Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

I bailed out on this book about a third of the way in because it doesn’t really have a point. The only point is that the author is pissed off and wants to rant about stuff.

The author is kind of an Internet personality. He was an editor for Rolling Stone, he has a podcast and a Substack, and last year he was in the news because Elon Musk gave him from screenshots of conversations that appeared to show the former owners of Twitter/X conspiring to hide details of Hunter Biden’s misdoings.

This book was written in 2010, just after the (a?) financial crisis. Every chapter is a long diatribe about some aspect of that situation – it’s just a tedious series of blame rants.

To give you an idea of the tone, the chapter on Alan Greenspan is titled “The Biggest Asshole in the Universe.”

There’s nothing constructive here. No solutions seemed to be offered (based on how far I read). And given that it was written fairly shortly after the 2007/8 financial crisis, it’s likely that a lot more has been discovered since then, so his observations might be inaccurate.

(For example, the fate of TARP was still way up in the air during the time this was written.)

After the first two chapters, I browsed a bit, but the book just seemed to be one long anger trip, and I wasn’t in the mood for it.