I used to think the whole “debanking” panic was overblown. I really did. I’d roll my eyes at the Twitter threads and the think-pieces about how we’re all living in some dystopian soft-censorship nightmare. I’m a reasonable person, you know? I vote, I pay my taxes, I have a 401k that I check maybe twice a year when I’m feeling particularly masochistic. I thought the people screaming about being deplatformed or debanked were probably extremists, probably saying genuinely horrible stuff that any reasonable company would want to distance themselves from.

I was wrong about all of it, and I learned that lesson the hard way on a Tuesday morning that started like any other.

Let me tell you about March 14th, 2026. I remember the date because it was the day after my daughter’s seventh birthday, and we were still cleaning up wrapping paper and trying to find homes for the avalanche of plastic toys that had taken over our living room. I woke up, made coffee in the same black mug I always use, sat down at my desk to start the workday like I do every morning. I’m a freelance copywriter. Boring stuff. Product descriptions, email campaigns, the occasional blog post about software I don’t understand for companies I’ve never heard of. It pays the bills, or at least it used to before everything went sideways.

Read more: The Specter of Economic Death: Algorithmic Ostracism and the Dissolution of Financial Personhood in Late-Stage Surveillance Capitalism