<\/p>\n
You see the future, right? You want to have a kid, so you go enroll in a network state with Nordic-style social benefits in its territories. You want to Crispr human gametes, so you move your lab to a locality without bioethics panels. You want to live in a sugarless society, so you join a state called Keto Kosher. The life you live is constrained only by the people you choose to associate with. And those people, because they have self-bundled with you, will be more eager to reach a political consensus you like than the nameless hominids ever were. If they can\u2019t, you\u2014or they\u2014will simply seek another network state. This kind of polity, Srinivasan writes, \u201cprizes Exit above Voice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Albert O. Hirschman, the original coiner of those concepts, didn\u2019t care for prophesiers. He looked down on what he saw as their Warhol-esque desire for airtime. A European Jewish refugee from Nazism, he was similarly wary of the possibility of an Exit-based, Patchwork-style future. \u201cIt is possible to visualize a state system,\u201d he wrote in 1978, in which \u201ceach country would supply its citizens with a different assortment of public goods.\u201d They could \u201c\u2018specialize\u2019 in power, wealth, growth, equity, peacefulness, the observance of human rights, and so on.\u201d Hirschman found this vision inspiringly \u201cpolyphonic,\u201d but \u201cperhaps too beautiful to be real.\u201d For one thing, what if a rival power invades? When you think about it, this new polity of ours is vulnerable to a lot of the same risks as our old polity. Our leader could turn out to be a megalomaniac we can\u2019t fire. We might prefer to leave but lack the resources. Maybe no other place we want to live will take us in.<\/p>\n
Speaking of which, who are \u201cwe\u201d? As I read Srinivasan\u2019s book, my editor brain kept getting hung up on how often he reaches for that pronoun. In the opening essay, for instance, he writes: \u201cWe want to be able to peacefully start a new state for the same reason we want a bare plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh startup, or a clean slate.\u201d Later: \u201cHistory is the closest thing we have to a physics of humanity.\u201d And: \u201cIn the fullness of time, with truly open data sets, we may even be able to develop Asimovian psychohistory.\u201d<\/p>\n
Does \u201cwe\u201d refer to people like Srinivasan, the technologists, the self-bootstrappers, the seekers of karmabhoomi?<\/em> Is it a weird-fun Dr. Bronner\u2019s \u201cwe,\u201d a freaky Borg \u201cwe\u201d? Does it include the fellow travelers he CC\u2019d on that email back in 2013\u2014the other lovers of Exit? They too have only risen with the maelstrom. After laying relatively low for a few years, Curtis Yarvin has resurfaced with a newsletter on Substack, and his influence on prominent Republicans was recently explored at length by Vanity Fair<\/em>. Blake Masters is the Thiel-funded, Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for US Senate in Arizona and jokes about 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n All those people, I suspect, would quickly find their notes in the polyphonic world that Srinivasan imagines. And it\u2019s likely that anyone else who lives according to roughly his values would too, from the 19-year-old coding wiz in Mumbai to the grad-school dropout crypto-nomadding in Costa Rica to the billionaire investor in his New Zealand bunker. But when you strip off the techno-cruft\u2014the promises of a new civilization engineered on a new stack, one that privileges decentralization, devolution of power, and the sovereignty of every individual and\/or central processing unit\u2014you see that the essential political philosophy here is pretty antiquated. I don\u2019t know what to call it. Cosmopolitan feudalism? Enlightened tribalism? Corkscrew cliquism? It reflects a belief that the main failure of contemporary society is that the wrong people<\/em> hold the power. It addresses the problem by unbundling society and then rebundling it to ensure that none of those people ever bother you again. And OK, as long as no nukes get loose, maybe that turns out fine. Maybe you go to your Bermuda in the Sky and I go to my DigiSweden and we\u2019re both happy in the telepresence of the people we\u2019ve chosen. But maybe we find that the imbalance of power, spread out across the overlapping constellations of the physical world we still see outside our windows, feels just as bad as always. And maybe we find that, most of all, we desperately miss home.<\/p>\n If I could<\/span> slip through the quantum foam at the bottom of the maelstrom, I think I might eventually arrive in an alternate universe in which Srinivasan gives a talk called \u201cSilicon Valley\u2019s Ultimate Voice.\u201d He might start it just the same way\u2014poke a little fun at the government, praise the garage-guy ethos, lay some Hirschman on the Startup Schoolers. And then he might say: \u201cSilicon Valley is a place where a certain ideal of American progress finds its purest expression. That makes it our job to offer not just solutioneering oratory and different repackagings of rare earth minerals but also the tools of a better, fairer future for all. So Startup Schoolers, let\u2019s figure out how to update the crappy code base! Help me clear the FUD! Whatever we may all believe, however we may disagree, let\u2019s use our Voice!\u201d<\/p>\n No point wondering what\u2019s down there, though. We have our own maelstrom to escape. Exit is up to us. We are the protagonist.<\/p>\n
\n