Brentwood - Tuesday September 5th at 6:30 pm -- Jonathan Taplin discusses and signs " The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto".
Join us on Tuesday September 5th at 6:30 pm as we welcome Jonathan Taplin to the store to discuss and sign The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto. Joining him in conversation will be Ian Masters.This event is free to attend and will be held in the courtyard at DIESEL, A Bookstore in Brentwood.
Free seating is limited. To reserve a seat, please purchase one copy of a book for one seat.
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, exacerbates 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.
Jonathan Taplin is a public intellectual, writer, film producer, and scholar. He is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a professor at the USC Annenberg School from in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment until 2017. Since his graduation from Princeton University in 1969, his 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, producer of major films such as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, an executive at Merrill Lynch, creator of the Internet’s first video-on- demand service, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium.
Ian Masters is a BBC-trained broadcast journalist who has covered national security affairs for over 40 years on public radio. He is the host of the nationally-syndicated news analysis public radio program "Background Briefing" at backgroundbriefing.org and has produced documentaries for the BBC and ABC News and has been a senior fellow at UCLA's Center For Strategic and International affairs and the UCLA Center For International Relations and was a consultant to the Center For National Security Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Event date:
Tuesday, September 5, 2023 - 6:30pm
Event address:
225 26th St
Suite 33
Santa Monica, CA 90402
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