Hilary J. Allen

@profhilaryallen.bsky.social

1.4K followers 320 following 540 posts

Law professor at the American University Washington College of Law (but all views expressed here are my own); author of Fintech Dystopia and Driverless Finance; mythbusting crypto, AI, and other fintech

Internet serial: fintechdystopia.com .. more

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Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · Aug 29

"Let's Get Skeptical," the final chapter of Fintech Dystopia, has dropped
fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...
Covering
- How much the abundance agenda and VC output suck
- Silicon Valley subsidies we can take away
- How to laugh our way into Silicon Valley skepticism
- A plan to actually fix finance

A picture of Olivia Newton-John with the caption "Let's Get Skeptical"

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 7h

The Silicon Valley biz model now involves making things most consumers hate, buying politicians to vote for special legal treatment to sustain hated businesses, but trying to hide that pols are funded by hated biz? The invisible hand of the market at its finest! fintechdystopia.com/chapters/int...

develop a business model that centers a particular technology. Tell some stories about how that technology will solve a legitimate problem (preferably using the words “democratize” and “disrupt”). Bend or break some laws with that business model, and profit from not complying with the law. Get away with bending or breaking the law, and with harming people along the way, because lawmakers and regulators are too timid to stop “innovation.” Get big enough that you can convince lawmakers and regulators to change the law so that you never have to comply with it and those who are harmed have no recourse – because you haven’t actually solved the problem, and your business model isn’t good enough to survive if you have to follow the same rules as everyone else. Bonus points if the law is changed in a way that guarantees you a monopoly or oligopoly position. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 7h

AI PACs are following Crypto PACs' playbook to a T (probably because a16z is the driving force behind both). Notably, the ads these PACs fund don't mention crypto or AI, because a16z knows that both are toxic to voters.

nymag.com/intelligence...

AI Money Is Coming to a Midterm Near You

Industry giants including Marc Andreessen and Anthropic are already spending millions to prop up pro-AI politicians.

nymag.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 3d

As a start, let's make sure we all laugh at it...

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

Although many media and academic institutions are compromised by ties to Silicon Valley (not to mention besieged by funding cuts from the Trump administration), there are still many independent journalists and scholars who can and do play an important role in reframing how we look at technological innovation. But skeptics without the benefit of a university or publishing platform can also help change the narrative, and they can do it the same way everyday people have always undermined the power of the powerful – by laughing at Silicon Valley and its narratives of inevitability. As activist Saul Alinksy put it, “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.” While I don’t want to downplay the harm that Silicon Valley does, it is still a ridiculous place, and ridicule is one of the best ways to defuse Silicon Valley’s narrative power and rebalance our yin and yang in favor of skepticism. In the classic comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur says to his knights (after a ridiculous musical number) “on second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.” The goal is to change the “facts on the ground” so that everyone thinks of Silicon Valley as a silly place too.

There are plenty of great hype men in Silicon Valley, but that hype loses its power if people start laughing at it. I suspect that Silicon Valley hype is effective in part because people want to believe that the world is better than this – that techno-solutionist bullshit couldn’t possibly be perpetuated at such scale in such a cynical way, so there must be some germ of promise in it. Accepting that Silicon Valley can really be this cynical can break your brain, and humor is probably the most palatable way to deliver this kind of brain-breaking message. That is why I am prescribing you all a watch (or rewatch) of HBO’s Silicon Valley TV series to help inoculate you against techno-solutionism.

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 4d

Exactly!

As I wrote last year:
(fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...)

AI hype continues unabated in 2025, but lurking beneath the surface there’s a palpable sense of desperation about low AI adoption. You can see that desperation in the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan when it says “the bottleneck to harnessing AI’s full potential is not necessarily the availability of models, tools, or applications. Rather, it is the limited and slow adoption of AI, particularly within large, established organizations.” You can see that desperation as tech CEOs line up to declare their companies “AI-first,” forcing their employees to use AI tools and sometimes using “level of AI usage” as a metric in employee performance reviews. Silicon Valley’s preferred playbook of “get us all hooked and then turn the screws” won’t work if we never get hooked in the first place, and so the AI industry seems to have enlisted the Trump administration and their tech CEO friends to try and make GenAI indispensable. It feels a bit like Meta pleading with its employees to please, please, please use the Metaverse back in 2022, only on a more environmentally destructive and soul-crushing scale.

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 4d

And I would add, all of this is happening at a time when the use of AI tools is highly subsidized. How much will employers be willing to pay for the unsubsidized versions?

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 4d

(Screen shot from fintechdystopia.com/chapters/int...)

Fintech Dystopia - Introduction

fintechdystopia.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 4d

@davekarpf.bsky.social @lizzieohreally.bsky.social

Imo there are parallels here with how SBF tried to position FTX (politically and morally) as the Dem-affiliated "good guys" in crypto. Of course FTX did fraud/played both sides of the aisle, then Coinbase/Circle decided to try out being "good"...

By now, many books have been written about the grisly details of FTX, SBF (as Bankman-Fried is often called), and the rest of 2022’s “crypto winter.” These books tell the story of an industry practically quilted out of red flags, which combusted in a spectacular series of frauds and failures once the easy money of 2020 and 2021 ebbed away. But every time news broke about a fraud or a failed company, the rest of the crypto industry performed a curious rhetorical trick. The remaining players circled their wagons and said “they deserved it, they were bad crypto. Not like us – we’re good crypto.”

Reposted by Hilary J. Allen

Gillian Gower, PhD @medievaliste.bsky.social · 4d

AI is not inevitable. If we had sane people in government that were not in thrall to billionaire tech CEOs, LLMs could be regulated, forced to obey existing copyright laws, and banned from places where their use is inappropriate, such as college classes. This should be a moderate position.

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 6d

“Newsom currently finds himself aligned with Peter Thiel…in an effort to kill a union-backed billionaire tax that would help offset Trump’s healthcare cuts…[N] regularly bows down to the powerful California interests bankrolling the very authoritarianism from which he claims he can save the nation.”

The Guardian @theguardian.com · 6d

Gavin Newsom’s likely presidential bid is built on broken promises | Gil Durán

The California governor has a record of failed pledges on housing, healthcare and more as he mistakes theatrics for leadership

www.theguardian.com

Reposted by Hilary J. Allen

The Guardian @theguardian.com · 6d

Gavin Newsom’s likely presidential bid is built on broken promises | Gil Durán

The California governor has a record of failed pledges on housing, healthcare and more as he mistakes theatrics for leadership

www.theguardian.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 6d

This isn’t a new playbook - Andreessen Horowitz more or less lobbied the crypto markets into existence (along with a bunch of other fintech). Lobbying and marketing - rather than finding good tech- is WHAT THEY DO.

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

Reposted by Hilary J. Allen

Revolving Door Project @revolvingdoordc.bsky.social · 7d

Abundance has a new 501(c)(4) group to help push its deregulatory message according to reporting by Axios. "Next American Era" will be headed up by former DCCC chair and current OpenAI/Oracle lobbyist Cheri Bustos, further integrating data center construction with abundance

The AI Lobbyist Starting An Abundance Nonprofit | Revolving Door Project

Next American Era is hoping to help push abundance policies into the mainstream. It's headed by OpenAI lobbyist Cheri Bustos

therevolvingdoorproject.org

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 8d

I noticed this too - I wondered if they're being bombarded by AI scrapers, but I don't know enough to know whether that's a plausible explanation

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 10d

I really enjoyed my conversation with Titi and Zakiya at Dope Labs. Talking about the limitations of fintech, financial inclusion, and our crypto-captured Congress.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/d...

Is Financial Technology Helping or Hurting? - Lab 125

Podcast Episode · Dope Labs · 02/01/2026 · 29m

podcasts.apple.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 11d

Coinbase and Ripple might need some of that Fairshake PAC money back…

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 11d

This is my beat. It all depends on how interconnected crypto and the traditional financial system have become.

See:

driverlessfinancebook.com

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 12d

💯

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 12d

Let's catch up!

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 12d

My guess is some kind of combination of people being goldfish and Upton Sinclair's "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 12d

Kind of like my crypto critique

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

But all of these aspirations are based on fundamental confusion regarding the “decentralization” that blockchains offer. A system needs to offer more than just the opportunity for decentralized control to actually be decentralized. Blockchains, and many of the things built on them, are technologically decentralized systems in the sense that there are lots of nodes involved, but if one person can control lots of those nodes, or some nodes are more important than others practically speaking, then control of the system will become centralized and all that effort that went into technological decentralization will be for naught.

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 14d

Also: crypto's potential to cause a financial crisis is seen as a feature and not a bug

www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/u...

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 14d

Non-USD stablecoin volume is about $1.5 billion; USD stablecoin volume is about $300 billion (if DefiLlama's nos are right)

The USD market is the ballgame - but not because Americans use them for real-world payments. Criminals and gamblers just like their USDs

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 14d

My working title for this op-ed was "Better the Devil You Know": www.ft.com/content/b986...

Donald Trump’s crypto embrace is a threat to Wall Street

Stablecoins will increasingly challenge bank deposits as a riskier place for people to park their cash

www.ft.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 15d

First, this is great news. Second, does this help explain what's happened to crypto prices lately? (Pig butchering scams use crypto for payment)

The Wall Street Journal @wsj.com · 15d

The arrests of two alleged ringleaders of transnational scam networks in Cambodia have led to thousands of workers—many of them trafficked—being let go from compounds across the country.

High-Profile Arrests Spark Exodus of Scam Workers in Cambodia

Thousands of people—many of them trafficked—have been let go from compounds in a shake-up of the deeply rooted “pig-butchering” industry.

on.wsj.com

Reposted by Fabián Muniesa, Hilary J. Allen

The Wall Street Journal @wsj.com · 15d

The arrests of two alleged ringleaders of transnational scam networks in Cambodia have led to thousands of workers—many of them trafficked—being let go from compounds across the country.

High-Profile Arrests Spark Exodus of Scam Workers in Cambodia

Thousands of people—many of them trafficked—have been let go from compounds in a shake-up of the deeply rooted “pig-butchering” industry.

on.wsj.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 17d

Nothing says "we're so decentralized and intermediary-less that we need Congress to pass new legislation to accommodate our decentralization and intermediarilessness" than a crypto exchange intervening to prop up crypto prices.