"To state the bleeding obvious, a lot of things in our society need to be fixed. But our experience with crypto – and with many of the other business models we’ll explore in this book – makes it clear that many over-hyped technological solutions are at best a crutch and distraction, and at worst downright harmful. Actually improving people’s financial wellbeing, for example, will require us to pursue real, slow, piecemeal, democratic solutions."

"The answer to the question “can this technology actually do this thing?” is “no” when the technology can’t solve the problem at hand; the answer is also “no” if there’s not actually an identified “thing” for the technology to do. In the early days of the internet, it was abundantly clear to people that it was useful, even though the pathways to commercializing the internet weren’t necessarily obvious at first. Today, it sometimes feels like that reality has been flipped on its head. Members of the Silicon Valley elite (people who made their fortunes at the beginning of the internet era, or later, with the arrival of the smartphone) can seem like junkies chasing the dragon of another tech revolution high, pushing any new fad they happen upon, actual use cases be damned."

"Let me put it more bluntly: we are kidding ourselves if we expect the private sector to solve the long-standing and structural problem of economic precarity, and we shouldn’t be surprised when businesses seek to profit from that economic precarity instead – that’s capitalism, baby! But some fintech businesses do claim to be so much more than profit-making enterprises, and then trade on those claims to try and curry regulatory favor and concessions that aren’t available to other financial businesses. Regulation is needed to prevent predatory inclusion, but many fintech business models have obscured or explained away their high costs and problematic practices with a veneer of flashy tech innovation. And when regulators have sought to enforce their rules against fintechs, they have often been accused of being “anti-innovation.”"

"In short, the predominant legal use of stablecoins is not for payments, but for speculative trading. They aren’t as stable as they claim to be, and the stability they do have arises from free-riding on the US banking system and monetary policy – and as we’ll come back to, if stablecoins are able to keep gaining market share, these parasites might eventually endanger their hosts. Stablecoins are typically unavailable to those without bank accounts…and so we come to the question that I keep screaming about stablecoins (in my head, and occasionally on social media), WHY ARE WE EVEN DOING THIS???"

"Just like beauty, efficiency, competition, and security are all in the eye of the beholder. For example, one person’s “efficiency” may be another person’s “dismantling critical government infrastructure.” And yet technological solutions designed to make things more efficient, more competitive, or more secure are often presented by Silicon Valley as neutral and universally desirable. That veneer of neutrality and universality can be dangerous if it disguises the fact that Silicon Valley is solving (or creating and then solving) problems in ways that are antithetical to our values. To illustrate those dangers, we’ll use a particular technological solution: the blockchain. A blockchain is a clunky type of database, and it really is the perfect example to demonstrate the hollowness of techno-solutionism: it promises to do everything but really isn’t very good at doing much of anything (anything other than helping some unscrupulous folks make money, that is)."

"AI hype continues unabated in 2025, but lurking beneath the surface there’s a palpable sense of desperation about low AI adoption. You can see that desperation in the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan when it says “the bottleneck to harnessing AI’s full potential is not necessarily the availability of models, tools, or applications. Rather, it is the limited and slow adoption of AI, particularly within large, established organizations.” You can see that desperation as tech CEOs line up to declare their companies “AI-first,” forcing their employees to use AI tools and sometimes using “level of AI usage” as a metric in employee performance reviews. Silicon Valley’s preferred playbook of “get us all hooked and then turn the screws” won’t work if we never get hooked in the first place, and so the AI industry seems to have enlisted the Trump administration and their tech CEO friends to try and make GenAI indispensable."

"It seems safe to say that the common usage of “disruptive innovation” has morphed into a more all-purpose description for “Silicon Valley technology being deployed in new domains to take market share from incumbents.” But despite this evolution, the messianic connotations that Jill Lepore identified remain: this kind of disruptive innovation is still seen as a panacea that can fix just about anything. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley disruptors often don’t know much about the domains they propose to disrupt, and so they may not understand (or even care) why a particular industry evolved a particular way, or why its pain points are what they are. Silicon Valley’s outside perspective can be helpful to a degree: outsiders are well positioned to break out of the groupthink box, to come up with new and creative ideas about how to tackle problems that incumbents have simply come to accept as their lot. But outside-the-box thinking only gets you so far when you don’t understand the basics. As one incisive journalist put it, when we’re talking about disruptors, “have we just constructed a sexy new language to talk about novices?”"

"I’m trying (and failing) to resist the urge to engage in some armchair psychology here: my pet theory is that insecurity (in the sense of not feeling comfortable in one’s own skin) is at the root of all the world’s problems. I’m sure that, like the rest of us, members of the Silicon Valley elite sometimes have the creeping sensation that they’re not good enough. If they won’t acknowledge that their past success was built partly on luck, though, then when they can’t force a repeat of the luck that made them successful in the first place, I suspect that exacerbates those feelings of insecurity, and they need something else to fill the hole. Maybe that something is public adulation; maybe it’s the sense of playing the hero in some epic sci-fi story. Which brings us to… TESCREAL"

"Because all this legal largesse just kept on coming, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Silicon Valley elite came to feel entitled to it – that as it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be, amen. But whether you consider the United States’ legal accommodation of Silicon Valley a good choice or a bad choice, it’s important to recognize that it was a choice – and one that has proved enormously beneficial to the tech industry. The billion (trillion?) dollar question is, do we want to keep making the same choice going forward?"