The masses loved the freewheeling ways of the early Internet — until they didn’t, and then they sought order and protection within the walled gardens of social-media platforms. And, inevitably, they came to find those cramped and irritating as well as they turned into aggregations of shrieking aunts, bellowing uncles, and twenty billion Mark Zuckerbergs going door-to-door trying to sell you magazine subscriptions. And so now there are movements on both the left and the right to put the tech giants under political discipline, which, end the end, will make the masses miserable, too. Everything does.

But will it be an improvement? Professor Posner says that under Facebook’s new currency model, “the problem of volatility is solved.” I would not bet on that. There are two kinds of entities in Facebook’s world: the volatile and the dead.