Our metastatic government and irresponsible fiscal policies exacerbate this. Soon, most U.S. expenditure will go to servicing debt, and we lack the political mechanisms to correct this. Worse, we now depend on foreigners or local retirees to buy our debt. Former President Biden’s policies, like freezing assets in U.S. dollars, discouraged investment in U.S.-denominated assets. If your assets can be frozen because you once met someone who had lunch with the brother-in-law of a banker connected to Putin, why take the risk of holding dollars?
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At the Tandon School of Engineering of NYU, where I spent more than fifteen years, the near-totality of both faculty and graduate students were foreign-born
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V. THE LIBERATING EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
The next point is an optimistic one: social media has transformed information flow. Historically, people traded information at the barber shop or fish market, acting as both conveyors and recipients. Big media disrupted this, turning us into passive consumers of TV lectures by the state and a bowdlerized press. Now, platforms like TikTok and X allow us to both share and receive information, returning to a natural model.
Social media is hard to control, even with censorship, and AI makes it even harder to manipulate without producing incoherent outcomes. For example, an ethnic cleansing in Gaza might have been covered up by traditional media in 1995, but in 2025, social media exposes it. The media only matters to politicians or those out of touch — anyone under 30 doesn’t care about ABC News.