Quality is not democratic,
but access should be.

The Club Player in the Frankfurt Tower

This essay wasn't written at a desk. It emerged from a conversation – a multi-hour dialogue with an AI language model that began with something completely mundane: a check of my rental contract for a 45-square-meter apartment in Lannach, a small town in Styria, Austria. From the question of whether my landlord could legally bundle utilities and heating into a flat fee, the discussion turned to energy prices. From energy prices, it turned to the Iran war and its consequences for Europe. And from the Iran war, it turned to inflation and the question of whether the European Central Bank is doing the right thing in the current crisis. The answer I arrived at over the course of that conversation is: no. The ECB is not doing the right thing. It isn't even doing the obvious thing. It's doing the reflexive thing. And it's doing it even though the logic argues against it, because it is institutionally incapable of acting otherwise. This text is an attempt to lay out that argument. It came out of a dialogue, and that's part of its character and part of its method. I developed the theses, set the direction, brought in the chess metaphor, formulated the objections, and drew the conclusions. The AI pushed back, formulated, sharpened, and challenged me. Without the conversation, the text wouldn't exist in this form – but the position it takes is mine. On DeepedIn, we make this kind of thing transparent, not because it's an embarrassing admission, but because it's the right model. Anyone who works with tools should name their tools. Physicists cite their instruments. Programmers credit their libraries. Anyone who wants to be honest about knowledge work in the twenty-first century documents their workflow. That's the idea behind this platform, and this essay is a working example of it. What follows is an indictment of European monetary policy in the crisis of spring 2026 – and a proposal for how it could be done differently. Anyone who engages with the thought experiment may end up disagreeing. That's welcome. What I don't expect is consensus. What I'm hoping for is an argument.

By Michael Fellinger