Readers of law journal articles wouldn’t be out of line for thinking that we legal scholars take ourselves too seriously and write too obtusely. We know it’s a problem and we wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to pick up a law review again. Maybe it’s the jargon or our fixation on minutiae. Thankfully, every now and then someone in the legal academy has the foresight and skill to simply, powerfully, and hilariously explain and critique an industry that has long had it coming. This time, the object of scorn is the financial technology industry, or “fintech” for short. Hilary Allen’s FinTech Dystopia: A Summer Beach Read About Silicon Valley Ruining Things is the best kind of polemic, because it is informative, fun to read, and free. This book and its companion law review article seek to break through all the hype, smoke, and mirrors around fintech by breaking each tool, practice, or narrative into their component parts.
In doing so, Allen shows that the emperor has no clothes. Over nine chapters, she takes on a litany of financial solutions in search of problems—payday loan apps, cryptocurrency, and all the related claims of “democratizing finance” and “banking the unbanked.” Her goal is to “empower you to ask questions,” and she delivers. Come for clear explanations of how blockchains work, stay for the sardonic pop culture references.
Because FinTech Dystopia was released in serial form every week starting in July 2025 (it really was a beach read!), each chapter can be read independently. Each edition develops the argument that if we judge fintech not by profitability but by how well it delivers on its core promises of capital formation, risk management, transaction processing, and channeling monetary policy, it’s easy to see the many ways in which it fails to deliver. Promises made, promises broken, rinse, and repeat. After the 2008 financial collapse, lawmakers failed to mitigate venture capital’s appetite for short-term, explosive growth at all costs, and now it’s everyone’s problem (again). This time, it’s all wrapped up in techno-wizardry and whatever scintilla of Silicon Valley’s leftover goodwill from the 90’s that it hasn’t yet thrown into the woodchipper.
I like this book (lots) for how directly it rebuts fintech boosters’ most common claims. For example, Chapter 2 tackles the canard that fintech is going to “democratize finance.” This hype ignores the fact that many fintech users “already have access to more traditional financial services: by switching, they often forfeit consumer protections without realizing it.” For many, “democratizing” is more accurately described as “predatory inclusion” or “democratizing exploitation.” Allen writes that “[i]f fintech’s version of financial inclusion is helping people to wager money they can’t afford to lose, and borrow money they can’t afford to pay back, then that’s a pretty grim vision for the future.”
Chapter 2 also contains one of the clearest explanations I have seen for how cryptocurrencies, retail trading tech, and payday loan apps have stacked the deck against retail investors. It dissects popular promises about bitcoin by explaining that it is not intrinsically valuable and that it relies upon finding a “greater fool” to offload your overvalued asset in order to make money. Allen reminds the reader that in an alternative universe fintech could serve “the socially useful purpose of raising capital for productive activities, where there’s a possibility of a win-win outcome for both the investor and the business using the investor’s capital.” But instead of “democratizing finance,” fintech now largely exists to let “sophisticated trading firms shoot fish in a barrel.”
Chapter 3 also guts the argument that fintech will help “bank the unbanked.” It recognizes that while ensuring everyone has access to banking is a challenging problem, fintech isn’t the answer. It is exploitative by design and endangers our existing financial infrastructure. Allen argues that “stablecoins” are not really used for payments; they are mainly for speculative trading. “They aren’t as stable as they claim to be, and the stability they do have arises from free-riding on the US banking system and monetary policy….if stablecoins are able to keep gaining market share, these parasites might eventually endanger their hosts.” On top of that, stablecoins are “typically unavailable to those without bank accounts…and so we come to the question that I keep screaming about stablecoins (in my head, and occasionally on social media), WHY ARE WE EVEN DOING THIS???”
For folks like me who don’t have as much of a background in finance and banking, I found Allen’s explainers and occasional “public service announcements” very helpful. (“[PSA]: many stablecoin users lack a contractual right to force the issuer to redeem their stablecoins for cash.”). Once you learn that “neobanks” aren’t eligible for deposit insurance, it becomes much easier to see how they are not as safe as they are made out to be. A huge chunk of FinTech Dystopia is dedicated to demonstrating how organizations frequently struggle to properly track, protect, and dispense people’s money. You had one job!
FinTech Dystopia deflates hype mainly by explaining how these systems actually work. Blockchain gets the full strip down treatment, demonstrating how it is “poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit.” The chapter on generative AI explores why it’s unwise to build an entire financial system on resource-hogging probabilistic tools that replicate biases at scale and offer vibes in place of precision. The last few chapters of the book are on the Silicon Valley dogmas and narratives that cannot fail, they can only be failed. (Think “innovation” and “effective altruism.”) Here’s a word of advice: If you happen to talk to Professor Allen at an event, I do not recommend suggesting to her that complex social problems can be easily solved with an app.
The book also proposes alternative infrastructural approaches like postal banking and preserving the ability to pay cash to serve people’s financial and banking needs. It argues for revitalizing competition law, consumer protection rules, and data privacy frameworks to better hold companies accountable. And given the fundamental pathologies of cryptocurrency, it cautions legislators against entrenching and justifying these tools by regulating them instead of prohibiting it outright. FinTech Dystopia ends much more optimistically about the future than you might think, given the bleak picture it paints throughout the book of where we are now. To make things better, we must start with the battle for hearts and minds. We have the way, we just need the will.
This past spring, I assigned FinTech Dystopia in my Digital Civil Liberties seminar, and I invited Professor Allen to join us on the day we discussed her book. During our conversation, I asked her why she chose to be so sharp with her criticism of the fintech industry and her answer was simple and direct: they deserve every word of it.
This book makes clear how Silicon Valley has exploited our institutions and played us for fools. The complexity of finance and banking helps shield the industry from public criticism. It’s easy to get mesmerized by lofty promises about blockchains and AI. But this book shows us that with insight, conviction, and humor, we can break the spell.
