Exodus Reconsidered

Some battles are better fought from a distance. Indeed, it can be better to exit and build something great than to stay and fight but build nothing. My critique of Mike Solana's "Exit vs. Build."

Mike Solana has a problem with “exit.” Too many of his friends have ditched the Bay Area for places that are considerably less infested with criminals, social justice fundamentalists, and other chaos agents. But he thinks California is too big to fail. Solana, writing from PirateWires, is upset that free people would exercise the exit option over voice or loyalty—you know, like pirates once did. And he seems blissfully unaware of Hirschman’s threefold dynamic, writing, “It’s better to fight than to run.” Despite being committed to staying put and “building,” Solana doesn’t mention loyalty once in his screed about exit and voice. No matter. My goal is to interrogate some of Solana’s misunderstandings about exit. His text is in Roman. My commentary remains in italics.

First, there’s exit within America, say from San Francisco to Austin or Miami. This is an understandable impulse, and closest to the “voice” position if paired with strong local engagement in, for example, a proponent’s new home in Austin or Miami.

Then, there’s “exit” out of politics completely, and in some cases the physical world. Arguments here tend to focus on the regulations governing our cities and countries, which are often designed by anti-human crusaders to be unworkable.

We should always be suspicious when a writer doesn’t quote quotes or name names. Blanket ascriptions usually indicate laziness or a deliberate attempt to ascribe a position to many that only a handful hold. In this case, exiting politics probably doesn’t mean what Solana thinks it does, but his critique is vague enough not to make for a steelman. Certain narrow dimensions of life can exit the physical world, though these are almost always linked to flesh and blood humans. No one denies this. Exit is a modality of decentralization that can function at various layers of the human stack. Now, as sympathetic as I am to the idea that most California “crusaders” are “anti-human,” it’s still good form to do more than just assert. Still, let’s give Solana the benefit of the doubt.

Proponents of this form of “exit” usually make the case for meaningful change in the world through business, and especially through software, where there are fewer impediments to building.

Business, software, and software businesses are all reasons people might exit in order to build (e.g., a company leaves CA and incorporates in TX) or build in order to exit (e.g., a person can now leave USD for BTC). We call this subversive innovation and subversive entrepreneurship. Sometimes, these can be superior change vectors when you’re outnumbered, outspent, and outgunned. Anyway, we used to call them pioneers.

One obvious problem with both positions is national politics.… From Elizabeth Warren’s grab for unrealized gains, which would end the concept of startups, to Lina Khan’s crusade against the concept of successful companies, the federal government is increasingly animated by war with industry. Eventually, if these trends continue, there will be nowhere left to run but from the country. Exit, then, even in its more reasonable form, is implicitly global.

This is all true, of course. But it hardly seems like a case against exit. I know of multiple tech and biotech companies incorporated in the Prospera ZEDE (Special Economic Zone) in Honduras on the island of Roatan, where pirates originally settled. One, a biotech company, could never have gotten off the ground with accelerated human trials for gene therapy had they stayed in the US. Sometimes Pharaoh is so shitty you have to go into the desert (or to paradise) to escape a corrupt, captured regulatory regime like that of the FDA. Again, Solana insists, “It’s better to fight than to run,” but I would argue it’s better to exit and build something than to stay, fight, and build nothing. The pirates of Roatan and the innovators of Prospera are building. People who like to fight should probably stay and fight. But the circumstances are both/and, not either/or.

Now, in its purest, philosophical distillation, proponents of exit retreat to the internet with a search for answers to our institutional rot that concludes in everything from enthusiasm for virtual reality to the concept of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State: “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”

A little more colorfully, “The internet,” Balaji writes in a recent post worth checking out in full, “is the next America.” Roughly, the argument here is technologists in San Francisco have more in common with technologists in Shenzhen or sub-Saharan Lagos than they do with a farmer in Napa, or a communist barista living in the Haight. As “netizens” slowly come to realize this, they will naturally form a class consciousness, followed by a desire to live among each other, and ultimately a nation in the real world.

Did Solana read

Balaji

‘s The Network State? Maybe he did not and is making assumptions, or maybe he did and is unpersuaded. But the seeds of our collective self-consciousness have long been sown. My friends in the liminal web are developing our own culture and working to make this coalescence more formalized. In our first full course at Parallax, we had 21 participants hailing from Sweden, Peru, the Netherlands, South Africa, France, Switzerland, the US, and others. And as The Grey Robes continue to constitute themselves, we are providing a moral-cultural core for a cosmopolitan community that, though networking first, might well upend the soil-n-conquest model of government. In any case, I can smell the skepticism coming, just as King George III must have been skeptical of a workable constitutional republic between 1776 and 1789.

Obviously, there are many standing questions here in terms of how the future nations of our netizens will form, thrive, and defend themselves from what, following the Ayn Randian brain drain, will presumably be a large and growing number of starving nuclear powers.

I think this is supposed to be humor, but if it’s serious, we should be clear that decentralists are people united by a desire to be freer and, indeed, more Promethean. We want to organize ourselves according to the “consent of the governed” and practice our virtues and our crafts. But we are under no illusions. Crypto networks, startup societies, and special jurisdictions are experiments, and many will fail. They are niches of possibility within an evolutionary fitness landscape. If they are wildly successful—so much that the nuclear powers are starved—I’ll celebrate and worry far less about the debt-fueled welfare-warfare orgies that are now the greatest threat to the Republic Empire.

But I’m still stuck on the premise of the netizen itself. What does he love? What does he worship? When entrepreneurs and technologists from disparate cultures around the world come together like those kids in Captain Planet, and form their digital community, what language do they speak? As fate would have it, we recently got a pretty good glimpse of tech’s “global community,” and holy shit am I not interested in buying the subscription.

I’m still stuck on the premise of the San Franciscan itself. What does she love? What does she worship? When junkies, thugs, and SJFs from disparate cultures from around the world come together like zombie hordes to smash and grab, loiter and shoot up, or loot and riot under the BLM banner, what language do they speak? As fate would have it, Governor Newsom rounded up the homeless like Uyghurs and power-washed the fecal streets so that Master Xi would smile radiantly upon him for a day. Yet people are still paying $3,500 for a 2BR apt, on average, only to scrape excrement off their shoes, be gaslit by the town mothers, or be lectured routinely that trans women are women…

Picking on SF is just too easy. We can simply reply that there are millions of people from around the world who want to wiggle out from under technocratic or theocratic thumbs. Many of them speak broken English, and they find each other online so that they can coordinate activities and capital to create “archipelagos” of relative freedom that can serve as escape hatches and niches of possibility on obscure patches. Some of their coordination systems will live in the cryptographic cloud. But they aspire to form self-governing jurisdictions on terra firma. It would be dandy if these eventually evolve into networked city-states resembling Singapore, Dubai, or Liechtenstein.

A couple weeks back, I had a great conversation with Jan Sramek, the founder of California Forever, which is attempting to found a new city in the Bay Area (piece and video here, full transcript here). If successful, the project will serve as an inspiring example of progress in a state where progress has largely been legislated out of existence.

If you watch a video of Mr. Sramek, you’ll find the man speaks English just fine but in an accent that is distinctly from not-America. So we’re to understand that A) California is worth fighting for “Forever,” but Sramek’s home country is not, B) Sramek’s attempt to build a new city within California will somehow not represent an opportunity for exit, say, from SF, and C) the weight of both federal and state regulations will fail to mute the aspirations of the project? The nested jurisdictions problem Solana points to above cuts both ways, after all. And Mr. Sramek is clearly okay to exit in order to build. In any case, California was settled by waves of different peoples exiting other jurisdictions. Each, in his or her own way, was a pioneer. Today, there are few places left to settle, but the pioneers are still with us. Sramek is one of them.

You can’t live inside the internet, and if you could it would be a nightmare. The real world will be built and run by people who seek to build and run the real world, and everyone else — no matter their intelligence, no matter their intention — will lose. “Exit vs. voice” is a lie. Our choices are “vanish” or “build,” and “build” will be a fight.

Exit vs. voice is a lie? Told by whom? No one I know thinks that leaving means ceasing to express himself, much less that people will live anywhere but somewhere in the real world. No one I know knows how to “vanish,” either. The Internet represents a cluster of technologies that facilitates exit, voice, loyalty (and war). It is still a new frontier colonized by people from different places, which is what Balaji meant by America. Subversive innovations are designed to lower coordination and transaction costs, raise predation and parasitism costs, and reduce switching costs (exiting a system). Mike Solana thinks people like us want to build Shangri La in VR. Instead, we want to fight, too. But in the digital age, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation are way more effective than politics, policy, and punditry in that fight. And you don’t have to live in San Francisco to gird your loins and rush into the breach, even if the enemy is there.