Exitocracy

Discussion

The Silicon Valley Theology of Exit

Chor Pharn:

"To understand the Network State conference, one must first understand the religion of Exit that animates Silicon Valley.

The Valley’s founders have always believed that when institutions ossify, you build your own outside. The microchip was an exit from the mainframe. The personal computer was an exit from IBM. The Internet was an exit from state-regulated media. Bitcoin was an exit from central banks.

Balaji’s network state is simply the next logical step: exit the state itself.

He formalised this vision in his 2022 book The Network State: How to Start a New Country, which imagined online communities that crowdfund land, develop micro-governance charters, and seek diplomatic recognition. He treated code as constitution, tokenomics as tax base, and Discord channels as proto-ministries.

To his credit, it’s a bold attempt to reinvent civic life for an age when trust in institutions has collapsed. The problem is that it treats governance as a software problem—one that can be rebooted from scratch rather than rewired from within.

This is why his guest list makes such anthropological sense: venture capitalists (Ben Horowitz, Naval Ravikant), crypto founders (Vitalik Buterin, Arthur Hayes), digital regulators (Abu Dhabi, Palau, El Salvador), and influencers (Nas Daily, Andrew Huberman).

These are people who have already lived their lives in exit mode: each built fortunes by optimising code, not institutions; each believes the state can be “forked” like an open-source project.

The Network State conference was their high mass."

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/popups-and-pipes-how-the-network)

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