Technology seems to increase people’s expectations faster than it can fulfill them. In the context of spam email, I remember writing years ago that people want the internet to be an open window onto New York, Hong Kong, and Delhi, but they don’t want to hear any noise. Search engines are terrible because none of them can find that quote. (See what I did there?) Technological change seems to increase the tension between our wants and our “gets.”

That dynamic has broader effects, hollowing out respect for institutions. It’s uncomfortable to say this about such a likable man, but Walter Cronkite’s “and that’s the way it is” sounds a little condescending now. When the media environment was three television networks and a newspaper per city, they shaped the perceptions and priorities of all, and nobody was the wiser. Now freer and more dissatisfied, people select their sources from among thousands, everyone is their own community of interest, and professional journalism’s claim to know the news for us is widely rejected. It’s hard to say things are better, but ways to make information trustworthy again will emerge.

How far and how fast will these dynamics extend? Recent bank runs amid competition from cryptocurrency have some people seeing fiat currency’s imminent collapse. My bet is that the Federal Reserve System is not yet on the chopping block. In light of tech-fueled anti-authoritarian trends, though, we should be thinking about how public goods like money can be retooled with minimal disruption.

There is good reason to distrust monetary authority. When asked directly at a recent hearing how the 2 percent inflation target benefits families, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell answered with an appeal to authority (at 1:50:00). The 2 percent target is good because it’s what central bankers agree on.

The question should be an easy home run. Does 2 percent inflation lower costs for consumers? (It’s axiomatic that it doesn’t.) Does it let them keep their jobs? (Some of the time, at ever-lower real pay.) Does 2 percent inflation give them cheaper housing? (Only relative to inflation that’s higher.) Maybe 2 percent inflation can feed the cat or bring in the mail; otherwise, it’s just a deeply regressive tax, taking from the poor and ignorant while elites escape its gravitational pull.

And obviously, the 2 percent target isn’t something the Fed has been able to maintain. Judged by an actual performance standard, our monetary authorities are doing a bad job of maintaining a bad policy. Instead, they’re propping up banks that, overseen poorly, invested poorly.

It’s easier with each passing year to say “the system is rigged.” Amid rising expectations for better, our rigged systems pave the way for populists, demagogues, and worse.

Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (Stripe Press, 2018) ably documents early strains of what I call “rejectionism.” I don’t agree with Gurri that the lay public’s failure to posit alternative structures makes them nihilists. I’m hopeful that democracy is a weigh station on the road to more advanced collective decision-making.

Today some in cryptocurrency see their field as the protagonist in a significant, somewhat rejectionist monetary drama. Balaji Srinivasan is a smart and accomplished polymath who called the COVID-19 crisis early. On March 16, 2023, he tweeted out a “BitSignal,” arguing that recent bank runs are a harbinger of far worse. He believes massive malinvestment has left the banks without net assets. He wants people out of dollars and into Bitcoin, taking their Bitcoin off exchanges. He is spending $1 million and betting another million on the thesis that bitcoins will be worth $1 million each within 90 days. (An hour-long articulation of his views can be found here.)

I have a cherished family member who has been predicting dollar hyperinflation “in two-to-ten years” for at least the past forty. That somewhat inures me to such predictions. Even if they’re correct on the financial and monetary merits, a hyperinflation doesn’t occur when the system is in technical failure. It happens when everyone believes it is. That precondition is not in place, and our monetary authorities are working overtime to see that it isn’t. That is steadily getting harder for them to do.

But what would you do to prepare for that outcome, which is inevitable on a ridiculously forgiving, infinite time horizon? Something like what Srinivasan was doing before: laying the groundwork for a truly viable cryptocurrency alternative. Grow the “soft” ecosystem of crypto: awareness, adoption, usability, governance, economic and monetary theory, security, and, of course, code writing and review.

People are rightly conservative with their money. Here’s hoping that any collapse of our monetary authorities and system happens when the people can fall “upward” into a more stable, secure, and private system for managing their wealth and transactions.

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