Capitalism’s reputation is on trial. The US Securities and Exchange commission is examining whether cryptocurrency is a complex Ponzi scheme. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has sued FTX founder, former CEO, and disgraced crypto magnate Sam Bankman-Fried, accusing him and his companies of fraud. In September, Meta was fined €405 million for breaking EU data privacy laws by failing to protect children’s data on Instagram.
Social media, once heralded as an innovation that would nurture direct democracy and empower patients to collaborate and share their data securely, has been exposed for mishandling personal information. We now know these platforms are helping to spread and normalise racist tropes. Meta allegedly sat on information that discloses its technology’s demonstrable harms to children. Instagram’s persistent inability to expunge content that glamourises anorexia shows that something is rotten in pockets of today’s brand of capitalism.
No less a proponent of free-market capitalism than Ayn Rand, the libertarian writer and philosopher, would be horrified by the risible representations of modern entrepreneurialism: fraudster Elizabeth Holmes of bankrupt blood-testing firm Theranos, and Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX — both former Silicon Valley darlings.
Ayn Rand and economist Friedrich von Hayek championed property law as capitalism’s guardrail against graft: without that protection, non-fungible tokens and ephemeral cryptocurrencies invite…
