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Comment by cjkaminski | Hacker News Reader

Based on my experience on the fundraising side, I'm inclined to agree with your perspective. One small nit to pick: I think policy changes can happen. However, it's hard for me to imagine meaningful change occurring before a catastrophic event. How big would the blast radius be? Obviously no one knows, but I hope it's closer in scope to "The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank" as opposed to "The Collapse of Lehman Brothers".

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I don’t really have hope because big money controls politics. Everything gets steered towards capital’s interest instead of humanity’s.

At the Federal level, absolutely. I could imagine that California and New York could work together to affect meaningful change. It would still be tough because specialty finance regulation is unlikely to generate the type of constituent response usually required for government action, but it's not impossible.

That said, reform would be a Herculean task under the best conditions. Effective change would never be a "one and done" operation. It would be great to have a non-profit like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to carry the mantle.

I don’t think collapse is by itself a good predictor of change. People in collapse just bow easier. Change of this scale unfortunately comes from terminal and collective despair. Let’s not rule out either normal change, not every marginal action needs to make things worse. The system might have enough variation still to turn around. In short, despair or its anticipation are not optimal strategies.

Apparently The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is not enough to force change.

The Collapse of Lehman Brothers is also not enough for long term change, also apparently.

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