interesting take on the four so-called Technocrats, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen: an analysis of their “move fast and break things” approach and their influence on our lives. The author dives deep into the history of libertarianism and offers fresh interpretations on the motifs and goals of these very rich and interconnected figures. It can be a little meandering at times but definitely worth reading.
Thanks to the publisher, PublicAffairs, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
Thanks to the publisher, PublicAffairs, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
October 20, 2024
Wow. This book is so much more than I was expecting! Really ties together a lot of thoughts I’ve been having lately.
The book details multi-billionaire “technocrats” taking over our democracy (social media); scamming us (crypto); scamming our government (Tesla); buying politicians like JD Vance; keeping us online as much as possible (VR); and trying to live forever, via taxpayer funded research. Meanwhile we have news stories in which homeless people are requesting euthanasia to avoid freezing to death.
Where are we headed, humanity?
The book details multi-billionaire “technocrats” taking over our democracy (social media); scamming us (crypto); scamming our government (Tesla); buying politicians like JD Vance; keeping us online as much as possible (VR); and trying to live forever, via taxpayer funded research. Meanwhile we have news stories in which homeless people are requesting euthanasia to avoid freezing to death.
Where are we headed, humanity?
December 7, 2024
It’s the crying rant of a lost democrat who abhors the four billionaires so much that he took out two to three years to crib about them in the form of a book. I mean this is similar to a jilted lover and not like a reasonable man. He, however, did a lot of research but his writing and failed attempts to capture the narrative is so one sided that biased seems fair.
December 18, 2023
OK. these four guys are crazy rich, insanely arrogant, wildly entitled, un-usually thin skinned, and full of ideas where other people are to pay. The four “projects” he identified from this crew is...
And he has a bunch of quotes from other people pointing out how stupid these ideas are, even though each one of them think they are each the smartest people in the room. And really I figure he is probably right on this. But what really gets Taplin’s juices flowing is dunking on people who like science fiction and video games. He dislikes scific on principle but the icing on the cake is Musk and company all liked fantasy Sci fic.
He is mostly following Kurt Andersen’s lead from his Fantasyland book where video games, scific , and almost anything is the cause of all problems.
But the core philosophy of a film like The Avengers is transhumanism, the idea that humans can be made better with technological enhancements. | Location 1962-1963
All four of them also claim The Lord of The Rings series had a profound influence on them. J. R. R. Tolkien’s books are an attempt to construct new myths to help modern man deal with the moral chaos of our contemporary society. They are essentially very conservative pleas to “return the king” to his rightful throne. | Location 1977-1979
American society has devolved into a sort of permanent adolescence, characterized by rage, relentless social media self-promotion, a lack of impulse control, and delusional fantasies about how the world actually | Location 2274-2276
OK, maybe. Or maybe these whiny rich guys are just jerks who have knack at making money or taking it from the government. And they have some really dumb ideas like crypto actually working for normal people and deserting earth to move to an super IN-hospitable planet where it would be WAY harder to live than even a damaged earth. AND personal liberty would be really restricted because of the harsh environment. Jerks who think their ideas are great because the idea came from them.
It goes on a while and he gets high on his own solutions, and they do sound great. Although I am skeptical how they could be rolled out and accepted. But here they are
An oh boy is he proud of his other accomplishments and he sometimes has to really stretch the context to bring himself up, but he does it. Here are some highlights
His bragging
When I was working for Bob Dylan in the 1960s
I produced two of Martin Scorsese’s early movies
In the late 1960s, I was the tour manager for The Band
at the USC Innovation Lab, where I served as director
In the end an OK book. If you are fanboy of one these guys you will be unchanged and if you were wary of them you will generally agree but not really learn anything
One quote I wanted to remenber
Like many before him, Hoover believed that technology and the associated rise in productivity would create a bounty of societal wealth. In the summer of 1928, as he was campaigning for the presidency, Hoover said, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” But Hoover’s technological utopianism did not prove out, and within eighteen months, millions would be standing in breadlines.| Location 490-493
*The first project is Web3,
*The second project is the support of crypto currency.
*The third project involves getting the government of the United States to pony up at least $10 trillion to fund Elon Musk’s Star Trek pipe dream of sending humans to live on Mars.
*The final project, led by Peter Thiel, is called transhumanism, which the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “a social and philosophical movement devoted to promoting the research and development of robust human-enhancement technologies.
And he has a bunch of quotes from other people pointing out how stupid these ideas are, even though each one of them think they are each the smartest people in the room. And really I figure he is probably right on this. But what really gets Taplin’s juices flowing is dunking on people who like science fiction and video games. He dislikes scific on principle but the icing on the cake is Musk and company all liked fantasy Sci fic.
He is mostly following Kurt Andersen’s lead from his Fantasyland book where video games, scific , and almost anything is the cause of all problems.
But the core philosophy of a film like The Avengers is transhumanism, the idea that humans can be made better with technological enhancements. | Location 1962-1963
All four of them also claim The Lord of The Rings series had a profound influence on them. J. R. R. Tolkien’s books are an attempt to construct new myths to help modern man deal with the moral chaos of our contemporary society. They are essentially very conservative pleas to “return the king” to his rightful throne. | Location 1977-1979
American society has devolved into a sort of permanent adolescence, characterized by rage, relentless social media self-promotion, a lack of impulse control, and delusional fantasies about how the world actually | Location 2274-2276
OK, maybe. Or maybe these whiny rich guys are just jerks who have knack at making money or taking it from the government. And they have some really dumb ideas like crypto actually working for normal people and deserting earth to move to an super IN-hospitable planet where it would be WAY harder to live than even a damaged earth. AND personal liberty would be really restricted because of the harsh environment. Jerks who think their ideas are great because the idea came from them.
It goes on a while and he gets high on his own solutions, and they do sound great. Although I am skeptical how they could be rolled out and accepted. But here they are
regenerative economy.
The cooperative philosophy
B Corporations prioritize environmental and social goals
Holistic views of wealth:
Empowered participation:
Honoring community and place:
Edge-effect abundance: Creativity
Robust circulatory flow:
Balance seeking:
An oh boy is he proud of his other accomplishments and he sometimes has to really stretch the context to bring himself up, but he does it. Here are some highlights
His bragging
When I was working for Bob Dylan in the 1960s
I produced two of Martin Scorsese’s early movies
In the late 1960s, I was the tour manager for The Band
at the USC Innovation Lab, where I served as director
In the end an OK book. If you are fanboy of one these guys you will be unchanged and if you were wary of them you will generally agree but not really learn anything
One quote I wanted to remenber
Like many before him, Hoover believed that technology and the associated rise in productivity would create a bounty of societal wealth. In the summer of 1928, as he was campaigning for the presidency, Hoover said, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” But Hoover’s technological utopianism did not prove out, and within eighteen months, millions would be standing in breadlines.| Location 490-493
January 27, 2024
This time last year I read Douglas Rushkoff's Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of Tech Billionaires. I was really impressed by his coverage of the subject, his ability to capture so much of our current society, and the ways are future is taking shape. This book became one of my favorites I read last year and I was eager to check out more.
I came across this book, End of Reality, and was excited to take another dive into this techno dystopia that previously only seemed like the world of fiction. As far as modern publishing goes, these kinds of non fiction books are better than any contemporary Sci Fi.
So what makes End of Reality more than just Survival of the Richest part 2? Author, Jonathan Taplin focuses the scope of his work with a look at four technocrat billionaires (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, and Peter Thiel) and their technological "advancement" dreams. Considering how big these men are and the kind of position they hold in society, all of us are forced to live in their world and deal with these projects that are more than likely doomed, leaving the general population to pick up the pieces.
The concept of "this is the techocrat billionaire's world, we're just living in it" is a similar theme to Rushkoff's book but Taplin focuses more in on these four, explaining not only the fallacies in their projects but how their influence and status in society has shaped our world for the worse, leading to a rise in fascism.
I found this book to be a great exploration into these ideas. While short, I felt like Taplin got an impressive amount of information in and was able to explore a lot of really interesting concepts. I felt his media analysis of our modern pop culture landscape and its part in the rise of fascism to be really great and thought provoking. The chapter debunking Elon Musk's plans to colonize Mars was also highly informative while also being quite entertaining.
While I enjoyed the vast majority of this book, I did find a few moments where I wish Taplin explored these subjects more. I felt like more time could have been spent focusing on the technologies, as this book focuses a lot on the ego and persona of these four men; which is a valuable component in itself.
I will also say, while I share similar beliefs to Taplin in his views of these technologies I felt like he overlooked a few elements, specifically in the metaverse discussions. Of these four technologies, the metaverse (the general concept, not the Zucc project) is the one I have the most interest and knowledge in.
Like most people under the age of 40, I've spent time in many virtual spaces, whether they be MMORPG's or general online multiplayer games. Having this experience I know the value and connection to a seemingly intangible space and how that can often be just as real as "real life". While I think that the Zuckerberg metaverse is a feeble pipedream that fails to live up to the concept of an actual metaverse, I've seen many digital spaces come and go over the last 20 years that make a good case for the value of a metaverse.
Taplin mentions Second Life but only in a dismissive sense. While it's true that that platform is nowhere near as popular as it used to be I've seen some incredible developments in it within recent years. There's also no mention of VR Chat, which probably is the real contender for an actual metaverse to live up to the name.
While I agree and think it's great that Taplin discusses the flaws of a virtual, VR world, especially for women who can find its out of body experiences alienating, there's also a strong case for the virtual world in terms of gender expression. For many trans and gender nonconforming people a metaverse is actually one of the few places they can feel comfortable in their gender expression. There are countless stories of trans people coming out digitally long before they do so in the tangible world, if they feel comfortable enough to come out at all. While I don't think Zuckerberg's metaverse is interested in helping these kinds of people it could have been highlighted as it only further shows how a zuckerverse virtual reality is nothing more than a fascist playground.
Overall, I found this book to be highly insightful and an essential piece of the puzzle in navigating technology going forward. While I would say Survival of the Richest had a greater impact on me, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this subject.
I came across this book, End of Reality, and was excited to take another dive into this techno dystopia that previously only seemed like the world of fiction. As far as modern publishing goes, these kinds of non fiction books are better than any contemporary Sci Fi.
So what makes End of Reality more than just Survival of the Richest part 2? Author, Jonathan Taplin focuses the scope of his work with a look at four technocrat billionaires (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, and Peter Thiel) and their technological "advancement" dreams. Considering how big these men are and the kind of position they hold in society, all of us are forced to live in their world and deal with these projects that are more than likely doomed, leaving the general population to pick up the pieces.
The concept of "this is the techocrat billionaire's world, we're just living in it" is a similar theme to Rushkoff's book but Taplin focuses more in on these four, explaining not only the fallacies in their projects but how their influence and status in society has shaped our world for the worse, leading to a rise in fascism.
I found this book to be a great exploration into these ideas. While short, I felt like Taplin got an impressive amount of information in and was able to explore a lot of really interesting concepts. I felt his media analysis of our modern pop culture landscape and its part in the rise of fascism to be really great and thought provoking. The chapter debunking Elon Musk's plans to colonize Mars was also highly informative while also being quite entertaining.
While I enjoyed the vast majority of this book, I did find a few moments where I wish Taplin explored these subjects more. I felt like more time could have been spent focusing on the technologies, as this book focuses a lot on the ego and persona of these four men; which is a valuable component in itself.
I will also say, while I share similar beliefs to Taplin in his views of these technologies I felt like he overlooked a few elements, specifically in the metaverse discussions. Of these four technologies, the metaverse (the general concept, not the Zucc project) is the one I have the most interest and knowledge in.
Like most people under the age of 40, I've spent time in many virtual spaces, whether they be MMORPG's or general online multiplayer games. Having this experience I know the value and connection to a seemingly intangible space and how that can often be just as real as "real life". While I think that the Zuckerberg metaverse is a feeble pipedream that fails to live up to the concept of an actual metaverse, I've seen many digital spaces come and go over the last 20 years that make a good case for the value of a metaverse.
Taplin mentions Second Life but only in a dismissive sense. While it's true that that platform is nowhere near as popular as it used to be I've seen some incredible developments in it within recent years. There's also no mention of VR Chat, which probably is the real contender for an actual metaverse to live up to the name.
While I agree and think it's great that Taplin discusses the flaws of a virtual, VR world, especially for women who can find its out of body experiences alienating, there's also a strong case for the virtual world in terms of gender expression. For many trans and gender nonconforming people a metaverse is actually one of the few places they can feel comfortable in their gender expression. There are countless stories of trans people coming out digitally long before they do so in the tangible world, if they feel comfortable enough to come out at all. While I don't think Zuckerberg's metaverse is interested in helping these kinds of people it could have been highlighted as it only further shows how a zuckerverse virtual reality is nothing more than a fascist playground.
Overall, I found this book to be highly insightful and an essential piece of the puzzle in navigating technology going forward. While I would say Survival of the Richest had a greater impact on me, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this subject.
May 18, 2023
Taplin takes us to the inner sanctum of the plutocratic insurgency: where libertarian billionaires, resentful that they are not universally acclaimed as heroes and geniuses, use their platforms to spin personally-targeted 'populist' technophantasmagoria that are designed first and foremost to distract the rest of us from the vast anti-democratic power and privilege that they have amassed for themselves. Taplin’s not afraid to name names (Musk, Thiel, Andreeson, and Zuckerberg are the villains of the piece) and definitely has the goods that this is a strategy rather than merely an emergent effect, but perhaps he is a bit too sure that the masses are all rubes and suckers, falling for the game.
In general, this book reminded me of art historian Ernst Gombrich's line that, "What is characteristic of Nazi propaganda is less the lie than the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events." (Ideals and Idols, p. 102)
In general, this book reminded me of art historian Ernst Gombrich's line that, "What is characteristic of Nazi propaganda is less the lie than the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events." (Ideals and Idols, p. 102)
October 24, 2023
I started out ready to rave about this book. Where the author lost me was when he started sounding like an old man pointing at the new and calling it bad because he doesn't understand it. It also possibly wasn't very anti capitalism and felt like the author thought if we get the tech giants to course change that we can save capitalism. Maybe I am wrong on that. I did appreciate how honest it was about these tech billionaires and how they are helping to destroy our world.
May 4, 2024
I had high hopes to learn from this book, but it ended up being disappointing, because of the author's explicit biases. I think there is a lot of truth in the underlying argument, but it is hard to trust the evidence presented because it is so evident that he cannot stand conservatives and assumes the liberal cause. I share his skepticism of Big Tech and causes that are touted by the left and the right. However, according to Taplon, any republican must be either a deceived fool or malicious... No space for anyone else... It echoed of Hilary's "deplorables" comment. His solution is also to trust the government and B Corps and not big tech. The problem is that those all have the same potential for evil that big tech has
January 15, 2024
7%
If I wanted to read a book about technological fear-mongering, I would read one of the right-wing blogs written after a trump rally.
The number of facts in this book is disproportionately outweighed by the author's own fictions and hypocrisy.
At least he makes the effort of putting in a note of anti-consumerism culture.
If I wanted to read a book about technological fear-mongering, I would read one of the right-wing blogs written after a trump rally.
The number of facts in this book is disproportionately outweighed by the author's own fictions and hypocrisy.
At least he makes the effort of putting in a note of anti-consumerism culture.
January 11, 2025
Welp. I am scared now. But also more educated. I wish I had read this book before the election tho 🥲 reading it post election feels apocalyptic. All of his predictions are coming true. This is an extremely important book (but a little dry)
December 22, 2023
Wow! This was hardcore!
August 15, 2024
Read this
November 19, 2024
Excellent read on how we reached this point in America. How a person can influence the opinion of many and that opinion can be wrong on so many levels.
December 10, 2023
2.5 stars
There are glimpses of something interesting here but it’s ultimately comes across as unfocused and somewhat untrustworthy due to some poor research.
It seems like this was rushed out.
There are glimpses of something interesting here but it’s ultimately comes across as unfocused and somewhat untrustworthy due to some poor research.
It seems like this was rushed out.
February 16, 2024
Review of The End of Reality, by Johathan Taplin
by Donald M\H. Marks
Physician and scientist
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S...
I really enjoyed this thoughtful, provocative and detailed compelling book;The End of Reality, by Jonathan Taplin
The author criticizes the sale of what are in his opinion 4 totally unrealistic scams: the metaverse, crypto, space travel, and transhumanism by four billionaires: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen. Taplin is a professor of communication and digital media at the University of Southern California.
The book's main points are:
The 4 billionaires Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen are:
selling fantasies while the world is burning,
diverting attention away from issues like income inequality, climate change, and the erosion of democracy,
capitalizing on the low quality of life among America's poor and working classes,
hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter.l,
selling a fantasy future where artificial intelligence and robots will do most of the work.l,
Selling a future where a large portion of the population will sit at home, living a fantasy life in the Metaverse for at least 7 hours every day, subsisting on government-paid crypto Universal Basic Income,
The book is a reform agenda that seeks to replace the warped worldview of "The Four" with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.
Chapter 6 is a discussion of the Metaverse, where it came from, what it consists of, what you can get from it, what you need to make it work, and who controls and profits from it.
Chapter 7 provides an exhaustive history refresher on Crypto, where it came from, the crashes and scams, and should give cheer to anyone who didnt get involved or exited while intact.
In Chapter 10 of the book, Tolpin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these four influential billionaires: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (referred to as “The Four”). These tech moguls have been hyping various schemes that divert attention away from critical issues:
The schemes:
Metaverse: The concept of the metaverse, a virtual shared space, has been popularized by these billionaires. However, Taplin argues that it poses moral, political, and economic threats.
Cryptocurrency: The rise of cryptocurrencies, championed by some of these billionaires, has implications beyond financial markets. Taplin critiques how these digital currencies can exacerbate income inequality and other societal challenges.
Space Travel: The ambition to explore space, led by figures like Elon Musk, is portrayed as a grand but ultimately unnecessary and unachulieveable endeavor. However, Taplin highlights the enormous taxpayer money funneled into supporting these ventures, often benefiting these billionaires disproportionately.
Transhumanism: The idea of enhancing human capabilities through technology (such as brain-computer interfaces) is another scheme. Taplin questions the ethical implications and the potential impact on society.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a federal law that protects online platforms from liability for content posted by their users.It was enacted in 1996 to encourage the growth of the internet and protect free speech online. It also allows online platforms to self- moderate content according to their own policies and standards. Tolpin argues that Section 230 has enabled the rise of a “post-truth” era, where anyone can create and spread their own version of reality online, without any accountability or consequences. The book discusses the following principles concerning Section 230:
Section 230 is not a free speech issue, but a power issue. It grants enormous power to online platforms to shape public discourse and influence public opinion, while shielding them from legal challenges and public scrutiny.
Section 230 is not a neutral or objective law, but a political and ideological one. It reflects the values and interests of the tech industry, which favors innovation, growth, and profit over social responsibility, democracy, and human rights.
Section 230 is not a permanent or immutable law, but a contingent and historical one. It was enacted in 1996, when the internet was still a nascent and experimental medium, and it has not been updated or revised since then, despite the dramatic changes and challenges that have emerged in the digital age.
Section 230 is not a universal or global law, but a national and exceptional one. It is unique to the United States, and it contrasts with the laws and regulations of other countries, which impose more obligations and restrictions on online platforms and content.
The platforms are not neutral intermediaries, but active participants in shaping the online discourse and influencing public opinion.
The platforms have created a surveillance economy that exploits user data for profit and manipulates user behavior through algorithms and recommendation systems.The platforms have contributed to the erosion of trust in facts, science, and institutions, and the polarization of society along ideological lines.
The platforms have failed to adequately moderate harmful content such as hate speech, harassment, extremism, and disinformation, and have resisted regulation and oversight.
The platforms have stifled competition and innovation by acquiring or copying potential rivals, and have leveraged their market power to extract rents from creators and consumers.
As Pres. Teddy Roosevelt has said, 
The author concludes that Section 230 is a flawed and outdated law that needs to be reformed or repealed, in order to restore trust, truth, and accountability in the online world. Section 230 has enabled the rise of powerful tech monopolies that manipulate information, spread misinformation, and undermine democracy. Taplin argues that Section 230 should be reformed or repealed to hold the platforms accountable for the harms they cause and restore a more diverse and trustworthy media landscape.
Taplin proposes several solutions to address these Section 230 problems, such as:
Revising Section 230 to make the platforms liable for certain types of content, such as illegal or defamatory content, or content that incites violence or interferes with elections. I recommended this several years ago, when I tweeeted that I support and advocate for:
Return of #FairnessDoctrine to all media, public and private, to enable fair and balanced reporting and opinion,
repeal of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230(c)(1), to hold social media responsible for malicious, harmful and false posts,
Breaking up the platforms or imposing structural separations to prevent them from dominating multiple markets and engaging in anticompetitive practices,
Establishing a digital bill of rights that protects user privacy, data ownership, and consent, and gives users more control over their online experience,
Supporting public and nonprofit media that provide high-quality, diverse, and independent journalism and information,
Promoting digital literacy and civic education that equip users with the skills and knowledge to navigate the online environment and participate in democratic processes.
In essence, “The End of Reality” serves as both a scathing critique and a reform agenda. It challenges the worldview propagated by these billionaires and advocates for regenerative economics that prioritize sustainability and full employment.
by Donald M\H. Marks
Physician and scientist
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S...
I really enjoyed this thoughtful, provocative and detailed compelling book;The End of Reality, by Jonathan Taplin
The author criticizes the sale of what are in his opinion 4 totally unrealistic scams: the metaverse, crypto, space travel, and transhumanism by four billionaires: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen. Taplin is a professor of communication and digital media at the University of Southern California.
The book's main points are:
The 4 billionaires Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen are:
selling fantasies while the world is burning,
diverting attention away from issues like income inequality, climate change, and the erosion of democracy,
capitalizing on the low quality of life among America's poor and working classes,
hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter.l,
selling a fantasy future where artificial intelligence and robots will do most of the work.l,
Selling a future where a large portion of the population will sit at home, living a fantasy life in the Metaverse for at least 7 hours every day, subsisting on government-paid crypto Universal Basic Income,
The book is a reform agenda that seeks to replace the warped worldview of "The Four" with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.
Chapter 6 is a discussion of the Metaverse, where it came from, what it consists of, what you can get from it, what you need to make it work, and who controls and profits from it.
Chapter 7 provides an exhaustive history refresher on Crypto, where it came from, the crashes and scams, and should give cheer to anyone who didnt get involved or exited while intact.
In Chapter 10 of the book, Tolpin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these four influential billionaires: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (referred to as “The Four”). These tech moguls have been hyping various schemes that divert attention away from critical issues:
The schemes:
Metaverse: The concept of the metaverse, a virtual shared space, has been popularized by these billionaires. However, Taplin argues that it poses moral, political, and economic threats.
Cryptocurrency: The rise of cryptocurrencies, championed by some of these billionaires, has implications beyond financial markets. Taplin critiques how these digital currencies can exacerbate income inequality and other societal challenges.
Space Travel: The ambition to explore space, led by figures like Elon Musk, is portrayed as a grand but ultimately unnecessary and unachulieveable endeavor. However, Taplin highlights the enormous taxpayer money funneled into supporting these ventures, often benefiting these billionaires disproportionately.
Transhumanism: The idea of enhancing human capabilities through technology (such as brain-computer interfaces) is another scheme. Taplin questions the ethical implications and the potential impact on society.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a federal law that protects online platforms from liability for content posted by their users.It was enacted in 1996 to encourage the growth of the internet and protect free speech online. It also allows online platforms to self- moderate content according to their own policies and standards. Tolpin argues that Section 230 has enabled the rise of a “post-truth” era, where anyone can create and spread their own version of reality online, without any accountability or consequences. The book discusses the following principles concerning Section 230:
Section 230 is not a free speech issue, but a power issue. It grants enormous power to online platforms to shape public discourse and influence public opinion, while shielding them from legal challenges and public scrutiny.
Section 230 is not a neutral or objective law, but a political and ideological one. It reflects the values and interests of the tech industry, which favors innovation, growth, and profit over social responsibility, democracy, and human rights.
Section 230 is not a permanent or immutable law, but a contingent and historical one. It was enacted in 1996, when the internet was still a nascent and experimental medium, and it has not been updated or revised since then, despite the dramatic changes and challenges that have emerged in the digital age.
Section 230 is not a universal or global law, but a national and exceptional one. It is unique to the United States, and it contrasts with the laws and regulations of other countries, which impose more obligations and restrictions on online platforms and content.
The platforms are not neutral intermediaries, but active participants in shaping the online discourse and influencing public opinion.
The platforms have created a surveillance economy that exploits user data for profit and manipulates user behavior through algorithms and recommendation systems.The platforms have contributed to the erosion of trust in facts, science, and institutions, and the polarization of society along ideological lines.
The platforms have failed to adequately moderate harmful content such as hate speech, harassment, extremism, and disinformation, and have resisted regulation and oversight.
The platforms have stifled competition and innovation by acquiring or copying potential rivals, and have leveraged their market power to extract rents from creators and consumers.
As Pres. Teddy Roosevelt has said, 
The author concludes that Section 230 is a flawed and outdated law that needs to be reformed or repealed, in order to restore trust, truth, and accountability in the online world. Section 230 has enabled the rise of powerful tech monopolies that manipulate information, spread misinformation, and undermine democracy. Taplin argues that Section 230 should be reformed or repealed to hold the platforms accountable for the harms they cause and restore a more diverse and trustworthy media landscape.
Taplin proposes several solutions to address these Section 230 problems, such as:
Revising Section 230 to make the platforms liable for certain types of content, such as illegal or defamatory content, or content that incites violence or interferes with elections. I recommended this several years ago, when I tweeeted that I support and advocate for:
Return of #FairnessDoctrine to all media, public and private, to enable fair and balanced reporting and opinion,
repeal of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230(c)(1), to hold social media responsible for malicious, harmful and false posts,
Breaking up the platforms or imposing structural separations to prevent them from dominating multiple markets and engaging in anticompetitive practices,
Establishing a digital bill of rights that protects user privacy, data ownership, and consent, and gives users more control over their online experience,
Supporting public and nonprofit media that provide high-quality, diverse, and independent journalism and information,
Promoting digital literacy and civic education that equip users with the skills and knowledge to navigate the online environment and participate in democratic processes.
In essence, “The End of Reality” serves as both a scathing critique and a reform agenda. It challenges the worldview propagated by these billionaires and advocates for regenerative economics that prioritize sustainability and full employment.
January 13, 2024
The technocrats and the technocracy. Well before reading this, I thought that I was of that mindset. But it turns out that I did not really understand what the label meant. The title line of A brilliant takedown and exposé of the great con job of the twenty-first century — the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism — being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society. Pretty much describes it all. I like the idea of technology and how it can be used and developed to increase my life and more importantly my health span. When I read about the advancements that might allow transhumanism, I am excited. I have been reading SciFi and getting lost in the possibilities for my entire life. I love the potential and idea. So, to feel bad about a person who might be able to make this come to be, a person who could be a character in the books that I have read, that’s pretty cool. But this book proposes the idea that the technocrats are actually harming humanity by investing dollars and leveraging wealth in such a way that it helps the few and not the many. There are certainly elements in here, esp around the social and political ideology of some of these characters that are quite scary to me. There are some references to antics that I have seen over the past decade that are very concerning. I was unfamiliar with Peter Thiel before this book. Well, I will continue to read about them and the results of their products and let those readings inform my evolving opinions.
June 24, 2023
One of the most important books of the year. As we enter the real AI era (as opposed to the background one that we’ve willingly given into) this book saliently explains how and why we’re willingly driving ourselves into a distorted reality that benefits the very few.
Taplin spends much of the book dissecting how four specific billionaires - which he calls the Technocrats - are not only hoarding wealth, but toying with the market to see just how much they can get away with (see the recent banking crash). He interplays this with the current nonsensical drive and investment in virtual reality and web3, and how the major players are testing the waters to defraud everyone while getting rich themselves (hello Tether).
This is one of those books that you read and suddenly things that have felt not quite right make so much more sense, and from which you walk away with a massive new TBR list.
Highly recommend for those in tech or who’ve been inundated by friends trying to get you to buy into crypto like it’s the new Lularoe.
Taplin spends much of the book dissecting how four specific billionaires - which he calls the Technocrats - are not only hoarding wealth, but toying with the market to see just how much they can get away with (see the recent banking crash). He interplays this with the current nonsensical drive and investment in virtual reality and web3, and how the major players are testing the waters to defraud everyone while getting rich themselves (hello Tether).
This is one of those books that you read and suddenly things that have felt not quite right make so much more sense, and from which you walk away with a massive new TBR list.
Highly recommend for those in tech or who’ve been inundated by friends trying to get you to buy into crypto like it’s the new Lularoe.
April 7, 2023
Politics, culture, media, business, and technology have conspired to create historic inequality and polarization, according to Jonathan Taplin, who has played a role in all those venues.
His core thesis in "The End of Reality": While our nation and the world cope with existential threats, the “technocrats” that lead our biggest businesses are chasing after high-cost, low-reward fantasies.
Taplin’s timely book is forcefully opinionated, but is well sourced. He’s qualified to synthesize modern developments in business, entertainment and media, having been something of a Forest Gump: managing Bob Dylan’s tours in the ‘60s, producing Hollywood films and documentaries in the ‘70s, overseeing media mergers in the ‘80s, pioneering video on demand in the ‘90s, and directing the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California in this century. (I read the pre-publication version, and hope that an author bio is prominent at the beginning because he makes references throughout to his many personal experiences).
He draws mostly on authoritative media and academic sources to support his contention that fascism and libertarian dogma grew together in the 20th century. He further contends that this dogma has influenced Silicon Valley and especially four “technocrats” who are his chief villains: Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. He provides bios of each that paint a picture of socially awkward young men who by genius and luck are now among the richest and most influential in the world.
I found “Part I: The Past” to be confusing. He bounces around on the timeline and takes numerous side excursions. At one point, he refers to Filippo Marinetti’s “rage against feminism” several pages before the actual quote to which he refers. He too often cites media opinion writers as authorities. He sometimes over-reaches, as when he claims that our current polarization is mostly the result of Barack Obama’s election and Facebook. These all serve to weaken his argument, which I generally found compelling.
Taplin warns that we are at risk of falling for a fantasy future laid out by the technocrats, whose underlying motive is to maintain their stranglehold on the world’s wealth. Rather than repair community, Zuckerberg would have us put on a $1,500 helmet and make fake connections in the metaverse. Rather than cooperate internationally, Andreessen would have us dissolve nation-states in favor of a marketplace governed by cryptocurrency, which he and a few other whales can manipulate. Rather than make basic health care available to everyone, Thiel envisions “transhumanistic” technology that would enable the super-wealthy to live to 160. And rather than solve the climate crisis, Musk would have us colonize Mars.
The four technocrats, who Taplin says are leading purveyors of Silicon Valley libertarian dogma, are hypocritically recipients of past and future government support. Musk’s Tesla was saved by the 2008 bailout of the auto industry and now sucks in billions of defense and space dollars. Zuckerberg’s properties benefit from regulators’ hands-off approach. And Thiel, who pumps millions into Republican campaigns, will need public investment in his cyborg/transhumanism scheme.
Taplin taps into his arts and media background to discuss how our cultural institutions have helped the technocrats create an environment in which their fantasies make sense:
Taplin proposes “a new way of thinking about the economy—regenerative economics,” in which “businesses that utilize natural resources should restore those precious resources rather than treat them as natural capital to be used up.” He points to more companies that place value in the process of their endeavors -- empowering their workforce, engaging with their communities and customers, and thus innovating outside of the technocracy. “America is best when citizens imagine themselves as part of an intergenerational movement to preserve our planet and our democracy.”
He makes concrete suggestions for how we can head off the technocrats. He makes the best case I have seen so far for the elimination of Section 230, which protects digital platforms from being held responsible for damage caused by misinformation and attacks made by their users. He calls for government-sponsored panels to discuss the goals and guardrails of artificial intelligence and transhumanistic projects. He suggests science-based decisions regarding space exploration. He urges the breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And he recommends that crypto be regulated by the Security and Exchange Commission.
More broadly, he says the solution lies in putting humans and society in the diver’s seat:
“The forces of technology can be part of the solution in creating a more perfect union rather than part of the problem. For this to happen, the Technocrats can’t take the lead. The humanists—the writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists—have to provide a vision for where we want to go.”
His core thesis in "The End of Reality": While our nation and the world cope with existential threats, the “technocrats” that lead our biggest businesses are chasing after high-cost, low-reward fantasies.
Taplin’s timely book is forcefully opinionated, but is well sourced. He’s qualified to synthesize modern developments in business, entertainment and media, having been something of a Forest Gump: managing Bob Dylan’s tours in the ‘60s, producing Hollywood films and documentaries in the ‘70s, overseeing media mergers in the ‘80s, pioneering video on demand in the ‘90s, and directing the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California in this century. (I read the pre-publication version, and hope that an author bio is prominent at the beginning because he makes references throughout to his many personal experiences).
He draws mostly on authoritative media and academic sources to support his contention that fascism and libertarian dogma grew together in the 20th century. He further contends that this dogma has influenced Silicon Valley and especially four “technocrats” who are his chief villains: Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. He provides bios of each that paint a picture of socially awkward young men who by genius and luck are now among the richest and most influential in the world.
I found “Part I: The Past” to be confusing. He bounces around on the timeline and takes numerous side excursions. At one point, he refers to Filippo Marinetti’s “rage against feminism” several pages before the actual quote to which he refers. He too often cites media opinion writers as authorities. He sometimes over-reaches, as when he claims that our current polarization is mostly the result of Barack Obama’s election and Facebook. These all serve to weaken his argument, which I generally found compelling.
Taplin warns that we are at risk of falling for a fantasy future laid out by the technocrats, whose underlying motive is to maintain their stranglehold on the world’s wealth. Rather than repair community, Zuckerberg would have us put on a $1,500 helmet and make fake connections in the metaverse. Rather than cooperate internationally, Andreessen would have us dissolve nation-states in favor of a marketplace governed by cryptocurrency, which he and a few other whales can manipulate. Rather than make basic health care available to everyone, Thiel envisions “transhumanistic” technology that would enable the super-wealthy to live to 160. And rather than solve the climate crisis, Musk would have us colonize Mars.
The four technocrats, who Taplin says are leading purveyors of Silicon Valley libertarian dogma, are hypocritically recipients of past and future government support. Musk’s Tesla was saved by the 2008 bailout of the auto industry and now sucks in billions of defense and space dollars. Zuckerberg’s properties benefit from regulators’ hands-off approach. And Thiel, who pumps millions into Republican campaigns, will need public investment in his cyborg/transhumanism scheme.
Taplin taps into his arts and media background to discuss how our cultural institutions have helped the technocrats create an environment in which their fantasies make sense:
“To what extent did popular culture’s consistent view that only corrupt liars survive in America lead to the assumption that we need a president like Tony Soprano, someone who can kick ass and take names? And this sense of fatalism is reinforced by the social networks that lead us to believe that corruption is the steady state of American politics. And for the Technocrats, deeply invested in the status quo, that’s all good. “
Taplin proposes “a new way of thinking about the economy—regenerative economics,” in which “businesses that utilize natural resources should restore those precious resources rather than treat them as natural capital to be used up.” He points to more companies that place value in the process of their endeavors -- empowering their workforce, engaging with their communities and customers, and thus innovating outside of the technocracy. “America is best when citizens imagine themselves as part of an intergenerational movement to preserve our planet and our democracy.”
He makes concrete suggestions for how we can head off the technocrats. He makes the best case I have seen so far for the elimination of Section 230, which protects digital platforms from being held responsible for damage caused by misinformation and attacks made by their users. He calls for government-sponsored panels to discuss the goals and guardrails of artificial intelligence and transhumanistic projects. He suggests science-based decisions regarding space exploration. He urges the breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And he recommends that crypto be regulated by the Security and Exchange Commission.
More broadly, he says the solution lies in putting humans and society in the diver’s seat:
“The forces of technology can be part of the solution in creating a more perfect union rather than part of the problem. For this to happen, the Technocrats can’t take the lead. The humanists—the writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists—have to provide a vision for where we want to go.”
August 19, 2024
Yes, most of the particular pet projects written about in this book that's less than a year old are already mostly obsolete, but I think the existential threat is still there, and we still have to stay vigilant. These guys aren't going to stop grifting for the kind of money that could save this world while actively trying to destroy it.
September 20, 2023
All fluff and no substance.
May 9, 2025
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle....the biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. Timothy Snyder/On Tyranny quoted in the introduction
we have bought into the idea that they are going to deliver us a bright future, and we tend to ignore any facts that seem to contradict this story. p2
there has been a myth that the Big Tech leaders are progressive heroes, but I will show you that the Technocrats are actually part of a broader anti-democratic, authoritarian turn within Big Tech, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and keeping their monopolies unchallenged and their multibillion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. p2/3
How did we get to the point at which billionaire CEO's spend their money on magical thinking while more and more are being pushed by those same men into the Precariat- a world of temporary gig labor with no social safety net? p87
Jonathan Taplin might not have all of the answers but he certainly knows to ask the right questions. He also has, over the course of his impressive resume, a genuine insiders perspective, which allows him to insert his own experiences into the material without being overtly obnoxious. In fact, the personal touch is one of the things that keeps his account grounded, never turning into a rant but rather a demonstration of his skill in presenting alternate perspectives.
History has proven that fantasy is both a brilliant marketing tool and a powerful political tool. p12
For I who have loved fantasy and quite a bit of science fiction, it is disheartening to see how quickly new factions veer off over marketing ploys and fatal ideological differences. Walt Disney was bad enough with his purloined fables that he had tweaked to his own ends. Now we have AI invading our lives, and there are those who welcome it as a creative partner. Personally, I am not interested in conversing or in any way interacting with preprogrammed 'intelligence', whether it be a person hired to conform to a script or a machine intelligence. I will not knowingly read a fabrication by a fabrication. It is an affront to be required to prove that I am not a robot, to a robot.
Good luck, eh.
JT has proven to my dismay that the fantasies of Mars colonization, a Metaverse controlled by AI, fake money, and immortality are not just deranged ideas that I can safely ignore like the endless pop up ads that are so annoying. The idea that a convicted criminal with a cabal of supporters of dubious character is playing out of Hitlers Nazi playbook of the early 30's does indicate good reason to be alarmed.
fascism can be distilled into the following: it wants to silence and even murder its opponents rather than arguing with them; it prefers an authoritarian state rather over a democracy; it pits an aggressively exclusionary idea of the nation against a pluralism that values...differences. p15
It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines. p227 quoting Wendell Barry
4.5 pushed up to 5 for GR why not
6/7
December 26, 2024
I wanted to like this book but found it quite frustrating.
Taplin identifies, correctly, four of the key figures in the new silicon valley elite challenging traditional elites in American politics, and explores their biographies, personalities, business ventures, and the ideas of which they are public proponents. Taplin also endeavours to examine how the ideas they purport to champion are disguise deeper ambitions for power.
This is important, timely, and a worthwhile endeavour, but I am left wanting more.
Taplin touches on the political ideologies that some of the figures discussed, but in his attempt to paint a coherent picture and create a strong narrative, I believe he has not adequately identified how these men's politics has changed over time and why. For example, Taplin talks extensively about the libertarian philosophies that these figures hold, which is really quite an outdated view - when compared to public comments made post-Covid, the libertarian label doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. For example, Thiel is on record expressing support for a "national conservative" philosophy. It's worth noting that Taplin does identify links to characters such as Curtis Yarvin, so it does leave the reader wondering if Taplin is aware but reluctant to write about this evolution of their political thought and activity.
Moreover, Taplin, in my opinion, focuses too much on the "great men" themselves and not at the politics of the situation, nor the wider silicon valley environment and how that has fostered the politics of these men. The USA is undergoing a historical shift in terms of the political factions that have come to power in the Republican party, and the billionaires discussed here are all connected to this in some way. The book would have benefited from a deeper exploration of the what, how and why of these men's links to political changes in the USA. Furthermore, while Taplin deserves praise for not shying away from the links to Curtis Yarvin, he does not really touch on the wider silicon valley blogosphere, rationalist community, and indeed broader community of venture capitalists and business owners that are also involved in this development of a certain type of right wing politics in silicon valley, and its links to the Republican party.
Perhaps what I am asking for is more than one journalist can reasonably cover. Or, perhaps I am not the target audience. But I do think that a broader exploration of the changes in the American economy and its politics, and how both have changed and been changed by silicon valley and the Republican party, would have made a much better book.
Taplin identifies, correctly, four of the key figures in the new silicon valley elite challenging traditional elites in American politics, and explores their biographies, personalities, business ventures, and the ideas of which they are public proponents. Taplin also endeavours to examine how the ideas they purport to champion are disguise deeper ambitions for power.
This is important, timely, and a worthwhile endeavour, but I am left wanting more.
Taplin touches on the political ideologies that some of the figures discussed, but in his attempt to paint a coherent picture and create a strong narrative, I believe he has not adequately identified how these men's politics has changed over time and why. For example, Taplin talks extensively about the libertarian philosophies that these figures hold, which is really quite an outdated view - when compared to public comments made post-Covid, the libertarian label doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. For example, Thiel is on record expressing support for a "national conservative" philosophy. It's worth noting that Taplin does identify links to characters such as Curtis Yarvin, so it does leave the reader wondering if Taplin is aware but reluctant to write about this evolution of their political thought and activity.
Moreover, Taplin, in my opinion, focuses too much on the "great men" themselves and not at the politics of the situation, nor the wider silicon valley environment and how that has fostered the politics of these men. The USA is undergoing a historical shift in terms of the political factions that have come to power in the Republican party, and the billionaires discussed here are all connected to this in some way. The book would have benefited from a deeper exploration of the what, how and why of these men's links to political changes in the USA. Furthermore, while Taplin deserves praise for not shying away from the links to Curtis Yarvin, he does not really touch on the wider silicon valley blogosphere, rationalist community, and indeed broader community of venture capitalists and business owners that are also involved in this development of a certain type of right wing politics in silicon valley, and its links to the Republican party.
Perhaps what I am asking for is more than one journalist can reasonably cover. Or, perhaps I am not the target audience. But I do think that a broader exploration of the changes in the American economy and its politics, and how both have changed and been changed by silicon valley and the Republican party, would have made a much better book.
April 8, 2024
**.5
Repeat after me: "Correlation does not imply causation".
Starts with a brutal and well deserved excoriation of four narcissistic and dangerous asshole billionaires. Then uses them as stand-ins for railing against four technologies that he claims they represent: virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), blockchain based economies, transhumanism (specifically life extension therapies), and space exploration (focusing on manned missions to Mars).
While he makes some good points about some of the challenges facing the beneficial implementation of these four areas, he completely rejects any and all potential benefits, and jumps back and forth between blanket dismissals and personal attacks on the men that he has chosen as representatives of entire industries, many of which don't even exist yet. His argument stoops to the shallowest of logical fallacies: [asshole billionaire A] is bad. He supports [advanced technology A]. Therefore [advanced technology A] is bad. Repeat for B, C, D.
The problems are much more fundamental than that, however. By equating entire domains to a single bad man, he creates a strawman that's easy to criticize. For instance, he reduces all of AR/VR to consist solely of Mark Zuckerberg's implementation of Facebook's [aka Meta] Metaverse. While acknowledging that the term was blatantly appropriated, he ignores every other competitive application or vision (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Samsung, Sony, etc.), because those don't fit into his narrow view of why it's bad.
He then slippery slopes his way from the potential pitfalls to a wider rant against what he considers the moral decay of society. Unsurprisingly, he repeats the usual tired tropes that video games, rap music, fantasy books, and sci-fi movies cause depression and violence, and explain the rise of everything from QAnon/MAGA, gang violence, school shootings, teenage eating disorders, low voter turnout, Covid conspiracies, etc. Of course there is zero evidence provided that these causal links exist, and even the correlation is sketchy at best.
It's too bad, because he does make some good points, but they are largely about the larger issues of surveillance capitalism, neoliberalism, neo-fascism, the influence of big money on politics, inequality, etc., all of which are covered better and in more detail in other books. Which you should read instead of this one.
Repeat after me: "Correlation does not imply causation".
Starts with a brutal and well deserved excoriation of four narcissistic and dangerous asshole billionaires. Then uses them as stand-ins for railing against four technologies that he claims they represent: virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), blockchain based economies, transhumanism (specifically life extension therapies), and space exploration (focusing on manned missions to Mars).
While he makes some good points about some of the challenges facing the beneficial implementation of these four areas, he completely rejects any and all potential benefits, and jumps back and forth between blanket dismissals and personal attacks on the men that he has chosen as representatives of entire industries, many of which don't even exist yet. His argument stoops to the shallowest of logical fallacies: [asshole billionaire A] is bad. He supports [advanced technology A]. Therefore [advanced technology A] is bad. Repeat for B, C, D.
The problems are much more fundamental than that, however. By equating entire domains to a single bad man, he creates a strawman that's easy to criticize. For instance, he reduces all of AR/VR to consist solely of Mark Zuckerberg's implementation of Facebook's [aka Meta] Metaverse. While acknowledging that the term was blatantly appropriated, he ignores every other competitive application or vision (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Samsung, Sony, etc.), because those don't fit into his narrow view of why it's bad.
He then slippery slopes his way from the potential pitfalls to a wider rant against what he considers the moral decay of society. Unsurprisingly, he repeats the usual tired tropes that video games, rap music, fantasy books, and sci-fi movies cause depression and violence, and explain the rise of everything from QAnon/MAGA, gang violence, school shootings, teenage eating disorders, low voter turnout, Covid conspiracies, etc. Of course there is zero evidence provided that these causal links exist, and even the correlation is sketchy at best.
It's too bad, because he does make some good points, but they are largely about the larger issues of surveillance capitalism, neoliberalism, neo-fascism, the influence of big money on politics, inequality, etc., all of which are covered better and in more detail in other books. Which you should read instead of this one.
February 7, 2024
Worth reading if only to help people sort out their thoughts as they deal with the fact that the tech billionaires--although powerful, impactful, and corrupt--are not, as they imagine themselves to be, gods with Master Race abilities or powers far beyond those of mortal men, or whatever, but merely rather nasty aging boys with unimaginably lots of money and delusions of grandeur.
They imagine themselves to be geniuses, and they are clever, no doubt about it. Still, their lives are largely about luck--the luck to have been born to educated, affluent parents, the luck to have been born at a propitious political moment when the post-war liberal consensus eased their paths and made it easier for them to gull and con their victims, the luck to be the heirs of decades of research by scientists and engineers (most of whom produced knowledge on government pay) whose true creativity and insight left a legacy of innovation that these aspiring billionaires were clever enough to tweak and patent.
The wealth of these men derived from other people's work, and grew because our courts and legislatures are friendly to the wealthy, and because, as Taplin observes, unlike men whose wealth was derived from labor and production--Rockefeller, Carnegie, or even a man like Charles Koch, who shares the reckless "libertarianism" of the tech billionaires--their business model involves relatively few costs: especially when, like Elon and Zuckerberg, they decide to dispense with gatekeepers and fact-checkers, those once charged with keeping social media safe and rational and accurate (they've fired their fact checkers on the pretext that unchecked spews of disinformation and misinformation somehow constitute "free speech").
These men are not gods, they're not even particularly good people, and they're doing real harm as well as marginal good. But they, and perhaps Taplin as well, have failed to understand that the universe is after all a chaos system, and that straight-line projections based on current knowledge and technology have never been particularly accurate. Events both unintended and unanticipated have a way of changing our course, sometimes quite radically.
Still, a good read. Not brilliantly written, but worthwhile.
They imagine themselves to be geniuses, and they are clever, no doubt about it. Still, their lives are largely about luck--the luck to have been born to educated, affluent parents, the luck to have been born at a propitious political moment when the post-war liberal consensus eased their paths and made it easier for them to gull and con their victims, the luck to be the heirs of decades of research by scientists and engineers (most of whom produced knowledge on government pay) whose true creativity and insight left a legacy of innovation that these aspiring billionaires were clever enough to tweak and patent.
The wealth of these men derived from other people's work, and grew because our courts and legislatures are friendly to the wealthy, and because, as Taplin observes, unlike men whose wealth was derived from labor and production--Rockefeller, Carnegie, or even a man like Charles Koch, who shares the reckless "libertarianism" of the tech billionaires--their business model involves relatively few costs: especially when, like Elon and Zuckerberg, they decide to dispense with gatekeepers and fact-checkers, those once charged with keeping social media safe and rational and accurate (they've fired their fact checkers on the pretext that unchecked spews of disinformation and misinformation somehow constitute "free speech").
These men are not gods, they're not even particularly good people, and they're doing real harm as well as marginal good. But they, and perhaps Taplin as well, have failed to understand that the universe is after all a chaos system, and that straight-line projections based on current knowledge and technology have never been particularly accurate. Events both unintended and unanticipated have a way of changing our course, sometimes quite radically.
Still, a good read. Not brilliantly written, but worthwhile.
December 18, 2023
This is a decent book that’s all about four of the techno billionaires who are causing a lot of issues in this world and are a threat to democracy and the well-being of all of this. Taplin writes in-depth about Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andreesen, and Elon Musk. The book dives into a variety of different forms of tech these guys are pushing as well as the insane ideologies of each of them and all the whacky stuff they do.
I will say that this book is 75% awesome book about tech billionaires being awful, but the other 25% had me rolling my eyes because it’s techno fear porn. Taplin is a major tech doomer, and there were points in the book where I audibly laughed. In the chapter on AI, he references the Google employee who claimed their AI was sentient, but the author neglects to mention how the guy’s claims were thoroughly debunked. Then, at the end of the book, Taplin goes through a list of tech we shouldn’t use, and he says, “Don’t use VR,” and I laughed super loud. Yes, the Metaverse has some ridiculous stuff going on, but ALL VR? That’s a bit much.
Overall, it’s a decent book that I’d recommend reading with some skepticism when it comes to the techno fear porn.
I will say that this book is 75% awesome book about tech billionaires being awful, but the other 25% had me rolling my eyes because it’s techno fear porn. Taplin is a major tech doomer, and there were points in the book where I audibly laughed. In the chapter on AI, he references the Google employee who claimed their AI was sentient, but the author neglects to mention how the guy’s claims were thoroughly debunked. Then, at the end of the book, Taplin goes through a list of tech we shouldn’t use, and he says, “Don’t use VR,” and I laughed super loud. Yes, the Metaverse has some ridiculous stuff going on, but ALL VR? That’s a bit much.
Overall, it’s a decent book that I’d recommend reading with some skepticism when it comes to the techno fear porn.
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