Some extracts from this book:

This book will haunt you if you are already perplexed about the pain and suffering in the world. It is an honest realisation of a hopeful young person learning about capitalism, which he ultimately coins “extracted capitalism” and speaks of ‘growth by negation’.

Here is a short piece from his book:

What sticks with me most from those years covering the business world is a kind of shared delusion, this sense that all of this wasn’t just going to carry on forever, but continually improve. It is, of course, the delusion at the heart of capitalism, the existence of some essential, infinite wellspring of innovation and efficiency such as to make the prospect of equally infinite growth possible. But it’s one thing to contend with this sort of thing in the abstract, another to sit opposite the cofounder of what was one of the biggest technology companies on the planet and hear him tell you, with a conviction I have never once mustered for any issue or argument, that this new tablet is going to be an absolute sensation because, you see, it has a very slightly raised rubber edge that makes it possible to place it on the table upside down without damaging the screen. I came to see how cults take shape. Regardless of what the active component of economic growth may be—innovation, efficiency, a slightly raised rubber edge—so often on these assignments I was faced with the likelihood that what fueled the engine now was a kind of negation.

Interviewing one of Uber’s earliest executives, who demonstrated the company’s route-finding algorithms with the unbridled enthusiasm of a small child at Christmas, I couldn’t help but think what this company had really innovated was not some brilliant new solution to the traveling salesman problem, but the establishment of a new, lower norm of employee treatment. Success, growth, profit came from taking what might at one time have been decent, stable jobs and rebranding them as side hustles. The brilliant business idea was persuading people to expect less.

I recall the same sensation the day a business magazine I used to freelance for named its CEO of the year: an airline executive whose hallmark achievement was figuring out a way to offload his workers’ pension and health benefits, thereby doing something truly spectacular to the company’s financial fortunes. Whatever late capitalism is, it seems to be careening into this embrace of growth by negation. Through that prism, it’s hard not to see the advances in something like artificial intelligence less driven by technological breakthroughs as by a society that has, over years, over decades, become normalized to a greater and greater magnitude of both loneliness and theft, such that a sputtering algorithm badly trained on the stolen work of real human beings might be celebrated with a straight face as something approximating humanness. Under this ordering, it is not some corporation’s increasing capacity for better that drives the extractive world, but everyone else’s increasing tolerance for worse. Unconfronted, this kind of negation will not remain confined to widgets or labor or even the economic world. When the bigger wildfires come—as they already have—the industries whose callous disregard helped bring this about will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for calamity.

When climate change upends the lives of billions, our governments will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for violence against the hordes of nameless others to enact its cruelest, most violent fortressing. In time, negation becomes all there is. To walk away from this system is to speak the only language the system will ever understand. Otherwise, there will be nothing left under this way of living. In the end we will be asked to normalize not just unlimited extraction and unlimited suffering but total absence, a hollow that will look an awful lot like the one we were asked to overlay onto the minimum-wage workers and the climate refugees and the victims of endless colonial wars and, yes, even those dead Palestinian children who, had they been allowed to live, might have done something terrible. Just for a moment, cease to believe that this particular group of people are human.

It is hard not to weep as I turn the pages. For this young person ‘had seen through the glass darkly, but now, face to face.’

His work is almost prose. His pain and anguish pulsing through the veins of many disillusioned young people around the world.

We all wanted the best for our young people. We should have left them more humanity, not less. More healthy environments, not less. More love, not less.