Bodley Head in the Cloud

A book about the collision between the technology and finance worlds has gone to Bodley Head following a five-way auction.

Cloudmoney is by 36-year-old financial anthropologist Brett Scott and explores "how we’re blindly living through a moment of seismic change, with the tech and finance worlds colliding as high finance is being automated around us," according to his agent Patrick Walsh, of the PEW Literary Agency.

Walsh managed a five-way British auction won by Stuart Williams, publishing director, at Bodley Head while "a big" American pre-empt was accepted from Dan Halpern, president and publisher, at Ecco Press on Sunday night. Meanwhile a four-way Dutch auction went to Atlas; and the Italian pre-empt has just been accepted from Il Saggiatore.

Walsh said, of the concept behind Cloudmoney: "The point is that we’re living through the financial equivalent of the Enclosure Acts, that moment in history when powerful landlords dispossessed their tenants by seizing and fencing off their land and using it for sheep. We are in some senses those sheep, with our freedoms becoming circumscribed by market forces that we don’t see. We’re also unaware that three seemingly separated financial arenas – the drive towards cashlessness, the growth of Fintech, and possibly blockchain technologies – are weaving a new ecosystem."

Scott is an author, journalist and financial hacker exploring the intersections between money systems, finance and digital technology. He is the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto Press, 2013), a guide to the world of high finance and the emergent forms of alternative finance, alternative currencies and economic activism that are challenging it.

After a degree in anthropology in South Africa and a Masters in international development at Cambridge, Scott worked in the world of financial derivatives in the midst of the financial crisis. Since then he has worked on financial reform campaigns and alternative finance projects with a wide range of groups including the Brixton Pound and a stint in Silicon Valley.

Cloudmoney is due to be published next September.