Facebook’s Libra Reveals Silicon Valley’s Naked Ambition
“Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money!” And when you have more money than anyone could ever need, you call it Libra.
Facebook on Tuesday introduced a comprehensive, borderless economic system for its platform, which is based on a new cryptocurrency, Libra. The company plans to sit ostentatiously on its hands when it comes to governing the project, just one member of the so-called Libra Association, with a total of 28, to emphasize the separation between the currency—which will have a record of your every purchase—and the company, which has an oft-told history of privacy breaches and disregard for rules and regulations. A new subsidiary, Calibra, will be Facebook’s way of accessing the currency, which itself will be run out of Switzerland.
It’s all so wildly ambitious that politicians have already stated their opposition, months before the project is expected to go live. US Representative Maxine Waters, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, spoke out immediately: “Given the company’s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action.” Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, cautioned via Twitter: “Facebook is already too big and too powerful, and it has used that power to exploit users’ data without protecting their privacy. We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight.”
Noam Cohen
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The lesson, as if we needed yet another example, is that whatever scandals may trail the big Silicon Valley companies they are not scaling back, whether that means studying how to eavesdrop on people’s brainwaves to read their minds or building a currency to circumvent borders and national regulation. Call it the shoot-the-moon philosophy of corporate growth, taken from the high-risk, high-reward strategy in the card game Hearts—you either thoroughly dominate the opposition or you crash in fla
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