The Age of Coercive Capitalism

For decades, you traded your data for convenience and believed you had nothing to hide. That data is no longer just used to predict what you will buy. It is used to decide what you can buy, where you can go, and whether you qualify.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology were sold as tools of financial freedom. Instead, they have become components of a larger system, one in which the rules governing your money, your identity, and your economic opportunities can be set, changed, and enforced without your knowledge or consent.

This book asks two questions. What is actually being built? And why do the people building it keep going, even when they can see the harm?

Drawing on the neuroscience of Iain McGilchrist and the firsthand neurological testimony of Harvard brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, the book introduces the concept of Structural Narcissism. The leaders designing this infrastructure operate from a state of left-hemisphere dominance, a mode of thinking that excels at efficiency, measurement, and control but has lost access to the right hemisphere’s capacity for empathy, context, and ethical imagination. This is not a character flaw. It is a structural condition, selected for and rewarded over decades in corporate and financial culture. It is the reason Coercive Capitalism can exist without moral friction.

The author spent thirty years inside the infrastructure she now describes, from the earliest algorithmic behavioral technology at Firefly Networks, through the dot-com era, to a decade at Mastercard building the tokenized payment systems now at the center of this story. She is not reporting from the outside. She is telling you what she saw.

Read the full story behind the book on the About the Author page. Be the first to know.

The Age of Coercive Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of AI and Programmable Money is forthcoming. Subscribe to be notified when it is available.