Writer, film producer and scholar Jonanthan Taplin discusses his latest work, "The End of Reality," with Princeton professor Nigel Smith. Book signing to follow.
About the Book:
From the author of "Move Fast and Break Things" comes a withering takedown of four billionaires (from Andreessen to Zuckerberg) who are selling us fantasies while the world burns. At a time when multiple crises are compounding to create epic inequality, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme - from the metaverse to cryptocurrency, space travel and transhumanism - is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms.
Tech monopolies have hollowed out the middle class and brought unbounded public acrimony. Meanwhile, enormous amounts of taxpayer money are funneled into dystopian ventures, the benefits of which accrue to billionaires. "The End of Reality" is both a scathing critique of the warped worldview of a tiny minority and a vision of a truly regenerative economics 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 professor at the USC Annenberg School from in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. 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.
Nigel Smith is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton. He has written acclaimed books on Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips. He is currently writing a study of the relationship between words and music, which grows in part from his work with Rackett (2004-2010), which he founded with Paul Muldoon, and Wayside Shrines, a new collaboration with Muldoon, Chris Harford, Ila Couch, Noriko Manabe, Tim Chaston and Ray Kubian.
Co-presented by Labyrinth Books with support from the Princeton University’s Humanities Council.
