Balaji Srinivasan

like via a vehicle like Farcaster, we can have something that flips nytimes.com because every article is verifiable, because it's coming from decentralized citizen journalists on the ground.

This is another major point, by the way.

You know, the founding fathers of America were against a standing military.

You know, have you heard that?

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, the reason is if they had a Praetorian class, right, a group of guys who were armed when everybody else was disarmed, they knew from history that that group of people would see themselves as special and so on and so forth.

Versus if you had a farmer soldier who was drawn from the population,

then that would be representative of the population.

It wouldn't oppress the population and so on and so forth, right?

Now, because of the advent of industrialization and so on and so forth, it became economically infeasible.

The farmer soldier couldn't just, you know, make a tank out of a shovel or whatever.

They couldn't just beat plowshares into swords.

So that's why you got these professionalized militaries over time.

And now it's actually redecentralizing with drones and for cyber war and so on and so forth.

It's a whole separate topic.

But in the same way that you don't want a standing military, you don't want a standing media, right?

which does not represent the population.

The reason being, because then that standing media

who can check them?