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Defund, decentralize, deregulate... Destroy.

Updated: May 7

Drawn on April 4, 2025 | Published from Miami | Updated April 10, 2025

Realtor showing off his latest sale.
Defund, decentralize, deregulate... Destroy.

Entropy inbound


Submitted for your recusal — if you will — a society without codes. Roads sometimes have pavement. Buildings fit however they want, leaning, sagging, or standing proud — until they don’t. Perhaps there’s a makeshift power grid, tangled like a rat’s nest of ambition. The occasional overflowing septic tank — if any — perfumes the air. In this landscape, every structure is a gamble, every street an accident, and every attempt at order an exercise in futility.


Left to its own devices, deregulation may be liberating but it is not liberty — a disarray. An entropy that, when it comes to cities, leads to shantytowns.



The Lessons in Urbanism


Paris, before its transformation, was no romantic city of lights. Though fantastic in its own way, the charm of Renaissance fairs lifted, the stacked mess was a warren of medieval streets, a breeding ground for pestilence, cholera, and social unrest. Disease thrived in this gothic jungle.


Beyond the need to ruthlessly anchor his legitimacy through a vanity project eclipsing kings before him, it was in this fog of poor ether that Napoleon III [more here], determined to modernize the capital, called upon Georges-Eugène Haussmann — not just to beautify, but to impose order where little-to-none existed. The rat-maze had to go!


Haussmann’s code of 'tracés' was so powerful, so deliberate, and so internationally influential that it remains the blueprint for Paris today — transplanted many nations over, as the paragon of 19th-century modernism and socialist urbanism [more here]. The concept was so timeless that his logic dictated façades remain unfinished where lots met — as cliff edges of limestone blocks awaiting future construction — ensuring that the next project, whether built tomorrow or a century later, could seamlessly interlock with its neighbor. It was a framework designed for both cohesion and evolution, a masterstroke of heterogeneous homogeneity, and a real pain in the *ss for builders then as now.


Sure, they took a shot at loosening the zoning noose during the architectural dark age of the 1970s, only for its most ripened fruit to drop as some of the most hated post-modernist urbanistic flops of the 20th century. Nowadays, the regret has had time to sink in and a duty to respect the code, despite its pro forma-maximizing limitations, is held up with the utmost respect and scrutiny. The city, albeit now with some stylistic flexibilities, is reclaiming the dictatorial thrashing that baron Haussmann had imposed on the French. In this example, despite the imperialistic avenue-shaped scars over the freedom of faubourg dwellers, the doctrine of urbanism was gleefully adopted and meticulously refined by the democracies that inherited it. A template born from a sacrifice made through debt and blood, restructured into a model where the only true penance has now metamorphosed into taxation — a notion of fiscal solidarity currently regressing into oblivion in the United States.


What else is new?


Contrast this with deregulated and decentralized urbanism, where the absence of planning is mistaken for liberty. The result? The libertarian dream! At least in the years that led up to Napoleon, designers had a multi-generational flare for beauty, and air-conditioned cars did not exist. Today however, if not deregulated into favelas, we see the result of decentralized planning: splintered landscapes, cities without true centers, suburban sprawl split by 10 lanes both ways, food-deserts, shopping plazas, gas stations, gas stations, gas stations, and parking surfaces from horizon to horizon — architecture and its citizen: an afterthought.



Orderly deregulation or Disorderly regulation?


The same dynamic plays out beyond bricks and boulevards. Whether in urban planning or financial engineering, the deregulator’s utopia inevitably collapses into chaos — until someone begs for stability. Deregulation’s greatest irony? Its loudest champions end up pleading for a return to the very system they argue so hard to dismantle.


Behold the old playbook with pages full of intellectually atonal characters: Vexatious real estate developers who litigate for more parking in their buildings but lament the blight of traffic jams; irony-impaired anti-regulation warriors who decry fiat currency only to demand government bailouts when their decentralized cryptographic bets implode [1]. This is a crowd so inebriated by delusion that, if society were a Lego-set meticulously assembled over generations, they’d sooner hurl it against a wall in a bratty fit of rage than attempt to dissect and add a few pieces to fix what's frail. And after indulging their infatuation with shattering things, they wouldn’t bother rebuilding. They’d simply wander off toward the next shiny object in the room, like babies distracted by jingling keys.


The ideological emptiness of the paradox is no longer amusing: anarchists claim to seek autonomy from institutional control, yet build their dreams on the very dependencies they pretend to disdain. Critically, they want the perks without the price — organizations that hold reserves like gold or foreign currency, maintain financial stability, influence monetary policy, provide oversight, and act as lenders of last resort when things fall apart. Revolutionary stuff... Not exactly the 'Wild Western-Union' of the shoot-first, code-later frontier. Hard to see the point of decentralizing assets when you’re also campaigning for the very protections central banks were built to bear [2] — akin to an outlaw calling the sheriff after their dough gets looted.


So, which is it? Laissez-faire and embrace volatility, or regulate and waste staggering amounts of energy reinventing the US dollar in a more cumbersome form? Rather than an insurgent 'anti-establishment' plot to 'shake up the system' — similar in argument to the right-wing’s jarring efforts to privatize Social Security by replacing the current model with an amateurish plagiarism so obscurely contrived it resists explanation — the crypto business simply reads as two consecutive maneuvers:


  1. A liberation sales pitch toward individualism, buoyed by the pluralistic virtues of anonymity. [3]

  2. An attempt to institutionalize something that earns the bulk of its value from those same anonymous virtues that regulation would inherently terminate. [4]


Did you catch the discrepancy?


Deep down, it’s fairly obvious — given Trump’s friends’ very public ties to “Great Reset” anarcho-capitalists and doomsday theocrats. If the ideological endgame of crypto evangelism — total decentralization — were ever realized, it would lead not to freedom, but usher in absolute opacity, stripping away the transparency and accountability essential to a functioning economy.


‘Traceable anonymity’ may sound appealing, but in practice, it’s a dangerous oxymoron. Without enforceable checks and balances, trust — the foundation of every meaningful business transaction — collapses. The result is not innovation, but a fundamental breakdown in civic and economic cohesion. No surprise then that its loudest backers lean authoritarian, often cloaked in the absurd patriotism of MAGA hats.


Although blind to it, these authoritarians are not shielded from irony's wrath. The conflict in messaging is particularly noticeable in recent spectacles over trade wars. Indeed, cryptocurrencies, long peddled as shackle-breaking technology, nosedive in lockstep with Wall Street’s blue-chip barometer — not in defiance, but in tandem. In fact, Trump’s April ‘dump and pump’ antics of tipping off Mar-a-Lago friends, tanking the market with a tariff tantrum [5], floating a ‘pause’ via anonymous sources [6], denying everything, then buying back at a discount before announcing the tariff freeze — showcased the harmonic choreography well [7]. This synchronized suffering obliterates the myth that decentralization equals independence; when your ‘rebellion’ asset falls with the traditional markets, it speaks less as deliverance from the ways of old, and more as branding. Even chaos, it seems, has a market index [8].


So much for an 'alternative' to the status-quo.


The stupidity of the ideological cognitive dissonance reveals the layers of contempt these so-called freedom fighters hold — not just for democracy, but for intellectualism itself.


“With few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.”

— Carl Sagan, p.90, The Demon-Haunted World, 1995.



Democracy endures, despite its inefficiencies, because, short of keeping things secret for national security, it demands transparency and accountability — qualities that crypto-driven financial nihilism rejects outright.


Funny how, in decentralizing things like currency — post-modernizing finance — we may have stumbled upon a new architectural language: where façades go up in one zip code, and plumbing in another. Postmodernism 2.0: the final joke on our collective intelligence. 

 


The Civilizational Requirement


True liberty is not the absence of rules; it is the presence of a system that allows the complexities of competing interests to thrive equitably. Haussmann, his weird beard (look it up), and their descendants understood this. So did every great civilization that invested in the longevity of its cities.


Today, America finds itself captivated by surface impressions. We are dazzled by the grandeur of Parisian facades, yet often lack the education — or the will — to understand the stereotomic discipline behind them. Our civic imagination rarely extends beyond the superficial. We replicate appearances, not systems. And this is betrayed in our architecture: flimsy Hollywood boxes stamped with facsimiles of legacy design, geographically spreading further and further outward from the last vestiges of true monuments left in city centers — as if America were chasing its history away.


Without the willingness to centralize, regulate, and fund our built environment with intention and lasting-vision, we are left with nothing but empty copies. Just as with unregulated finance, our cities begin to mirror our ideological confusion — fragmented, performative, and hollow, with a strong lean into a foreshadowing irony.


In the grander scheme of things, whether architecture or finance, deregulation, when unchecked, doesn’t create innovation — it creates instability. An instability that ultimately corrects by necessity, whether through governance or catastrophe. The question is not whether rules will return, but will we have the foresight to shape them before entropy does it for us?


Gas stations!



[1] Attempts to bail-out crypto:




[3] The value of anonymity:



[4] Institutionalization efforts:



[5] Trump tariffs list: See all the tariffs by country (2025) BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ypxnnyg7jo (Accessed: 10 April 2025).


[6] Testing the hypothesis of a market rebound:


[7] Allegations of market manipulation:


[8] The tandem bike:


All audio is AI generated.

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