Facebook's plan to break the global financial system

The tech giant knows its best weapon is mobilizing the faux-populism other Silicon Valley companies have used to defeat regulation

Evgeny Morozov

The Guardian, 22 giugno 2019

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 good, the company has decided to redouble its unbending commitment to “moving fast and breaking things”. The good old 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, 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 ultimate 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.

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Continua qui: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/21/facebooks-plan-to-break-the-global-financial-system