Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

  “The thing about dreams—and, coincidentally, this applies to work as well—is that once the dream ends you can no longer recollect what happened” (97). This truism is from Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, a novel that explores the nature of dreams within late-stage capitalism. Dreams and work, the narrator writes, are unmemorable, though afterward “You feel that something has happened. A vague memory remains. The exhaustion is there. You are changed” (97). Clearly, both dreams and work hold deep significance for us—the dual-meaning of dreams is resonant here—and “the nature of both dreaming and working is infinite, and thus incomprehensible. We can try our best to explain it, to understand it, to conceptualize it, compartmentalize it, or track it, but the act of dreaming time is stolen and made unreal” (97). Work and dreams are incomprehensible.

So let’s try to comprehend them.

The titular character of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is distinctly unremarkable. He’s a young man, mid-twenties, with an exorbitant amount of debt, very few redeeming qualities, and a total lack of self-awareness. After a long stint of unemployment, he picks up a job at a hotdog stand in the mall—and also a more insidious secret career as a dream auditor. As a dream auditor, his job is to enter people’s nightmares and report on the elements that are most disturbing. He reports these to his superiors, who come and “sanitize” the dreams of the company’s clients. Picture this: you are having a nightmare that involves a mysterious shadow, a grizzly bear, and a bunch of children playing in the park. The auditor comes in and monitors, assessing the psychology of the dream and reports the grizzly bear. The higher-ups come in and suck up the grizzly bear in a vacuum-like hose. The auditor is swept into another dream, another janitorial site.

It gets more complicated. It turns out that the people whose dreams are being sanitized are employees of a company who is paying for the service with the nefarious idea that, by removing their dreams, the employees will be more efficient at work. Late in the book there’s the even darker revelation that all of the sucked-up elements of nightmares are in nightmare boxes in an archive and are being sold off as a second revenue stream for the Kafkaesque company that’s conducting the whole operation.

The premise of the book is pretty engaging, but I wish it went a little further. There are a lot of elements at play, some of which are really engaging, but I was expecting a little more variation. For instance, Abernathy’s direct supervisor, Kai, keeps appearing to sanitize the dreams and expels Abernathy from the site. Their relationship has some tenderness built in, but there are too many scenes where Abernathy says something stupid or insensitive, Kai expels him from the dream, and Abernathy longs to talk it out with her. Once or twice is fine, but I was expecting some more development there—even the revelations of Kai’s true backstory left things a little bit lacking. Similarly, Abernathy enters the same dreams repeatedly. There’s a narrative purpose for that, but with the premise of being a dream investigator has so much potential—you can do anything, so having recycled elements seems a bit flat. I kept waiting for an escalation that didn’t quite deliver. In one part, Abernathy works his way into middle management and discovers the conspiratorial nature of the organization from his boss, whom he knows in real life as a total prick. The revelation of what they’re doing is haunting, and the consequences are worse than Abernathy could have imagined. I’m being intentionally vague. But, even at the climax of the book, the conflicts seem to get resolved with, essentially, not a hitch. I was waiting for a big burst, but it didn’t really play out.

The book, at its core, is also a kind of love story. Abernathy is falls in love with his neighbour Rhoda, who is an older single mom with a daughter named Timmy. Both Abernathy and Rhoda are awkward with one another and can’t quite bring themselves together. One night, though, they bond and

He looks into his wineglass (a coffee mug) for a moment. He is suddenly overcome by a sweeping wave of feeling that he can’t quite put his finger on. Like he is going to cry out  of sadness, but not really out of sadness, actually, more like out of the inconceivability of life. Like life is an infinity of beauty, and he is only just now realizing it. Except, in realizing it, the beauty and the happiness are suddenly hurting him.
This is the first time Abernathy has ever been happy in love, which means that he is realizing, for the first time, that this type of happiness must end. It is a bittersweet feeling, holding both truths at once. (159)

It’s a simple exploration of a feeling but I think it really works. The balance of sadness and elation rings true—I, too, sometimes think about how the world is full of such infinite beauty that you can’t help but be crushed by it.

McGhee makes use of an allegorical, sometimes aphoristic style. She writes, almost, “from the beyond.” The omniscience of the narrator tells us early on that Abernathy only has a few years to live, for instance. There’s a playful style that points to the disconnect of characters’ experiences and their realities, there are interjections that read kind of like Ron Howard’s narrations in Arrested Development: Abernathy was about to have the best day of his life “...but really he wasn’t.” The book is framed on the cover as “riotously funny,” and I think I have a misplaced sense of sympathy because I mostly just feel bad for the characters. It’s like a dull ache watching their lives so drained of energy and life.

One of the most impactful moments for me was when Rhoda reveals the truth that governs her nightmares. She has a recurring dream of crawling across her driveway, not being able to reach her door, and her ex-husband arrives in his truck. I can imagine the dream pretty vividly and the terror it would inspire. Partway through the book, Rhoda reveals that she had two children. She describes how her father always used to say that deaths come in three. She tells Abernathy about deaths she witnessed and then the tragic story of her son eating mushrooms in the yard, being allergic, and dying while she was caring for her younger child. She narrates as follows, and the conclusion is such a great tragic intrusive thought almost as impactful as the mid-point of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust:

“When I walked into the yard,” she says, “and I saw him I called the ambulance. I called Derek and I said come home. Come home now. But it was too late. I knew it was too late. His face wasn’t — wasn’t moving. I went to go get, I went to go get Timmy. And we all sat together to wait. I held him in my lap. His perfect face. All three of us together. We were all together. All three of us were together but all I could hear in my head was my dad. He was just saying it over and over again. ‘What did you expect? At least now we’re free of it.’ I thought that. At least now we’re free of it. I thought that about my own son.” (200).

Following this harrowing account of her experiences, Abernathy, the coward, abandons Rhoda. At the height of Abernathy’s cynicism, he starts sanitizing all elements of dreams, sucking up the dreams wholesale. As it turns out, people’s memories are tied to their dreams and he starts creating zombies with no connections to the real world: just what companies wanted to achieve. He realizes too late how the banality of evil has crept into his life and makes a last desperate attempt to repair his relationship with Rhoda, which has a tender, if heartbreaking, turn.

Overall, the novel has a number of things going for it. It’s good, but not great. As I mentioned, I just wanted it to have some more escalation. I needed McGhee to give it a bigger push, to take some more wild risks, in order to give the book some more rich layering. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind has a lot of things going for it in terms of premise and social critique. If you’re into a magical realism Kafka / David Foster Wallace, it’s worth picking up. If you want an all-out dreamscape, you might turn your attention elsewhere—or fall asleep.

Happy reading!

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman

 

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in cryptocurrencies. I have a general awareness of what it is and how the blockchain works (sort of). I’ll admit that I’ve never really understood the purpose of crypto—sure, I understand its ostensible purpose as being a deregulated market that allows for private transactions or whatever, but it has often felt to me like just another kind of stock market controlled by the same tech billionaires that ruin everything else on the planet. So, I launched into Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by cryptoskeptics Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman.

It’s hard to know how much of their argument feeds into my confirmation bias. Crypto enthusiasts are notorious for saying “do your own research.” Well, in my “research” of watching videos like Dan Olson’s “Line Goes Up – The Problem with NFTs”, I have very little faith in the alternative markets that pop up. The little Marxist in me knows that money of all kinds is only valuable through collective agreement and that the surplus value of labour is expressed through bills and coins. There’s not really an inherent difference if people opt to trade in alternative currencies, but McKenzie and Silverman present a compelling case for crypto not really being a currency at all. McKenzie writes that because “you put real money into them and you hope to make off of them through no work of your own” and that “under American law, that’s an investment contract. More precisely, it’s a security.” He refers to the 1946 Supreme Court decision that established the Howey Test for determining securities. It has four prongs: “an investment of money, in a common enterprise, with the expectation of profit, to be derived from the efforts of others. Check, check, check, and check.” Referring to Bitcoin in particular, McKenzie and Silverman make the case that it, and the “20,000 or so other cryptos ought to be classified as securities under American law.” In practice, it operates more like a stock, and a stock that seems rigged from the start.

One striking stat that McKenzie and Silverman return to, albeit an estimation, is the response Alex Mashinsky, former CEO of the Celsius Network, provided when they asked how much “real money” was in the crypto system. His answer was 10-15%. This supposedly trillion dollar industry, the book asserts, is set for a collapse akin to the subprime mortgage crisis—or the tulip mania bubble burst. Even before getting into the scam part, the authors make the argument that Bitcoin isn’t all that useful and that it’s wrong to buy into the notion that “If more people would just buy Bitcoin, eventually it will become a currency you can actually use.” They consider the functions of money like store of value and unit of account and say that Bitcoin “fails miserably’ because “the price jumps up and down like a rabbit on amphetamines, making it impossible to run a business using Bitcoin, or any other crypto, or hold onto it for any period of time with reasonable confidence it would retain its value.” The unpredictability is its downfall: “Could you use a cryptocurrency as a rudimentary form of money?” the authors ask and then answer, “I mean, sure, you could call a brick a soccer ball, but I wouldn’t recommend using it that way.”

The use-value of crypto currencies is thoroughly discounted, in part because the technology isn’t there to support it. The authors make the case that “the technology behind Bitcoin sucks. It doesn’t scale.” While they concede that Satoshi Nakamoto’s “solution to the double-spend problem was innovative, [it was] also clunky. The more miners who entered the competition, the more energy was used but the blocks were the same.” When they give the statistics, it does seem pretty bleak: “Bitcoin is able to handle only 5-7 transactions a second; it can never go above that” whereas “Visa can process 24, 000.” If more people bought into, for example, Bitcoin—the technology might not be able to handle it efficiently, anyway.

This is also an environmental crisis, as with all “new” and “cutting edge” technologies. Bitcoin uses tremendous amounts of energy: “the equivalent, in 2021, of Argentina. The entire country.” By contrast, “Visa and Mastercard use comparatively miniscule amounts of electricity to serve a customer base orders of magnitude greater. Bitcoin’s energy consumption is enormously wasteful and poses a massive environmental problem for the supposedly cutting edge technology and, really, for all of us.”

Potential practicality aside, most of the book is about the criminal potential of cryptocurrencies. The authors give some account of the systemic issues with crypto (its unreal consumption of resources, its propensity to be used for money laundering, and so on). Aside from just having bad actors, the whole industry seems to operate through misinformation and backdoor deals that benefit the people at the top. The top 1% whales own the vast majority of all crypto, 90% of Bitcoin has already been mined, and so on. Cryptocoin creators also seem to have a habit of double-dipping and being invested in or having deals with crypto exchange markets. In one particularly harrowing anecdote, McKenzie recounts the story of two crypto enthusiasts’ disastrous experiences when their cryptoexchange crashed or otherwise became frozen at times when they were hoping to trade. As an aside, even at the best of times, average crypto transactions take about 8 minutes. One man lost an exorbitant amount of money; he knew he wanted to sell, but the system wasn’t responding and he sat in horror watching the price of his crypto plummet, not being able to divest. Meanwhile, another man was set to invest, but the flaws in the technology prevented his purchase, and he missed out on making (potentially) hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is, incidentally, if he even would have been able to cash out; McKenzie and Silverman point to the challenges of actually turning your crypto into actual funds when desired.

I’m not sure if the systemic nature of crypto’s fraud is fully established in the text. McKenzie and Silverman focus on particular case studies of cryptoscammers pretty frequently. Having the focus land so squarely on a couple of key players gives the impression that the bad apples are ruining the bunch. I don’t doubt that crypto is rotten to the core, but I think there might have been some more balance from the specific to the general in order to show how thoroughly rotten the scheme is. 

That said, the case studies are pretty compelling. Some of my favourite chapters profile particular crypto scam artists or offer extended interviews with them (cf. Alex Mashinsky interview above). There’s an ongoing saga with Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX cryptocurrency exchange. McKenzie offers a character study of the fraudster and replicates a series of bizarre and, frankly, pathetic text exchanges where Bankman-Fried is pleading to get McKenzie on his side, to like him. The wry humour of the book helps paint this portrait in an engaging way before documenting the ways that Bankman-Fried manipulated the market, donated vast sums of money to politicians, and so on, before getting charged with seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. 

There’s a human interest aspect of the book that might have been emphasized a little more thoroughly for the victims of crypto scams. McKenzie points out that everyone seems to accept being scammed as part of the deal and place the blame on themselves and their own research (or lack thereof). Throughout the book, McKenzie and Silverman point out the comparisons between crypto and gambling, noting in particular the ways in which “the house always wins.” In the final chapter, McKenzie notes that gambling is the addiction most likely to lead to suicide, which makes it particularly concerning that the rise of crypto enthusiasm was seen most among young men (already overrepresented in suicide statistics) during the Covid pandemic. The final chapter also documents a family that falls apart because its patriarch gets addicted to crypto and continually wanted to borrow money for the next big score—his son offered to pay all of his bills, but not give cash. The argument that followed during that phone call was the last time they spoke. 

We’ll continue to see how the cryptomarket develops. I gotta say, I’m not super optimistic.

Happy reading!