Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Betrays the Company’s True Ambitions
hang out there all the time. Your friends and family are there. It’s got neighborhoods, both big and small. There are businesses there, you get most of your mail there in the form of digital messages.
It’s not perfect: Sometimes there’s crime, or that one neighbor who keeps pushing the conspiracy theories about vaccines or politics. You feel like the security teams are getting a little better at handling those kinds of disruptions, and after all, every place has potholes, right? Or maybe you’re just getting used to it. But lately it seems like if people step too far out of line, they just sort of … disappear.
Molly Wood (@mollywood) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the host and senior editor ofMarketplace Tech, a daily national radio broadcast covering the business of technology. She has covered the tech industry at CNET,The New York Times, and in various print, television, digital, and audio formats for nearly 20 years. (Ouch.)
And as the place has gotten bigger, it’s matured. Now you can move yourself into more of a gated community to avoid the bad neighborhoods and the undesirable encounters. And that’s nice, because every day it seems like there’s a new infrastructure project designed to get more people into the place.
You know the leadership of the place isn’t perfect, and it’s not like you trust everything they’re doing, but you’re comfortable here, and so you stay. And you have to admit, the shopping has gotten alotbetter. So many more stores and places to visit, it’s almost like you never have to go anywhere else.
And the best part is that the place finally got its own money! Talk about a milestone. It’s like your little digital home is finally turning into its own … country.
Yes, you guessed it, I’m talking about Facebook. And whatI’mguessing is that this is exactly what Facebook wants to be. Not a company, a country.
And while Facebook’s ambitions appear unsubtle (at least to me), the biggest tech companies are all building more and more advanced and immersive ecosystems. So maybe it’s time to start asking: Whatisthe functional difference between a company and a country?
It’s not a crazy question: We’re already at a point where huge multinational tech monopsonies have so much power over the global economy that central bankers and regulators are starting to wonder if they even have the tools to set economic policy, like they used to in the old days.
And the reason these big tech companies are different from other giant multinational corporations like Exxon Mobile or ConAgra or even, strangely, Microsoft is that their ambition really is to own all your interactions, not just your driving or your eating or your typing.
Amazon’s algorithms are setting prices for the rest of the world and there’s no business it doesn’t want to be in. Apple is less interested in being a big messy country that’s open to everyone, but would be happy to build an increasingly elite country club on the hill. Much like the NSA, Google would prefer that you forget they exist while they’re watching every single thing you do.
Oh, and these companies happen to boast user populations larger than any single country, not to mention the fact that they have annual revenues far exceeding many countries’ GDP dreams.
And now they want to create their own money.
Facebook’s proposal for Libra, a cryptocurrency backed by a basket of real currencies, and controlled by an independent body of partners based in Switzerland, mightseema step or two removed from being under Facebook’s control. But the power of Libra doesn’t lie in control as much as it lies in adoption.
Libra is meant to become the in-house currency for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp’s combined 2.7 billion users. If that happens, it’ll create, almost overnight, a borderless collection of millions, maybe hundreds of millio
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