Thread by @balajis

The long-term consequence is the end of the 20th century regulatory state.

The SEC is set up to go after Goldman, not 1M retail investors. The FDA was built to regulate Merck, not 1M people with personal genomes. And the FAA is meant to leash Boeing, not 1M drone hobbyists. 🧵

https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1353886305277472768

The premise of the regulatory state is that it ostensibly protects the individual from the giant corporation.

That’s the basis of its legitimacy, reputation, and power.

But when they go after an individual directly the facade of “protection” falls away.
press.princeton.edu/books/paperbac…

For the SEC to go after all the countless sympathetic individuals on Reddit who profited off the back of a giant fund isn’t just logistically difficult.

It’s *reputationally* difficult.

It’s like the RIAA suing its own customers. You are pursuing the little guy...why exactly?

If the SEC does this kind of thing, it gives the game away.

Going after sympathetic individuals on behalf of a giant fund shows that the regulatory state isn’t *really* there to protect citizens from big corporations.

It’s there to protect big corporations from competition.

The FDA has done this for years in dark of night, suing individuals to stop them from gaining access to possibly life-saving treatments (see: d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/startup%2Flect…).

But decentralization & social media are making it harder to cover up these cases or pretend they are one-offs.