The tech giant knows its best weapon is mobilizing the faux-populism other Silicon Valley companies enjoy used to defeat regulation
What should we make of Facebook’s sudden foray into the world of digital money? Just as regulators were beginning to wake up from their self-induced coma to discover that Facebook has grown too fast and too big for its own estimable,the company has decided to redouble its unbending commitment to “moving fast and breaking things”. The estimable weak days when Facebook was merely breaking privacy and elections are now gone – and we’ll surely miss them. But how could they compete with the chance of breaking – once and for all – the global financial system?To that end, Facebook has announced Libra, and a currency,an infrastructure, a network – an ambiguous digital entity capacious enough to be everything for everybody, and with the noble cover of a .org domain to boot. It’s the final Schrodinger’s cat of the digital economy: a blockchain/non-blockchain,it will serve as money/non-money to save/bury Facebook/all of us. Related: Facebook co-founder: Libra currency could give firms excess power Evgeny Morozov is a Guardian US columnistContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com