🌿 (buffy)² 🌿 reviewed Rinsed by Geoff White
Sensational Stories with a Flawed Perspective
2 stars
Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto: How the Tech Industry Washes Money for the World's Deadliest Crooks by Geoff White is a compelling but ultimately frustrating read. The book sets out to explore how technological innovations—like cryptocurrency, video games, and alternative routing protocols (such as Tor)—have provided new systems for laundering money. White argues that these innovations threaten to overwhelm authorities, destabilise economies, and disrupt societies (if only).
The stories White tells are undeniably gripping. The book begins with drug cartels, delves into sex trafficking and exploitation, and then moves on to nation-state hacking. However, while the narrative is sensational and the topics undeniably important, it often feels like White loses sight of the bigger picture. His focus on technology as the root of modern-day laundering and exploitation oversimplifies these deeply entrenched issues.
Yes, technology has allowed these problems to scale, but that's because we’ve never truly addressed the root causes: …
Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto: How the Tech Industry Washes Money for the World's Deadliest Crooks by Geoff White is a compelling but ultimately frustrating read. The book sets out to explore how technological innovations—like cryptocurrency, video games, and alternative routing protocols (such as Tor)—have provided new systems for laundering money. White argues that these innovations threaten to overwhelm authorities, destabilise economies, and disrupt societies (if only).
The stories White tells are undeniably gripping. The book begins with drug cartels, delves into sex trafficking and exploitation, and then moves on to nation-state hacking. However, while the narrative is sensational and the topics undeniably important, it often feels like White loses sight of the bigger picture. His focus on technology as the root of modern-day laundering and exploitation oversimplifies these deeply entrenched issues.
Yes, technology has allowed these problems to scale, but that's because we’ve never truly addressed the root causes: the criminalisation of drugs, the lack of systemic solutions to prevent human trafficking, and the broader socio-political structures that enable exploitation. White’s narrow lens on technology as the primary culprit ignores this context, and his arguments can feel reductive, especially to readers familiar with topics like information security, decriminalisation and human trafficking.
White’s perspective often comes across as overly deferential to government narratives, (bordering on bootlicking). His portrayal of privacy feels especially hollow—while he does make occasional nods to its importance, these moments are overshadowed by sensationalist claims like “North Korea has weapons of mass destruction” or “12-year-olds being sex trafficked on the dark web.” These juxtapositions feel like attempts to placate privacy-conscious readers, but instead, they dilute his credibility and make it hard to take his arguments seriously.
While Rinsed aims to shed light on the intersection of technology and criminality, it ultimately sensationalises its subject matter to a degree that risks misinforming readers. Someone unfamiliar with technology, decriminalisation, human trafficking, or privacy might walk away with the wrong idea, conflating the tools with the underlying systemic problems.
To White’s credit, the book is full of compelling stories, but the lack of nuance and critical engagement with the root causes of these issues prevents it from being the insightful exploration it could have been.
