The Unjust Toll

This is the short version. The essay it summarises has been years in the writing and is still being edited. When it is finished it will stand here in full.

You paid a toll this morning and nobody handed you the bill. The cut taken from money sent abroad, the fee inside the price of a coffee, the gap between what your savings earn and what your card charges. None of it appears on a statement, and there is no address to write to.

One fact sits behind all of it. The internet was built to copy, which is why it worked, and everything an economy is made of is singular. A coin spent twice is fraud. An authority held by two people is a breach. So we run the economy on a medium that cannot carry its own objects, and the workaround is that somebody stands in the middle and vouches. Whoever vouches can charge, because you cannot finish without them. Whoever vouches can refuse, because the record is theirs. Whoever vouches can be captured, because a point everyone must pass is the most valuable thing in any system.

Cnut is remembered as the fool who ordered the tide to stop, and that is the story told backwards. The chronicler offered it as praise, and the king who knew his power ended at the waterline is the one who went to Rome and had the unjust tolls taken off the road his people travelled. Xerxes met the same water, had it given three hundred lashes for disobedience, and lost his fleet before the year was out.

We, the people, are the sea.