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Chapter 9: Let’s Get Skeptical

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter9.html

Published: August 29, 2025 04:00

There are plenty of great hype men in Silicon Valley, but that hype loses its power if people start laughing at it. I suspect that Silicon Valley hype is effective in part because people want to believe that the world is better than this – that…

Chapter 8: Silicon Valley, Welfare Queen

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter8.html

Published: August 22, 2025 04:00

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’…

Chapter 7: High Priests of Techno-Solutionism

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter7.html

Published: August 15, 2025 04:00

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…

Chapter 6: Won’t somebody please think of the innovation?

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter6.html

Published: August 8, 2025 04:00

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…

Chapter 5: Finance and A̶I̶ Applied Statistics

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter5.html

Published: August 1, 2025 04:00

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…

Chapter 4: There’s a Blockchain for That

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter4.html

Published: July 25, 2025 04:00

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…

Chapter 3: Banking the Unbanked*

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter3.html

Published: July 14, 2025 10:00

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…

Chapter 2: "Democratizing Finance"

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter2.html

Published: July 11, 2025 13:42

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…

Chapter 1: Promises, Promises

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter1.html

Published: July 2, 2025 15:13

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…

Introduction

https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/intro.html

Published: July 2, 2025 14:13

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…