It’s two weeks to RE:WIRED Green, our event on climate change and the power of human ingenuity to tackle it. We have speakers on food technology and food waste, de-extinction, glaciology, intergenerational activism, right to repair, community farming, nuclear power and more – including ocean explorer Sylvia Earle, restaurateur Kayla Abe, paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara, and cultured meat pioneer Isha Datar. Visit us on September 28 in San Francisco. As a WIRED subscriber, you can get a 30 percent discount on a ticket by using the discount code HOTWIRED30 when you register. And now, here’s this month’s update.
Silicon Valley Exceptionalism
Silicon Valley is not only a melting pot for new technology, but has long served as a breeding ground for political ideas. I find it interesting—though unsurprisingly, in retrospect—that the Bay Area ethos of individualism and self-actualization has led in two very different directions simultaneously. On the one hand, tech companies in general favor progressive values such as access to abortion and LGBTQ rights; on the other hand, the Valley is home to a growing libertarian movement hostile to government regulation and social interventions.
Our cover story this month is Anthony Lydgate’s profile of one of that movement’s flag bearers, Balaji Srinivasan. If you have never heard of Srinivasan, one possible reason is that he is known to be hostile to journalists, who accordingly tend to avoid writing about him. (I think you’ll like how Anthony handles that in his story.) Srinivasan is certainly not as famous as some of the others in his circle — a group of wealthy disestablishmentarians grouped around PayPal founder and Trump financier Peter Thiel — but he has gradually become more widely known, most recently through the publication of a book called The network statuswhich came out earlier this year (no less on American Independence Day).
The culmination of Srinivasan’s political thinking over the years, including an article he wrote for WIRED in 2013, calls on people to abandon traditional forms of government in favor of new, virtual states connected not by geography, but by what shared values they prefer. You could choose a state that provides universal health care, enforces vegetarianism, or genetically engineer your kids, and if you don’t like the way things are going there, you can simply stake and, digitally speaking, move to another jurisdiction.
This may seem crazy to you – or it may seem very reasonable. Srinivasan reflects a discontent that is widespread regardless of your politics. The idea that our existing electoral democracy is really just an elected oligarchy runs all the way from Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary writer who advocates replacement of the system with a benevolent monarchy, to Hélène Landemore, the Yale political scientist who advocates a more hands-on – in the form of citizen participation called “Open Democracy”. Srinivasan’s world of self-sovereign, cloud-based digital states may seem like pie in the air, but isn’t it more so than Landemore’s vision of a polity deeply involved in discussing the kinds of questions we’ve traditionally outsourced to professional politicians and bureaucrats?
I think this is one of the most important questions we face today. As I wrote in a Reddit thread over four years ago, “we run 21st century societies on 17th or 18th century software”, the flaws of which are only becoming more apparent to everyone. Who gets to build civilization’s next software stack, and what it looks like, will be one of the defining challenges of the coming decades. I would say that it is therefore essential to pay attention to the ideas of people like Srinivasan, whatever you think of them.
