Hi, I'm Hirad.

Over the last week, I've been in shock over the scale of the Dutch farmers' protest. It might make the Canadian Freedom Convoy look like a weekend picnic. Canada is a big country, yet some of its key trading routes with its largest trading partner, the United States, were blocked for days by protesters. The Netherlands, it seems, is completely cut off by its farmers who have used tractors to bring the country to a halt. In solidarity with them, fishing boats have similarly blocked ports. While Schiphol airport seems functional, other airports have been closed. The goal of the farmers is "for the entire country to be paralyzed". I can't be quite certain about the details of the protest, because the second most shocking thing in the last week has been the near complete blackout in news coverage by western news media.

I was recently approached by a young graduate of computer engineering as she was struggling with deciding on a direction for her life post-graduation. Coming from an Eastern culture, she had always followed the straight and narrow path that her parents and family laid in front of her. She enrolled in computer engineering because that seemed to pay well. Now nearing graduation, she got a job offer from Amazon, and she accepted due to pressure from her family. Yet she was sitting in front of me, questioning whether following this predictable and safe path is really all there is.

I have been buying Bitcoin consistently for almost two years. I also bought a hardware wallet at some point, but I was too afraid of "being my own bank". The cryptocurrency world is rife with stories of people who lost their private keys and in turn lost access to millions of dollars' worth of Bitcoin. I figured a company like Coinbase is probably much better positioned to guard my assets than I am.

A cynical friend asked me why I’m wasting my time even reading about the freedom convoy – or politics in general – let alone going to the demonstrations. At first, I tried to give him a philosophical answer.

Among the many things that people in the America (and her sphere of cultural influence, which certainly engulfs Canada) are divided about as a result of the two years of this pandemic is how we should find reliable information and how we should make sense of the world around us.