Fair ordering is a lie! While most fair ordering protocols were created with good intentions, they have some sneaky little side effects that render them ineffective at best and security via obscurity at worst. The key issue with these mechanisms is that they are agnostic to the economic payoffs of the users who utilize them. In this talk, we will discuss at a high level a research program I have been working on to prove impossibility results for fair ordering. We will discuss how to construct DeFi protocols in which a given fair ordering protocol ensures worse social welfare for protocol users. We’ll skip the hard math for this audience (but will have some teasers) but give the highest level game theoretic ideas for how such a thing can happen. We believe this should be the nail in the coffin for using payoff agnostic fair ordering like Themis or Aequitas in practice — they effectively create preference relations on which protocols achieve high social welfare and which ones don’t. We’ll end with some ideas for how to make things more equitable, but in a non-payoff agnostic manner.