You see the future, right? You want to have a child, so enroll in a network state with Scandinavian-style social services in its territories. You want human gametes Crispr, so you move your lab to a place without bioethical panels. You want to live in a sugar-free society, so you join a state called Keto Kosher. The life you lead is limited only by the people you associate with. And those people, because they’ve teamed up with you, will be more eager to reach a political consensus you like than the unnamed humanoids ever were. If they can’t, you – or they – will simply look for another network status. This kind of polity, Srinivasan writes, “crowns Exit over Voice”.
Albert O. Hirschman, the original creator of those concepts, did not like prophecy. He looked down on what he saw as their Warhol-esque longing for airtime. A European Jewish refugee from Nazism, he was similarly wary of the possibility of an Exit-based, Patchwork-esque future. “It is possible to imagine a state system,” he wrote in 1978, in which “each country would supply its citizens with a different assortment of public goods.” They could ‘specialize’ in power, wealth, growth, justice, peace, the observance of human rights, and so on.’ Hirschman found this vision inspiringly ‘polyphonic’, but ‘perhaps too good to be true’. For starters, what if a rival power invades? If you think about it, this new polity of ours is vulnerable to many of the same risks as our old polity. Our leader may turn out to be a megalomaniac that we cannot fire. We may prefer to leave, but we don’t have the means. Maybe no other place we want to live will bring us in.
Speaking of which, who are “we”? As I read Srinivasan’s book, my editor brain hung over how often he reaches for that pronoun. For example, in the opening essay, he writes, “We want to be able to peacefully begin a new state for the same reason that we want a bare patch of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh start, or a clean slate.” Later: “History comes closest to a physics of mankind.” And: “In the fullness of time, with really open datasets, we might even be able to develop Asimovian psychohistory.”
Does “we” refer to people like Srinivasan, the technologists, the self-bootstrappers, the seekers of karmabhomi? Is it a weird-fun Dr. Bronner’s “we”, a freaky Borg “we”? Does it include the fellow travelers he posted in that email in 2013 — the other Exit enthusiasts? They too have only risen with the maelstrom. After lying relatively low for a few years, Curtis Yarvin has resurfaced with a newsletter about Substack, and his influence on prominent Republicans was recently explored extensively by Vanity Fair. Blake Masters is the Thiel-funded, Trump-approved Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Arizona and makes fun of RAGE on the stump. Patri Friedman runs a venture fund that invests in charter cities. Gibson has a book coming out later this year called Paper Belt on Fire: How renegade investors sparked a revolt against the university.
ILLUSTRATION: EDDIE GUY
All those people, I suspect, would soon find their notes in the polyphonic world that Srinivasan envisions. And it’s likely anyone else who lives roughly by his values would, too, from the 19-year-old cipher wiz in Mumbai to the crypto nomad from high school in Costa Rica to the billionaire investor in his bunker in New Zealand. But if you remove the techno-cruft – the promises of a new civilization built on a new pile, one that favors decentralization, decentralization of power and the sovereignty of each individual and/or central processing unit – you see that the essential political philosophy is here quite outdated. I don’t know what to call it. Cosmopolitan Feudalism? Enlightened Tribalism? Corkscrew cliquism? It reflects the belief that the main failure of contemporary society is that the wrong people keep the power. It tackles the problem by unbundling society and then bundling it back together to make sure none of those people ever bother you again. And okay, as long as nuclear weapons don’t come loose, maybe it’ll be fine. Maybe you’ll go to your Bermuda in the Sky and I’ll go to my DigiSweden and we’ll both be happy in the telepresence of the people we’ve chosen. But we may find that the imbalance of power, scattered across the overlapping constellations of the physical world that we still see outside our windows, feels as bad as ever. And maybe we notice that we especially miss home desperately.
If I could slipping through the quantum foam at the bottom of the maelstrom, I think I’ll eventually end up in an alternate universe where Srinivasan gives a talk called “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Voice.” He could start it the same way: poke fun at the government, praise the garage guy ethos, put some Hirschman on the Startup Schoolers. And then he might say, ‘Silicon Valley is a place where a certain ideal of American progress finds its purest expression. That makes it our job to provide not only solution-oriented oratory and various repackaging of rare earth minerals, but also the tools for a better, fairer future for all. So Startup Schoolers, let’s see how we can update the crappy code base! Help me clean up the FUD! Whatever we all believe, however we disagree, let’s use our voices!”
There’s no point in wondering what’s down there, though. We have our own maelstrom to escape. The exit is ours. We are the protagonist.
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