Business Post Magazine

Book review: The End of Reality urges us to push back against technocrats who run the world

‘Scathing but humane’ book by Jonathan Taplin centres on four infantile tech-bro billionaires who hold far too much power over us all

Elon Musk of X and Tesla; Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta/Instagram; and Marc Andreessen, co-writer of Mosaic, one of the very first web browsers

Is our culture infantilising us? Take films. When the algorithm is not feeding us mindless pap, we’re getting whipped up into a frenzy on social media – which purposely sows division to drive engagement. And on those rare occasions that we go to the cinema like toddlers, we tend to favour superheroes in capes.

It’d be hard to find a director more genial than Richard Linklater, but during a recent interview he couldn’t have been ...