Loretta Napoleoni has an armful of worldwide credentials. She is not only a respected, in-demand global pundit, but earned her stripes in the 1970s when the Red Brigades agreed to speak through her, giving her instant fame in her native Italy. Her latest book, Technocapitalism is meant to show that the techtitans who are changing the face of the Earth and space, are nothing more than greedy capitalists, pushing everyone and everything aside in search of more wealth. Not a very big challenge, was my first reaction. And my second.

All the appropriate elements present themselves routinely. Her chapters are a litany of excessive greed in all the domains we read about daily: Wall Street, carbon credits, crypto, blockchain, NFTs, video games, and space.

She attributes the billionaires’ successes to capitalism and despite people hating what they’re selling, using it daily anyway. That we hate the metaverse because it “strengthens our new identity as unhappy loners, mere consumers and commodities. (Yawn.) That Second Life, the original metaverse, has been plagued by hate, violence and scams. (I am shocked!) But these companies are valued in the billions. She points out that Google buys up companies at any price simply to keep them out of the hands of its competitors. This reduces choice and holds up innovation. Don’t be evil was removed as Google’s tagline for good reason.

What she never investigates is how they’re getting away with it. The USA has endless laws long on the books to prevent monopolies. The problem is successive administrations have choked off the budgets of those bureaus and actively prevent them from doing their mandated jobs. As far as she gets is: “No effort has been made to strip the Techtitans of their global data dominance.” If by the time you read this the Supreme Court has not made federal regulation illegal and destroyed the administrative branch completely, it is working on it. Anarchy for the specific benefit of all (billionaires). Just blaming capitalism is not enough.

She has great praise for blockchain, but doesn’t concede that the amount of storage required to put every little thing ever agreed to or purchased on an eternal blockchain is prohibitive and a largely pointless waste of energy and servers. Instead, she posits that blockchains can be local or regional in nature, taking up fewer resources globally by redefining them as statements of stake rather than of work, as with bitcoin blockchains. This is not a great answer to anything.

I have two major issues with this book. First and foremost, Napoleoni presents nothing new. Everything readers will find here can easily be found elsewhere. She does not travel to get the exclusive answers from highly knowledgeable experts. She has no unique insight into anything whatsoever. She simply summarizes history, connecting some dots for those who can’t or won’t do it for themselves. For researchers in the future, this could be a good starting point to understand how it all went so horribly wrong. And while that is necessary in this time of superficiality, it would have been nice if she had come up with something, anything new, to hang this whole effort on.

Two, for a book that wants to be taken seriously, Napoleoni unaccountably lapses into nonsense. At least seven times in the book, she suddenly spouts that whatever she is discussing caused something to “literally” …
-Banks and financial institutions were “literally drowning” in debt. No they weren’t.
-Large Language Models have “literally taken the world by storm.” No they haven’t.
-Ethereum “literally opened up a universe” for online commerce. No it didn’t.
-CryptoKitties “literally exploded” on the Ethereum platform. No it didn’t.
-NFT prices have “literally crashed”. This is as close as she ever comes to something to agree with.
-Without the anchor of the gold standard, inflation “literally exploded.” No it didn’t.
-In the early 2000s, the repo market “literally exploded.” No it did not.

Her ultimate point is that the techtitans “are not heroes or visionaries,” just greedy. Yes, and? And finally, regarding the laughable common good: “No common good will come from the race to accumulate cosmic profits selling connectivity to the masses in order to harvest their brains.” Deep.

David Wineberg ( )