If you spent hours and hours on Ticketmaster trying to buy your kids tickets to the upcoming Taylor Swift North American tour, you know what frustration and perhaps even fury feel like.
Hundreds of thousands of hopeful, and pre-approved, people spent a fretful day trying to use the Ticketmaster website and app to purchase tickets to the concerts, with many thousands being hit with delays, glitches, crashes and the other disasters that can befall digital platforms.
I was one of those people, and I’m still fuming. (I failed to get tickets.) But just a few days after that frustration, my middle kid and I attended a concert of The Offspring with Ticketmaster-purchased tickets, and this past August my wife and I attended a Lumineers concert with Ticketmaster-purchased tickets.
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I’m unlikely to abandon that way of transacting concert-going business. As crappy as the Taylor Swift disaster was (it’s been a big story in the entertainment news), that platform, concertgoers and artists aren’t likely to divorce.
Will that be true for crypto-currency exchanges? What’s going to happen to Twitter, which can serve as on online exchange of opinions and information, after Elon Musk’s tempestuous takeover?
Farmers live in agriculture industries dominated by exchanges, relationships and transactions based upon trust. The crypto-implosion and the Twitter tempest offer us a reminder about the critical importance of trust. So many of our agricultural issues are based on perceived breaches of trust in farmers’ business relationships. Slow rail service, grading disputes, grain contract breaches and non-payment by grain buyers are all trust-based market issues. They’re issues farmers constantly grapple with, which prevents them becoming market-destroyers.
With cryptocurrencies we can see what happens when an exchange holding users’ assets implodes. FTX, a Bahamas-based business that holds and trades crypto-coins owned by thousands of users, is short a few billion dollars in client funds. This is a problem.
It came to light as many crypto-currencies have been collapsing in value and clients have tried to cash out of their positions held by FTX. With not enough money in the exchange there’s been a run on the crypto-bank. The previously entertaining owner, Sam Bankman-Fried, has departed the company. There’s a mad scramble in crypto-world to stop the whole sucker from going down.
That’s not just FTX, but all the other crypto-exchanges and the pseudo-currencies themselves. After all, few of these “assets” are based on any tangible value, nor are they backed by governments with the power to tax their populations. They’re worth whatever somebody else thinks they’re worth, which these days can be summed up as “much less than before.”
When trust disappears, as it has with FTX, a whole trading system can collapse. Perhaps other crypto-exchanges will survive and thrive, with FTX cleared up or cleared away, or perhaps the cryptoverse will be sucked into a black hole of distrust.
Twitter, which thousands of prairie farmers use, is experiencing its own violent storm of instability. Since Elon Musk took over the company a couple of weeks ago, he has fired most of its staff, provoked a strike by many of its most important advertisers, reinstated the accounts of Donald Trump and Kanye West, and outraged large sections of its user base. There’s been a rush to find alternative platforms upon which to chatter, fulminate, rage and giggle.
Musk has said Twitter is financially unsound and needs fundamental changes, so he’s doing a whole bunch at once. Will it revolutionize and rejuvenate Twitter? Will it cause a total collapse of the ugly duckling of the social media industry? It’s too early to tell, although the massive debt Musk piled up to buy the company might cause a reckoning to come sooner rather than later.
Musk literally sends rocketships into space, has created both a new car company and exponentially grown the electric vehicle industry, and helped found Paypal, which I just used to donate money to Wikipedia while I wrote this column, so he’s pretty good at getting things done. But he’s also a loudmouth idiot who doesn’t know anything about running a media company that relies upon the trust and support of its users and advertisers. If many of them bail out, brilliant technical fixes won’t save the company.
It’d be tragic for farmers if Twitter fell apart because thousands use it to talk about agronomy, machinery issues, farm policy and life on the farm. Many get much of their news from Twitter, including links to Western Producer stories on our website.
It’s too soon to say with Twitter, as it is with cryptocurrencies, but as case studies in what happens when business platforms and exchanges challenge the trust placed in them by users, they are situations we can all benefit from following and studying.
This is why as farmers, media types and businesses, we take trust and credibility seriously. Once you jettison that, you might not have much left.
