It might not be so surprising to a lot of his fans that an author known for taking on grift and inequity is now talking about what officials and agencies are doing with cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Daniel Kuhn at Coindesk launches op-ed coverage of Taibbi’s latest remarks on the difference between censoring free speech and restricting the free flow of money, in a cogent analysis of what’s happening right now in the crypto and blockchain world.
“Going after cash is a big jump from simply deleting speech, with a much bigger chilling effect,” Kuhn cites Taibbi as writing. “This is especially true in the alternative media world, where money has long been notoriously tight, and the loss of a few thousand dollars here or there can have a major effect on a site, podcast, or paper.”
It doesn’t seem like a reach for Taibbi, who, after all, has in the past taking aim at practices like civil forfeiture and the seemingly predatory structure of traffic courts in books like The Divide and Griftopia, where he inserts a famous Eastern European saying explaining complex fraud and duplicity: “A thief rides a second thief, and uses a third thief for a whip,” (paraphrased.)
Taibbi became well-known partly as a result of Rolling Stone coverage where he coined the term “vampire squid” to describe Goldman Sachs, taking aim at the complicated machinations around the financial crash in 2008.
But the case for crypto and against random and arbitrary enforcement is, in some ways, a whole new ballgame.
Notwithstanding Taibbi’s relating blockchain regulation to a chilling effect on independent media, and the new allegations that Paypal has its own oppressive role to play, there’s already a well-known gripe in the crypto world as a whole, that the SEC is simply not being fair about regulatory enforcement by not offering companies a road map.
In that context, watch for more as officials take aim at crypto operations – and crypto operators fire back, in courts.