Matthew Tanous is a professional software developer with an autodidactic interest in economics, history, philosophy, and science. He is a main contributor for the blog Disinthrallment.
As more people get censored or removed from the platform, more prominent voices seek out alternatives that are in the more early stages and don’t censor as heavily. Fragmentation starts to make the service less useful and interesting rather than being a source of affirmation and good feelings.
With a sound money, none of these distortions would have been possible: the limitations of the currency itself would have forced an unwinding of excessive risk far before it could become a clash between major hedge funds and Reddit trolls.
I have recently been reading Helen Zia’s Last Boat out of Shanghai, which presents a narrative history of a handful of refugees who fled Shanghai as the Communist Party took control of China in the late 1940s. In framing this flight from the city, Zia details the experiences of the refugees...