Tokens of Modernity

Essay: “Tokens of Our Time: The Network of Frauds”

Splendid piece of detection, Poirot, I must say. Splendid, splendid. But you know I couldn’t possibuly have carried out that moulage test. I have not wax.
– Col. Johnny Race

You astonish me, Mon Col. You absolutely astonish me!
– Hercule Poirot

Was thinking of Moliere: the great ambition of women is to inspire love
– Hercule Poirot

Agatha Christie once wrote, “Very few of us are what we seem.” It is a maxim that might well serve as the epitaph for our era, where the illusion of substance has become the very foundation of our collective reality. Consider the phenomenon of Elizabeth Holmes and her meteoric rise to the zenith of Silicon Valley’s pantheon, a tale of grand deception not so much remarkable for its perpetrator but for the complicity of the entire network that allowed it to flourish. Holmes, with her wide, unblinking gaze and black turtlenecks, was not the fraud; she was merely the cipher that exposed the fraudulence of modernity itself.

Her company, Theranos—yes, that’s the name—promised a revolution in diagnostics: micro-labs that could run hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood. It was a narrative so beguiling that it lured not just investors but titans. Former Secretaries of State. Decorated generals. Titans of finance and diplomacy who had once navigated Cold War geopolitics were now seduced by the aura of disruption emanating from Palo Alto. Even The Economist, whose judgment we are supposed to revere, lavished Theranos with glowing endorsements. That they all believed her is not an indictment of Holmes but an indictment of the system they represent.

What does this reveal? Not that Elizabeth Holmes was uniquely audacious—plenty have faked it until they made it, and some of those fakers have transformed the world. No, it reveals the emptiness of the tokens upon which society runs. Holmes succeeded not by innovating but by mastering the symbols of innovation: a Steve Jobs aesthetic, the cadence of TED Talks, the promise of disruption. Her success was measured not in substance but in the optics of progress.

We live in a world of tokens. Titles, credentials, buzzwords, and brand affiliations dominate the modern imagination, hollow symbols masquerading as reality. A Stanford dropout becomes a credential in itself—a narrative of genius unshackled by the stodgy rituals of academia. A black turtleneck becomes a symbol of vision. Big eyes that refuse to blink become a token of unwavering focus. Holmes played the game to perfection, but the game was already rigged. She did not create the system; she merely exploited it.

And society, this network of networks, colluded. Investors, desperate for the next unicorn, ignored the glaring impossibilities of her technology. Media outlets, hungry for a compelling narrative, elevated her to mythic status. Boards of directors stacked with luminaries lent her gravitas without demanding accountability. Even regulators hesitated, paralyzed by the fear of stifling what might have been a once-in-a-century breakthrough. Holmes’s success was not an anomaly; it was a case study in the fragility of the entire ecosystem.

This is not to excuse her. Elizabeth Holmes knowingly perpetuated a fraud that endangered lives and undermined trust in healthcare. But her story is not about her. It is about us. The tokens upon which we build our lives are revealed, time and again, to be fragile constructs. We worship disruption, but it is often little more than a euphemism for chaos. We revere credentials, but they are often little more than an imprimatur for mediocrity cloaked in authority. We elevate individuals to godlike status, forgetting that our adulation often blinds us to their humanity—and their fallibility.

In truth, the world Holmes navigated is the same world we inhabit daily. We transact in symbols. Degrees and job titles, wealth and fame, likes and retweets—these are the tokens we collect to validate our worth, to signal our belonging, to mask the existential emptiness that lurks beneath. Her story merely amplified the stakes, showing us what happens when these tokens become not just tools but ends in themselves.

So what are we to make of this? Perhaps the lesson is not to abandon the tokens altogether—they are, after all, the lingua franca of our collective reality—but to wield them with skepticism. To interrogate the symbols, to demand substance behind the optics, to resist the siren song of the spectacular. If we are to avoid the next Theranos, the next Holmes, we must learn to live with ambiguity, to value the iterative over the adversarial, and to reject the notion that innovation can be distilled into a pitch deck or a branding exercise.

Elizabeth Holmes is in prison now, but the system that created her remains intact. And as long as we continue to worship at the altar of tokens, we remain complicit. Christie’s dictum echoes through the ages: “Very few of us are what we seem.” The question is whether we will ever learn to see through the veil—or whether we will continue to be dazzled by the illusion.