Everyone is rightly freaking out about Pavel Durov’s arrest in France. We need to understand why he was arrested and what governments of the world think about regulating speech, platforms, and protocols online.

I strongly recommend people read Seeing Like A State. The state operates on its own logic which is really different from the way people, communities, and companies work. The state can and has been incredibly damaging to people and society but it operates with a kind of internal logic and we can’t resist without understanding the state.