‘The Trolls of Wall Street: How the Outcasts and Insurgents Are Hacking the Markets’, by Nathaniel Popper
“Meme stock” mania peaked in 2021, when amateur traders, geeing each other up online, jacked up the price of stocks like GameStop and AMC. In his readable, propulsive history of WallStreetBets — the Reddit forum at the heart of the stock-trading craze — Nathaniel Popper argues that the effects of that mania are still being felt.
Popper recounts the history of the forum — founded in 2012 — in detail. His excellent access to chat logs and historical Reddit comments give an inside perspective on the long rise preceding the forum’s mainstream notoriety. Nonetheless, the book hits its straps in the chapters devoted to trading in GameStop shares, whose whiplash price moves dented hedge funds, kinked financial plumbing and made amateur trading front-page news.
The GameStop story isn’t easy to tell: it’s well trodden, and in parts highly technical. Popper’s deep sourcing and his light-touch explanation of market mechanisms help avoid those pitfalls. But the idiosyncrasies of WallStreetBets prove harder to navigate. Like many corners of the internet, “wsb” can be shocking and vulgar, a volley of crude, rapid-fire in-jokes. Popper addresses that, and describes the forum’s atmosphere well; but at times, the ink and paper of print feel like a pedestrian vessel for a story unfolding at a digital pace.
In one sense, though, The Trolls of Wall Street is immaculately timed. A recent resurgence in meme stocks — including GameStop — supports Popper’s argument that amateur influence on markets is not simply something that happened — it is happening, now. Retail investors may not be “hacking” the markets as they were three years ago, but they are still engaging with them. WallStreetBets today has more than 16mn members, millions more than three years ago. The “Trolls of Wall Street” are still around even if their power to shock has dwindled. Mischa Frankl-Duval
‘The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning’, by Samhita Mukhopadhyay
At 40 in a dream job as executive editor at Teen Vogue, Samhita Mukhopadhyay was living a glamorous life, posting pictures of herself on Instagram from New York Fashion Week. Secretly, she was exhausted, juggling a full-on job with caring responsibilities and grief. Then she decided to quit.
“Getting the job at [Teen Vogue owner] Condé”, she writes, “was like being inducted into a secret society of women who weren’t all outright feminists but had carved out an alternative path to female-based power by taking what real women cared about and building an empire around it.” But simply working for women, she discovered, did not make a workplace inherently “feminist, collaborative or nurturing”.
This book is a look at why Mukhopadhyay bought into “myths about what it means to be a woman who is ‘getting ahead’”, despite considering herself too old to have considered herself a “girlboss” and disdaining the “neoliberal” politics of Sheryl Sandberg’s “leaning in”.
The author, whose two previous books tackled dating and female activism in Donald Trump’s America, is pragmatic. Rather than throw her hands up in despair, she wants to show the reader a way to navigate the workplace that offers individual hope, while also pointing out ways to organise for collective change.
The idea is promising — not just to those setting out on their careers but also to those higher up the corporate ladder, trying to understand junior employees’ mindset or wanting to change the workplace. Mukhopadhyay looks at the “diversity industrial complex”, pointing out that “elevating a few women or people of colour to positions of power, or achieving that power as individual women, is not systemic change”. Yet she resists “binary thinking” that says such appointments are either failures or successes.
The book is thought-provoking and reassuring but ultimately fails to deliver detailed solutions — though solving workplace woes is rather a tall order. Emma Jacobs
‘The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in the Age of Intelligent Machines’, by Matt Beane
One utopian possibility of artificial intelligence is that it will take over boring or easy work. Rather than robbing us of meaningful jobs, technology will liberate humans to enjoy creative and challenging activities.
That’s the hope anyway. But as Matt Beane shows in The Skill Code, this creates a thornier problem. Monotonous, easily automated work is now often done by beginners. Mastering it is how we learn. Without the building blocks of novice work, how do we develop expertise?
An organisational ethnographer, Beane draws years of research in workplaces from Michelin-star restaurants to packing lines to operating theatres in this readable study of that puzzle. Developing skill, he concludes, relies on challenge, complexity and connection: gradually exposing ourselves to difficulty under the guidance of trusted, respected and experienced mentors. With vivid anecdotes, he shows how opportunities for this learning are dwindling. By making “novices more and more optional in experts’ work”, automation is gutting the next generation of skilled workers and hollowing out organisations.
The consequences of this, argues Beane, are grave: “if we’re not careful, our individual and collective adaptability could fade” just as rapid change means we need expertise more than ever. But this is not a grim book. The writer offers a range of examples of how people — he calls them “shadow learners” — are finding new ways to gain skills, even if it becomes more difficult. Helping everyone do that requires major investment, Beane says, but “deskilling, degrading work is always optional”. Bethan Staton
‘How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain’, by Peter S Goodman
Not long ago, a 416-page book covering shipping and logistics networks may have attracted little interest. But that was before the outbreak of what Peter S Goodman, the New York Times’ global economics correspondent, calls “the great supply chain disruption”.
In How the World Ran Out of Everything, Goodman follows the doom spiral that, in the midst of pandemic lockdowns, left supermarkets with empty shelves, stymied the production of electronic goods, and hit hospitals with shortages of face masks. “Covid-19 produced the shock,” he writes. But “it merely unmasked vulnerabilities that had been there all along”.
The book diagnoses these long-festering vulnerabilities, from the concentration of manufacturing in China to the rise of just-in-time production that skimped on storing back-up goods. Goodman paints an apocalyptic picture of supply chain collapse, which amounted to a collective existential crisis as consumers who had come to trust “the unseen forces that brought the UPS guy to their door” suddenly faced “the breakdown of globalisation”.
He does not hold back in naming those he sees as responsible: “greedy monopolists” who control production and transport of critical goods; “executives of publicly traded corporations and their hired enablers in the political sphere” who put shareholders before workers and economic security.
If these are the guilty, then Goodman’s book raises questions about how much will change. Its latter section points to efforts to bring manufacturing closer to and within the US. But “the same foundational perils [have] remained, awaiting an inevitable future disturbance”, Goodman warns.
Indeed, as the title shipped to bookshops globally, the fallout from attacks in the Red Sea is prompting warnings of another supply chain crisis. For those questioning the resilience of globalisation, the book will prove an informative but alarming read. Oliver Telling
‘The AI-Savvy Leader: Nine Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work’, by David De Cremer
Most of us have a lot to learn about how our jobs will be shaped by artificial intelligence. David De Cremer, dean of D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University, has a sobering message for those in charge: don’t forget that it is you, rather than the technology, that needs to lead.
The list of chapters could well be a structure for leading in any moment of great change. De Cremer discusses how leaders can offer a vision of how the new world of work might enhance what humans do best, and offers guidance on ensuring that employees feel included in the technology evolution, and supported as their roles change.
An expert on how organisations, and in particular leaders, can best adapt to the new technologies, De Cremer teaches by sharing stories from numerous interviews with senior managers, mostly conducted for business school case studies. They include those who mistakenly let “tech drive the tech”, allowing the IT department to manage a process that they should be leading themselves, as well as examples of business leaders who have managed a transition to AI well by remembering that their core strength is leadership skill rather than knowing everything about the tech.
Readers are encouraged to focus on the chapters where they feel their leadership in these times of AI adoption has been lacking, rather than trying to plough through all 206 pages in one sitting. However, this is not a long book and the concepts can be easily digested reading cover to cover. Jonathan Moules
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