Editor’s letter

Over the past decade, Facebook and Bitcoin have grown up together—Bitcoin was created in 2009, Facebook went public in 2012—and they are two branches of the same stream. Both represent the highest hopes of the early internet flooding over their banks. The promise of technology was that it would democratize everything from media to finance, removing the gatekeepers. And oh boy, has it done that. In finance, democratization initially meant cutting the power of banks and brokerages. Now Bitcoin devotees routinely talk about taking down the Federal Reserve and the nation state. In media, it’s the hashtags trending on Facebook, not the old news networks, that define the national mood and set the agenda. The gatekeepers who remain are hanging on for dear life, watching Facebook and pulling up “meme” stocks on their terminals in the hope of keeping up. For a long time, the rueful joke in the media business has been that the industry now has one editor-in-chief—Twitter.

Many of the gatekeepers ought not to be missed, but now we are seeing what happens when they are gone. In their place, as everyone who has thought about democracy over centuries has recognized, rush in con artists and professional manipulators. This is what’s happening both in the financial markets and the market of ideas. Billions of dollars of Bitcoin (see Best Columns: Business, p. 34) trade in a marketplace driven by speculators who can drive up prices and then turn around to sell their supply at will. On Facebook, conspiracy mongers around the world have mastered the art of gaming the algorithm with polarization as their prime product (see Main Stories, p. 4). Eventually, it is likely that a new civic and financial order will emerge; bubbles burst, conspiracy theories collapse under their own weight, guardrails get put in. Once I would have called that a near certainty. But these days the market for certainty is very thin, and betting Mark Gimein on the center holding can feel very lonely. Managing editor