When Nixon slammed the gold window shut so Congress could keep writing blank checks for Vietnam and the Great Society, it wasn't just some monetary technicality. It was the moment America broke its word to the world and broke something fundamental in us too. Suddenly money wasn't something you earned through sweat or innovation anymore. It became something politicians and bankers could conjure from thin air whenever they wanted another war, another corporate bailout, another vote-buying scheme.

Fast forward fifty years and smell the rot. That same fiscal recklessness Congress spending like drunken sailors while pretending deficits don't matter has bled into every pore of society. Why wouldn't it? When BlackRock scoops up entire neighborhoods with Fed-printed cash while your kid can't afford a studio apartment, people notice. When Tyson jacks up chicken prices to record profits while diners can't afford bacon, people feel it. And when some indie blogger slaps a paywall on their life's work because OpenAI vacuumed their words to train ChatGPT? That's the same disease wearing digital clothes.

We're all living in Nixon's hangover. The "us vs us" chaos you see Discord servers demanding your phone number, small sites gatekeeping against bots, everyone scrambling to monetize scraps that's what happens when trust evaporates. Just like the dollar became Monopoly money after '71, everything feels devalued now. Your labor? Worth less each year. Your creativity? Someone's AI training fuel. Your neighborhood? A BlackRock asset on a spreadsheet.

And Washington's still at it! Printing trillions to "save the economy" while inflation eats your paycheck alive. Passing trillion-dollar "infrastructure bills" that somehow leave bridges crumbling but defense contractors swimming in cash. It's the same old shell game: socialize the losses, privatize the gains. The factory worker paying $8 for eggs understands this. The nurse getting lectured about "wage spirals" while hospital CEOs pocket millions understands this. The teenager locking down their Discord because bots keep spamming scams? They understand this.

Weimar happened when money became meaningless. 1971 happened when promises became meaningless. What you're seeing now the suspicion, the barriers, the every-man-for-himself hustle is what bubbles up when people realize the whole system's running on fumes. The diner owner charging $18 for a burger isn't greedy. The blogger blocking AI scrapers isn't a Luddite. They're just building levees against a flood Washington started with a printing press half a century ago.

The tragedy is that we're all knee-deep in the same muddy water, throwing sandbags at each other while the real architects of this mess the political grifters, the Fed bankers, the extraction-engine capitalists watch dry-eyed from their high ground. Until we stop accepting their counterfeit money and their counterfeit promises, we'll keep drowning in this rigged game. The gold window didn't just close in '71. The whole damn social contract rusted shut.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

The gold standard is objectively terrible economic policy and "society was better when I was young" has been a meme for thousands of years.

It feels nice to attribute everything bad to this one weird trick, but it's fake.

What does any of this have to do with yt-dlp?

Wow. That was eloquent, and coherent, and depressing. I'd be grateful for someone to counter with something less dismal. Good things are still happening in the world. A positive future remains possible -- but we have to be able to imagine it to bring it into being.