Exitocracy

Discussion

Balaji's 'Network State' as an Exitocratic Manifesto

Divya Siddarth, Glen Weyl, Anne-Marie Slaughter:

"Srinivasan’s gospel is one of exitocracy: an ideology centered around the idea of exiting or “taking one’s business elsewhere”. Such an ideology is ripe for a global moment of polarization, paralysis, frustration and fear. Many agree that their current political-economic systems are not working for them and have little trust in their ability to effect change within those systems through democratic processes. Moreover, the nation-state is an awkward vehicle for solving many of our problems, which cut across and within nations, like the Internet or AI, climate change and the spread of diseases to be contained and cured. TNS models necessary experimentation in the form and function of what John Dewey called “new publics”, and rightly holds that emerging technology can and should empower such social imagination, just as the development of the printing press opened the door to imagining and realizing the mass democracies of the 19th century.

This makes it particularly ironic that Srinivasan’s solution is so backwards-looking. Exit is a necessary right, but it requires something to exit to. What we get here is less Star Trek and more Game of Thrones. He imagines states composed of a tight knit community committed to a single, sharp “one commandment” (e.g. strict dietary rules), ruled by a founder-king and enforced by a blockchain-enforced contract to monitor adherence to both. Exitocracy preserves ideological alignment, rendering voice in democracy unnecessary—the assumption is that those unhappy with the dictats of one feudal lord would simply find another.

Here Srinivasan builds on the libertarianism that has characterized past decades of Silicon Valley: a deep distrust of the state and an antipathy to regulation, welfare, public goods, social justice, and any supporters of these causes. But he explicitly recognizes the core flaw of this worldview: collective endeavors require sacrifice for the common good, sacrifices that purely atomized individuals optimizing for their self-interest will not make. His solution is a turn towards enforced morality, requiring a quasi- religious attachment to values that separate a network state from the world outside. Little wonder, then, that Srinivasan allies himself closely with the self-titled “neoreactionary” movement funded by his mentor Peter Thiel, which advocates for the erosion of democracy in favor of “American monarchy”.

But the power of networks is found in embracing and organizing the complexity of our shared lives, not in these impoverished constraints towards homogeneity and hierarchy."

(https://cip.org/blog/network-societies)

More information

• The Network Society