In the summer of 2019, Jeffrey Wernick, then a 63-year old investor and self-described anarcho-capitalist, was living above a hotel in midtown Manhattan and hosting regular lunches at Fred's at Barneys, where he’d extol bitcoin and rue the sunset of free speech in America. It was at one of these gatherings that he got to talking with John Matze, 26, the libertarian who had recently founded Parler—a Twitter alternative for conservatives fed up with what they considered to be the suppressive policies of mainstream social media.
Wernick doesn’t particularly like social media (“It’s antisocial,” he told me), but he appreciated Parler’s purity: The platform showed posts in simple chronological order with rather laissez-faire content moderation. A few months after the encounter, Wernick invested in the start-up and became a strategic adviser. “I thought it would be really perverse if the World Wide Web existed without there being a real public forum,” he said. “The town square has been hijacked by private actors, and a public square no longer exists.”
この記事は New York magazine の February 15–28, 2021 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は New York magazine の February 15–28, 2021 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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