Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games by Mike Drucker

  I continue to find myself compelled to read books about video games and people reflecting on their experiences. As such, I’ve most recently read Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games by Mike Drucker. The book is exactly as it professes: it’s a collection of Drucker’s memories and experiences of games.

The tone is mostly light and jokey—Drucker is a comedian, after all—as Drucker recounts anecdotes like showing up to his crush’s house in a homemade Super Mario 3 costume. There are some overtly comedic interludes, like a series of bad summaries of famous games or mock Steam reviews. There are also some moments of surprising tenderness, too. In one chapter, Drucker tells the story of his sister having a party at their house and his video games being stolen. His dad, at this point in the book, had been continually described as distant and uncomprehending to his son’s passion for games. When Drucker cried over his stolen copy of Street Fighter 2, his dad drove him around town and spoke to store employees, putting his pride on the line and asking or begging for a discount to replace his crying son’s game.

The most powerful chapter, in my view, is the one that got the most serious. Perhaps it’s because so much of the book is written in an overtly comedic tone that when Drucker describes the loss of his friend and their connection over the game Nier Automata, it hits hard. His friend was in a horrific car accident that killed her boyfriend and left her with serious challenges for the rest of her life. She developed other health complications and passed away. Drucker juxtaposes the story of their friendship and the loss of her alongside the existential themes of Nier Automata, a game that has 26 endings and, if you get the best of them, asks you to delete your save file. It’s a game about loss that serves as a tragic partner to Drucker’s memoir.

Granted, books like this are partially nostalgia bait. When I hear Megaman, my ears perk up, when someone references Silent Hill 2 I feel that special kind of magic that brings me back to my attic bedroom in Kingston, navigating the unsettling foggy streets. I recognize that my extant interest in games draws me to books like this and it’s okay to read a bit of fluff once in a while, right?

What was kind of cool is that Mike Drucker was unknown to me before I started the book, but has actually had a pretty prolific career. It was kind of cool to hear about how his writing career took off. He wrote for Saturday Night Live, he worked for Nintendo doing localization work (so cool!), he did reviews for IGN, did stand-up comedy, worked on a few other shows, including Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and others. A surprising side effect reading about video games was getting to hear a bit more about the process of developing a career in both comedy writing and video games.

I don’t really have a ton of commentary for this one. Good Game, No Rematch is a collection of accessible, generally humorous, stories. It felt like a light read and it was a nice trip down memory lane for myself while learning about Drucker, too.

Happy reading! Insert coins to continue.

Fenway Punk: How a Boston Indie Label Scored Big on Baseball's Greatest Rivalry by Chris Wrenn

  I bet none of you would have predicted that I’d one day be writing a book review for a book that is, technically, about baseball. Let’s be real, though, what brought me here was the music. Chris Wrenn is the founder of Boston-based record label Bridge Nine, who primarily release and promote hardcore punk music. With B9’s initial claim to fame being the release of American Nightmare’s first EP, they’ve also expanded their reach and offered releases from bands like H2O, Strike Anywhere, Polar Bear Club, Terror, War on Women, and Crime in Stereo (go listen to …Is Dead, that album rules). 

Anyway, Fenway Punk: How a Boston Indie Label Scored Big on Baseball’s Greatest Rivalry is about Wrenn’s entrepreneurial powers to build Bridge Nine from the ground up. The genesis of the label is pretty bizarre: Wrenn recounts how he bankrolled his initiatives by selling novelty t-shirts outside of Fenway Park. He played into the rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees, selling “Yankees Suck” shirts and stickers. The fact that he was able to squirrel away some funds and use that to record music for American Nightmare is pretty entrepreneurial and admirable, I will say.

One of the less palatable components of the book is, well, the reflection of a different time. Wrenn talks about fighting in parking lots for money, rolling with crowds that broke into houses to steal booze, and other youthful shenanigans that strike me as the kind of bro-ish machismo that drives so many people away from the hardcore scene.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is hearing about the politics of being a vendor outside a stadium. Wrenn gives background into how they had to operate under the radar and avoid being busted. Strategies included things like having one guy with a money bag and extra merch while someone sold a few things at a time—if they got caught, there would be less loss because the guy in the backpack could throw on a cap and blend into the crowd. The structure of the market also made it easier to sell, for example, stickers. Selling stickers at Fenway and later Hot Topic funded Wrenn’s musical projects, which is just wild to me. Back to politics, it was also interesting to hear about how the code enforcers built relationships with vendors. It was like reading about the mafia and / or crooked cops making secret deals.

More of the book was about baseball than I would have expected, which is my own naivety. Wrenn seems genuinely invested in recounting the glories and heartbreaks of the Boston-New York rivalry. The highlight of that component of the book was hearing about New York playing in Boston following the September 11th attacks and how the community changed around the time. Mostly, I didn’t really feel much towards the baseball drama.

Honestly, I wanted some more music stories from the book. When I heard about links to Converge or Sick of It All or Crime in Stereo, I perked up and felt invested, but the music faded into the background. With Wrenn’s long career of supporting music and being on tour with bands, I would have thought that there would be far more stories about the dramas and landmarks of the Boston hardcore scene. I wanted to hear those stories. Surely it would be appropriate to have a journalistic approach and share some fun anecdotes about Wrenn’s personal involvement with bands. Why did bands explode? What went wrong with releases? I mean, sure, there’s the time Terror got scooped up, but I feel like there are other layers of chaos that could’ve been addressed.

All in all, it was an enjoyable experience, but I would have preferred to spend more time in the pit than in the stands.

Happy reading!

Freedom Teaching by Matthew Kincaid

  Matthew Kincaid asks teachers a powerful question: “Do we believe that our students deserve to be in anti-racist environments 10% of the time? 20%? 50%? What percentage of racist policy is it okay for a student of colour to have to navigate on a daily basis?”

He follows it up with an even more powerful question: “What percentage of racist / oppressive policies are we comfortable with students existing in on a daily basis? Is the answer still truly zero?”

I find these two question sets highly provocative. For the first set, Kincaid points to the obvious answer: “in an ideal world, [it] would be 0%” while recognizing that “that is not the case.” The second question points to a fundamental disconnect between our ideals and practicality. While our students deserve to be in anti-racist environments 100%, nonetheless there’s a level teachers are able to accept for the sake of the system; it’s not complacency, necessarily, but there are a number of engrained practices that go unchallenged for a number of reasons.

This is where Matthew Kincaid’s Freedom Teaching comes in. In the book, Kincaid elucidates a liberatory philosophy that strives to make the educational world a more equitable place. I found the book to be thoughtful and empowering and Kincaid addresses a number of concerns that I am still grappling with, offering a framework within which to work. The book offers a balance between offering principles of freedom teaching while recognizing that the individual context of particular schools will have an impact on how the principles are executed.

Kincaid offers the following five tenets of freedom teaching and the book explores how to achieve these different ambitions:

1. Maintain hope that is radical.

2. It isn’t rigorous if it isn’t relevant.

3. Free minds, free kids.

4. Trouble doesn’t teach.

5. Cultivate a classroom that values cultural wealth.

I think that #1 can be a particular challenge, given the current context in which we exist. The government is underfunding public schools out of existence. Artificial Intelligence systems are eroding our relationship to truth and imposing a hegemonic perspective of so-called reality. Politicians are engaging in corruption with impunity. Social media is sapping the uniqueness of kids. There is a lot to find troubling, so having the first tenant be to maintain hope is both a necessary precondition and the kind of thing that can only be achieved through a leap of faith.

The second tenet, “It isn’t rigorous if it isn’t relevant” hits like a suckerpunch to the gut. I think about all of the so-called rigour I was subjected to as a student, and while I don’t regret it, I do wonder why reading six books instead of four and writing three essays instead of two is seen as “rigour.” The deeper point that Kincaid is making here, to me, is that being “rigorous” (i.e. challenging) for the sake of adding challenge is not the same as being rigorous by delving deeply into content that is truly meaningful to students. Kincaid adds to the discussion with more detail. He sees rigour and investment as working hand in hand: “Students are less likely to engage in rigorous tasks that they are not invested in, and tasks that are rigorous, that don’t promote investment, probably aren’t meaningful tasks.” As much as I hate having to justify the value of English as a discipline, it is worth considering how to get students invested in developing their writing skills. Whether that’s the content or the end-goal, there needs to be some reason for students to get invested. 

In terms of #3 and #4, I think we are in a particularly reactionary climate wherein the response to children misbehaving is to resort to more policing. By freeing students’ minds to explore and question, we enable their ongoing success in navigating and challenging societal structures. All of this also leads towards cultivating a classroom that values cultural wealth, where a teacher’s role is not to impose a particular view of how to best navigate our lives, but instead to co-create with the communities in which we operate. A noble goal, indeed.

Ultimately, these tenets have the goal to “create educational environments that liberate students and in turn enhance their ability to make choices that give them control over critical elements in their lives.” I think it would be uncontroversial to accept this as a worthwhile pursuit. If our education isn’t assisting students towards being agents of change in their own lives, what is our purpose, exactly?

As I mentioned, Kincaid makes the case that “freedom teaching requires investment in both theory and practice.” Indeed, it is “about finding the intersection between theory and practice.” The author gives a caution for the book: “Using this text to provide a theoretical framework without engaging in the practice of employing the techniques likely won’t yield the results you want. Engaging solely in the practices without internalizing the theory also will yield incomplete results.” I think this is one that gets challenging for people in the teaching world. We are all so busy, so exhausted. We want to be told “do this” and we’ll do it and fix the world. But, the work is complex and requires examining how our particular practices need to be thoughtfully adjusted in response to the context. As Kincaid points out, “One of the reasons why anti-racism initiatives in schools fail to gain continued momentum is because people find themselves so deep in the theory that they don’t know how to apply it in a practical setting. On the other hand, there are people who [adopt a] three-step guide on how to achieve equity without fully understanding the deep and nuanced theory that provides the foundation for those practices.” I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle, but if I truly reflect, I’m more on the theoretical side and still need practice actually acting.

Here’s the other major piece that I think Kincaid has identified in a particularly poignant way. One of the things I’ve seen is people enacting performative change and taking credit for how much they’ve made a difference—but maybe unjustly so. Kincaid writes that in his work with schools, “one of the most difficult barriers to dismantle is the barrier of performative change.” He makes the case that a school might eliminate a racist policy without replacing it with an anti-racist one. He gives a great example here where “a teacher changes the names on their word problems to be culturally affirming, but doesn’t shift their pedagogical approach in the classroom.” I’ve witnessed this kind of thing first hand. As we work to select books that are culturally affirming (i.e. change the content), we make no adjustments to what we do with those texts: we still impose, generally, a prescriptive structure of how to write, what to write, what to write about—all under the pretense of being “academic” and “objective” without valuing individual student voice. Changing the content without changing the form still serves to replicate the structures that are leading to undeserving students. Kincaid elaborates that “a school district undergoes anti-racism training, but does little to shift the policies that incubate racism.” When this happens, the change is superficial—”the very changes that we are championing can actually just reaffirm the status quo.” I couldn’t begin to list the number of so-called changes that have had this effect. The solution, Kincaid writes, is that “if we are going to invest the time, energy, and resources to freedom teach, we have to be committed to doing it all the way. If we are going to be committed to doing it all the way, we first have to train ourselves to believe in, and hope radically for, change.”

In trying to accomplish a truly revolutionary approach to education, there are a number of limiting beliefs that Kincaid addresses. One thing that I hear from teachers—and society at large—is that students need to be ready for “the real world” (by which, in my view, always seems to mean ‘the workforce’). In this conception of education, the purpose remains to reinforce the structures of capitalism. (Why is it that companies don’t pay to train their own employees, again? Why is it that public funds are being used to train employees for private companies? I digress.) Kincaid reinforces my view about the foolishness of the ‘real world’ as a standard for our practices through a slightly different angle: “I have witnessed the justification of several unjust systems because ‘students have to get ready for the real world.’ What this basically amounts to is exposing young people to traumatic experiences in the name of preparing them to navigate the brokenness in our society.” I think about things like holding students to strict deadlines and then deducting 50% of their mark, for example, if they hand something in a day late. I think about things like forcing students to answer questions in front of the class without time to prepare because ‘that’s how the real world works.’ Underlying these practices is the idea that somehow school is not “the real world,” despite students spending most of their time in our buildings. Schools are “real world” and when we defer to some monolithic conception of the real world in the great beyond after graduation, it automatically renders schools second-class to whatever idea we have of post-school. The other objection is one Kincaid takes up: “Freedom teaching instead views the world as malleable and teaches students that they have a say in the real world that they will both shape and inherit.” Teachers and students shape the world, so we have the freedom to shape the world we want while the students are in school to prepare them for the world they’ll want to create. In Kincaid’s words, “Freedom teaching is about creating schools that reflect the society that we want our students to live in rather than reflecting the society that currently exists. For this reason, this book will speak directly about replacing oppressive systems with liberatory ones and expanding the definition of what we consider to be success to include a culturally sustaining education for all children.” I think this, too, is spot on to how I want to approach teaching as I move forward in my career.

The challenges to Kincaid’s philosophy come in the form of limiting beliefs. He enumerates a range of perspectives that shy away from radical hope and instead instill a pessimism towards liberatory practice:

“This isn’t the real world. We need to prepare students for the real world. Culturally responsive teaching practices aren’t going to raise my test scores. Restorative approaches let students off the hook when they misbehave. All of this work that I am doing to make change isn’t going to amount to anything. I do not have enough power. If only I were the principal or a district administrator. I want to engage parents, but I know what is best for their children.

I think about my other recent read, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. In that book, he talks about how youth movements and minor protests are never taken seriously at the time of their enactment, but then lead to the kind of long-term change they seek and we revise our historical memory. I think the same is true here; we could counter these limiting beliefs by taking small actions and moving forward incrementally, even when it seems like it isn’t making a difference.

There’s been discussion in the last few years around the relative merits of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workforce. Under it, there’s an implicit racist assumption that Black people just aren’t as good as white people at being, say, a pilot (cf. I think an old Charlie Kirk clip, I think?). There’s the suggestion that DEI leads to a lowering of standards, but as Kincaid points out, “The absolute worst thing we can do in the name of anti-racism is to stop challenging our students.” Kincaid recognizes that the United States are far from being a meritocracy, but still points to the ongoing value of hard work, focus, and determination—esepcially for people of colour who want to have “a full array of choices for what they do with their lives.” This is why rigour is still encouraged (as long as it’s relevant). Kincaid notes that “we push our students to engage in rigorous tasks because we believe that they can do them. Consistently lowering rigour just reinforces external messages of inferiority.” Returning to a previous point, though, rigour without purpose—“rigour for rigour’s sake”—”can have the same detrimental effect.” He notes that having students repeatedly do hard things over and over without allowing them to experience success is a recipe for disaster. 

Implicit throughout Freedom Teaching is an asset-based mindset towards students. On the topic of whether students can do hard things (i.e. persevere throughout rigorous tasks), Kincaid notes that

“Our kids do hard things all the time. For some of them, just getting to school on a daily basis is hard. Caring for your younger siblings while your parents work is hard. Navigating the devastating effects of institutional oppression is hard. I don’t know if I ever taught a kid who couldn’t do hard things. In fact, many of my students had done more hard things by the time they were 13 sitting at one of my desks than I did in my entire lifetime.”

I think that’s a really positive note to consider. We are always pushing students for success; it would just be great to have a broader conception of what counts as success as we try to help everyone rise to their potential.

Overall, Freedom Teaching is a great outline of some principles that can help us to guide our teaching practice towards something more liberatory. I hope that we’re at the stage where we can incorporate this work and make significant change. I’d like to guarantee that we’re all that stage, but I know there’s still more work to be done. But we’ll do it. We’ll make it.

Stay optimistic and happy reading!

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

When reading nonfiction, I don’t necessarily have an expectation of stylistic flair. I think of data, of facts, of figures. I think of research that makes the case for how things are and how things need to be done differently. Every once in a while, though, I’m astounded by the power of words as people tell real stories about the world. Such is the case for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad.

Born in Cairo, El Akkad then grew up in Qatar before moving to Canada. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is an account of his personal experiences, his work as a journalist and author, and it all runs parallel to his outrage about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I love the balance of the personal and broad focus of the book. Discussing his own history, his concerns for his daughter, and his own personally quandaries with navigating the literary institution, is beautifully rendered. The context for the book, the destruction of Palestine, is rendered with unflinching courage.

Incidentally, there was a quote from the book that really resonated with me. He discussed the images of the starved and dead that are readily available for Palestinians. He gives an account for the images in grim detail and offers a justification for forcing people to look: when we close our eyes, it flexes the muscle to close our eyes and ignore what is happening; when we keep our eyes open, that flexes another muscle—the one that compels us towards action. Apologies that I don’t have the exact quotation (I forgot to take notes, I was so engrossed and read the book in about two sittings). That quotation, if nothing else, is something I will continue forward with in my life. I want to be the kind of person that flexes the muscles that keep my eyes open. That takes action in small ways until it becomes reflex.

I appreciate the candor of Omar El Akkad’s feelings of hopelessness. I think it’s a pervasive feeling right now. We keep advocating, and progress, at the best of times, does not seem to be forthcoming—and, at the worst of times, we seem to be backsliding. El Akkad wrestles with the question: why bother writing? What’s the point. Nothing matters. El Akkad points out, though, how everything seems futile until we can look back and see that it made a difference. Sit-ins during the American Civil Rights movement weren’t seen as being useful in the moment, but long after the fact we look back as though they were an integral stage in the movement. So, the small things we do now are something. I hope.

The book hits home in particular because of my interest in literature. El Akkad is an author, of course, and there are several parts of the book that address his writing career. For instance, he gives an account of his book American War (written before Trump’s first election, published after) being optioned for a film and then being dropped because the actual political landscape shifted. El Akkad also talks about the way the literary institution routinely ignores the plight of Palestine. One example that caught my attention is the brief reference to Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, which is a novelization of the true story of a gang rape and murder of a young Arab girl by Israeli soldiers. Shibli won for the Literaturpreis award but the organizers chose to “postpone” the award ceremony, citing it as a “joint decision” with the author in response to the “war between Israel and Hamas” (El Akkad points out that it wasn’t and that the “postponement” turned into a cancellation). The literary world saw the book and flinched. Closer to home, El Akkad talks about the protest at the Giller Prize dinner where protestors interrupted because of Scotiabank’s stake in Israeli arms manufacturing. El Akkad talks about the invite to attend the dinner; he talks about not going at the last minute; he talks about the lack of reaction, the lack of voices added to the protest, and he wonders how he would have participated. I appreciate how El Akkad is so honest about the challenges of the writing world—everyone is barely scraping by, and the allure of a major award can be truly life changing, but at what cost?

He emphasizes that in order to protest the ongoing genocide, there are several options. One that seems to gain favour is ‘negative’ participation. That is, withdrawing from the game entirely. This means things like arts institutions refusing to accept money from people invested in the Israeli war machine. Corporations and politicians want their names on awards to give themselves legitimacy and a representative response is to just not let them be involved. It seems inconsequential, but, as El Akkad points out again and again—all these minor youth movements seemed inconsequential until their results were achieved.

The way El Akkad uses language is so powerful; I really ought to have taken notes. I can’t speak highly enough of the prose. What made the book even more engaging for me are the familiar historical and cultural touchstones peppered throughout the book. At the personal level, El Akkad talks about being a student at Queen’s, my alma mater, and living in Kingston. He talks about Guantánamo Bay, which was a watershed moment in my political awakening. As an extension, he draws on the story of Omar Khadr, whom I was very lucky to learn about through my grade 12 politics teacher. Reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This provided additional context to my formative years and the way anti-Arab and Islamophobic perceptions infiltrated the Canadian mainstream—incidentally, El Akkad brings together issues intersectionality, discussing the plight of Canada’s Indigenous people as a parallel to the Palestinian experience.

The central conceit of the book is that Western liberalism is ineffectual in standing up to injustice because the privileged will not forgo their own self-interest. No one wants to be vulnerable. No one wants to be accountable. No one wants to risk their own position. While horrible things are happening, Western liberals pay lip service to the idea with sympathetic nods but will fail to take a stand. It’s only when it’s too late to do anything that we will revere those who protested. El Akkad writes that “While the terrible thing is happening—while the land is still being stolen and the natives still being killed—any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.” The political cache to be gained by looking back and decrying that which we did nothing to prevent is cynical and embarrassing. Denouncing events like the genocide in Gaza become a matter of expedience, we “say the right thing” long after we have any chance to do anything about it.

In a weird way, I find this book inspiring. It calls me out and I think it’s important to acknowledge how little I’m really doing to make an impact on world issues. I also don’t put my own livelihood on the line to take a stand. (There’s a silencing effect, even in education.) It does inspire me to do better and continue to build community around people who will not wait until Palestine has been totally erased from the map and then say, “Yes, that was too bad. I always knew that was bad.”

I really recommend this one. My review doesn’t do it justice and for that I apologize.

Happy reading and resisting.

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!

Multiple Choice Alejandro Zambra

  I’m not quite sure what to make of Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice. It’s a really unique project that turns a standardized test into an authentic literary enterprise. Zambra explores the possibility of a standard set of A-B-C-D-E options turning into something more profound and interesting, blending poetry, autobiography (maybe), and fiction.

The book is divided into five sections. The first requires readers to pick the term that doesn’t match the heading or the other terms. The second is about putting sentences into their correct sequence. The third is about completing the sentences (fill-in-the-blanks), while the fourth requires readers to eliminate a sentence or sentences within a short story. The final section is reading comprehension and offers some more substantial (though still only roughly 5 page) stories. 

But Zambra is tricky. While there might be a bubblesheet to fill in at the back of the book, there is no answer key, nor could there be. The questions put readers into challenging positions and the stakes feel even bigger than actual standardized test questions. Consider, for example, the excluded term question for “Teach.” Readers are expected to pick one of the following that does not fit: A) preach, B) control, C) educate, D) initiate, E) screech. Now, I’d like to think that as a teacher I don’t “screech” but if I take that out it leaves “preach” and “control” still in the mix; there’s no good option. Similarly, some of the options double-up. Like for “Promise” the options read from A-E as complete / silence / promise / complete silence. Conversely, Zambra includes questions where all of the options seem good. For instance, the word “Letter” has the options for A) uppercase, B) lowercase, C) cursive, D) dead, and E) silent. Likewise, “Cut” allows for erase / annul / blot / expunge / wound. All of them are viable choices, and so it forces you to reflect on what your personal biases are. What seems most poetic to you?

Zambra is able to make use of structures to allow for multiple options, a choose-your-own-perspective with carefully crafted options. For instance, in one of the fill-in-the-blank questions, he provides the statement, “And if they have any ________ left, that’s what _____________ for.” The options offer very different possibilities for engaged readers. The options range for innocuous and innocent to politically charged to deeply depressing. Here’s what the options say if filled in:

And if they have any energy left, that’s what sports are for.

And if they have any hope left, that’s what reality is for.

And if they have any illusions left, that’s what the void is for.

And if they have any dissent left, that’s what the cops are for.

And if they have any neurons left, that’s what crack cocaine is for.

The cynicism and nihilistic mindset allows readers to choose their fate, but almost none of them are good ones. Each adds dimension in an interesting way.

When asked to sequence statements into a cohesive narrative, there are similar disruptions to our thinking. Some resequencing questions are standard and legitimate, but they all seem just a little bit off from what you might want to conclusively decide. For instance, in the piece “The second” you’re given the following sequence:

1. You try to remember your first Communion.

2. You try to remember your first masturbation.

3. You try to remember the first time you had sex.

4. You try to remember the first death in your life.

5. And the second.

The answers put you in a position where you have to “try” to remember something “and the second.” It feels a little bit off because if you’re remembering the second, then surely you’d remember the first, no? It also places you in a position that implies that you have to forget the others. For your reference, and to decide what selective forgetting you’ll engage in today, the available answers are as follows:

1. 1-5-2-3-4

2. 1-2-5-3-4

3. 1-2-3-5-4

4. 4-5-1-2-3

5. 4-3-2-1-5

The sequencing questions really help to emphasize how the order of presentation can impact our perception of a narrative. Several of the pieces are essentially flash fictions, but flash fictions that offer multiple paths at once. For example, there’s a piece called “Two hundred twenty-three.” It reads as follows:

1. You remember the freckles on her breasts, on her legs, on her belly, on her ass. The exact number: two hundred twenty-three. One thousand two hundred and seven days ago there were two hundred twenty-three.

2. You reread the messages she used to send you: They are beautiful, funny. Long paragraphs, vivid, complex sentences. Warm words. She writes better than you do.

3. You remember the time you drove five hours just to see her for ten minutes. It wasn’t ten minutes, it was the whole afternoon, but you like to think it was only ten minutes.

4. You remember the waves, the rocks. Her sandals, a wound on her foot. You remember your eyes daring from her thighs to her eyelashes.

5. You never got used to being with her. You never got used to being without her. You remember when she said, in a whisper, as if to herself: Everything is OK.

Option D is to go 2-3-4-5-1. Reading it in that mode seems to create a greater sense of loss, an intimation of time passing, and the degeneration of a relationship. Reading it start to finish (option E) feels, in some ways, like a more complete story—although I feel like section 2 should be closer to the end. It’s difficult to make a choice. 

In other sections, Zambra maintains a playfulness that makes this poetry test impossible to grade. In a piece called “A kick in the balls”, the statements are presented as follows:

1. You think of all the people, living or dead, near or far, men or women, from your country or abroad, who have reason to kick you in the balls.

2. You wonder if you deserve a kick in the balls.

3. You wonder if you deserve to be hated. You wonder if anyone really hates you.

4. You wonder if you hate anyone. You wonder if you hate the people who hate you.

5. Insomnia wounds and accompanies you.

Each of the answers, though, is mutually exclusive. You either get to choose 1-1-1-1-1 or 2-2-2-2-2 or 3-3-3-3-3 or 4-4-4-4-4 or 5-5-5-5-5. Despite there seeing to be a connection between the items, you’re only able to put yourself into a repetitive rumination. In “Rhyme”, the answers present uneven outcomes. The options are A) 5-1-2-3-4, B) 5-4-3-2-1, C) 1-2-3-4-5, D) 1-5-2-3-4, or E) 1-2-3-4. That’s a tricky one because it prevents you from selecting the statement that “you are not crazy”. If you’d like the statements for rhyme to try to the poem at home, here they are:

1. You search for words that rhyme with your first name.

2. You search for words that rhyme with your last name.

3. Your first and last names do not rhyme, but you search for words that rhyme with both your first and last names.

4. You search for words that don’t rhyme with either your first name or your last name, or with anything else.

5. You are not crazy.

Additionally, at least one poem in the sequencing section gives the same sequence for every option—and yet you might feel the resistance popping up in you that you want to revise, you want to create an option that isn’t there. The book is tricky in how it invites your contribution and then, when it doesn’t, you realize you’ve been trained the principles of rebellion: find the path you want, even if it isn’t there. In the poem “Scars,” the only option you’re provided is to read it sequentially, which goes like this:

1. You think about how the shortest distance between two points is the length of a scar.

2. You think: the introduction is the father, the climax is the son, and the resolution is the holy spirit.

3. You read books that are much stranger than the books you would write if you wrote.

4. You think, as if it were a discovery, that the last point in the line of time is the present.

5. You try to go from the general to the specific, even if the general is General Pinochet.

6. You try to go from the abstract to the concrete.

7. The abstract is the pain of others.

8. The concrete is the pain of others colliding with your body until you are completely invaded.

9. The concrete is something that can only grow.

10. Something like a tumor, or the opposite of a tumor: a child.

11. In your case, it’s a tumor.

The fatalism of the piece matches the fatalism of the options. You can only go so far, and yet…

At times, Zambra plays off this interactivity in a meta way. In one of the sections where you have select one for deletion, there’s a discussion of being a reader, a writer, a censor, all at once. Again, it’s a tricky one because the option is to delete none of the options. Every option after that refers to the previous option, meaning that no matter what you pick, you don’t get the power to delete any of these items:

1. I didn’t want to talk about you, but it’s inevitable.

2. I’m talking about you right now. And you’re reading this, and you know it’s about you.

3. Now I am words that you read and wish did not exist.

4. I hate you. 

5. You would like to have the power of a censor.

6. So no one else would ever read these words.

7. I hate you.

8. You ruined my life.

9. Now I am words you cannot erase.

There’s another section that is about the relationship between writing and truth and whether we have the power to remove portions of the narrative. It’s a complex and playful interplay of the details.

In one of the short stories in the reading comprehension section, there is a whole section about Chilean students learning to cheat that feels relevant. Zambra writes, “Even if we did nothing but study, we knew there would always be two or three impossible questions. We didn’t complain. We got the message: Cheating was just part of the deal” (66). What is really compelling here is a critique (or reflection, at least) of the education system that demands compliance with correct answers. The reflection continues, though, into a meditation on individualism: “I think that, thanks to our cheating, we were able to let go of some of our individualism and become a community. It’s sad to put it this way, but cheating gave us a sense of solidarity. Every once in a while we suffered from guilt, from the feeling that we were frauds—especially when we looked ahead to the future—but in the end our indolence and defiance prevailed” (66). I think this book could really help us to connect to those feelings of individualism and community. On the one hand, we are all creating individual answers (there’s no answer key, so no standard) but at the same time we are in dialogue with an extant discourse over which we have no control. 

Now that we have reached the end of the review, what would be the best way to summarize this text?

1. Which text? The review or the book?

2. Multiple Choice is a poetic experience that demands

3. Readers to engage with writers.

4. Writers to plan multiple avenues at once.

5. Happy reading for the audience of this review.