Jonathan Taplin shares first look at The End of Reality with Vanity Fair.
August 22, 2023
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Jonathan Taplin shared an extended excerpt from his upcoming book, The End of Reality, with Vanity Fair this week.
Slated for release on September 5, The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto describes what Jonathan considers to be the great con job of the twenty-first century: the ways that the respective tech monopolies of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen are individually and collectively ushering our society’s degeneration and eventual bankruptcy.
Jonathan – who has at various times in his life been acclaimed educator, writer, and film producer – is at present director emeritus of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. (His remarkable, much-envied career has included stints as tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band, VP of media M&A at Merrill Lynch, professor at USC, and founder of the pioneering video-on-demand company Intertainer.) We’re proud that in every way, his new book is the full extension of the ideas Jonathan earlier offered in his Five Things I’ve Learned class, Five Things I’ve Learned about the Future of Media and Democracy.
The End of Reality details the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these four technology billionaires, documenting the ways that their tech monopolies have brought about corrupting, long-lasting consequences: middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony. At the same time, great volumes of taxpayer money continues to be funneled to their individual ventures.
“I use the term techno-determinism to describe the path the Technocrats have dictated for our country, Jonathan writes of “the Four,” “because they have sold, and we have bought into, the idea that they are going to deliver us a bright future. The future they are now selling us, however—crypto fortunes, the merger of the human and the computer via AI, the prospect of spending our lives in the Metaverse or on Mars—is a lie.”
It’s essential reading. Find the article here, at Vanity Fair. Follow Jonathan on Twitter. Check out his website to discover not only more about The End of Reality, but links to his coming book tour, as well as select podcasts, writings, lectures, and other publications. While you’re there, learn more about his extraordinary memoir, The Magic Years, Scenes from a Rock and Roll Life.
Jonathan Taplin's 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 in the ’60s, producer of major films in the ’70s, an executive at Merrill Lynch in the ’80s, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service in the ’90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium.
Taplin is the Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and author of The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock and Roll Life and Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy which was nominated by the Financial Times as one of the Best Business Books of 2017. Taplin has produced music and film for Bob Dylan and The Band, George Harrison, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Gus Van Sant and many others. He was the founder of Intertainer, the first streaming Video On Demand Platform in 1996.
Jonathan was a Professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism from 2003-2016. He is a member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He currently sits on the boards of The Authors Guild, Americana Music Association and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Council on Technology and Innovation. His commentary has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Medium, The Washington Monthly and the Wall Street Journal.
You and a guest could win two tickets to the class of your choice.