No Exit Opportunities
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Just as with Silk Road, the political philosophy and business model appear to go hand-in-hand. The accumulated wisdom of the ages seems to have very encouraging things to say about tech entrepreneurs, when read through the right lenses. Just one weird trick—remaking global geopolitics around the model of Silicon Valley start-ups—will foster all the freedom and prosperity one could reasonably ask for. The very best way for humanity to spread to the stars, and perhaps even remake the universe, is to just let Silicon Valley engineers do their thing. A new life awaits in the off-world colonies, provided only that the demands of officious bureaucrats, mendacious East Coast journalists, social justice whiners, and other enemies of progress are swept into the midden.
The problem is not that arguments for freedom and technological innovation are stupid or wicked. They are not. It is that political theory can’t do its proper job when it becomes an instrument of self-justification and self-soothing. It is very easy for highly intelligent people to find arguments and justifications for why they are right and ought to be allowed to do exactly what they want. This becomes even easier when they are surrounded by others who agree with them and sometimes even venerate them. The cryptographer Bruce Schneier is famous for Schneier’s law: the dictum that anyone can invent a security system so clever that he or she can’t break it. Cognitive psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have shown that much the same is true for arguments. Anyone can make a political case so compelling that he or she can’t see the flaws in it.
This led to a complicated relationship with the state. Some businesses looked to government to help them find shelter from the storm. Microsoft, after its antitrust scare in the 1990s, devoted itself to building good relations with the feds, and with other governments around the world, influencing regulators to act against its rivals. New platforms too built relations with the power establishment. During the Obama years, one commentator claimed that Google was so intimately intertwined with the administration that it had “achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government.” When corporate giants like Facebook suggested that their business models brought people together for the good of the world, politicians and journalists listened with enormous respect. There seemed to be a tacit accommodation between liberal technocrats and Silicon Valley: Obama was visibly disinclined to break up technology monopolies.
By 2017, the relationship between West Coast technologists and East Coast technocrats began to sour. Many liberals believed that the algorithms powering social media’s business model had helped Trump win. Journalists stopped deferring automatically to Silicon Valley leaders, while many Democrats, like the dynamic young lawyer Lina Khan, began talking about breaking up tech monopolies. This divide played out in the workplace too. As liberals warmed to racial and gender equity, many technology funders and senior executives grew cool, resenting employee demands that they reshape their business plans to reflect social justice priorities. Big incumbents like Microsoft, Facebook, and Google were unwilling to break completely with government, but began to worry that their business models were in the crosshairs (especially after Khan became Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission in 2021).
Riffing on his idiosyncratic understanding of Thomas Hobbes, Srinivasan argued in his 2022 book, The Network State, that human social order had once been based on fear and worship of God, and then on fear and worship of the state. Now that faith in the state was “plummeting,” there was a new Leviathan in town—crypto and internet based networks. Crypto’s underpinnings—blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs—enabled a new form of social organization that “on key dimensions was becoming more powerful and more just” [emphasis in original] than government. People could exit the system, and use the crypto framework to roll out their own “start-up societies,” on the model of start-up companies, organizing around “single moral innovations” such as reject-the-modern-world Catholicism or keto diets.
In 2023, Andreessen, who had defended Srinivasan’s original speech and hired him after he made it, laid out an even more ambitious take. What was at stake in the battle between Silicon Valley and its detractors was not just the future of Earth but of the stars. Andreessen had previously denounced the existential risk movement (with some justice) as a millenarian cult, but then moved quickly to promote his own alternative faith. His widely discussed “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” was a Nicene creed to progress, in which the words “we believe” appeared no less than 113 times.
Something like this tendency likely led Ross Ulbricht down his extreme path. In an interview with Andy Greenberg, Ulbricht argued that Silk Road was part of a transformative “epoch in the evolution of mankind,” which was causing a “monumental shift in the power structure of the world.” A few months earlier, not long after arguing that voluntarist organizations like Silk Road were resistant to violence, Ulbricht had “solicited the murder-for-hire” of a Silk Road vendor called FriendlyChemist, who was threatening to publish the names and addresses of other Silk Road vendors and customers. This was just the start of a virtual murder spree in which Ulbricht paid for several untrustworthy associates and associates-of-associates to be assassinated.
Ulbricht has never publicly explained the contradictions between his political beliefs and his sordid actions. Very likely, he doesn’t really see the gap. Our capacity to reason evolved so that we could tell ourselves and others plausible stories that justify what we want to believe, papering over the holes in our logic as necessary. It is difficult for a man to understand something when his business model depends on his not understanding it, but it’s depressingly easy for him (or her) to come up with reasonable sounding justifications for why they don’t need to care.
Gellner emphasizes how wildly unlikely it is that modernity should have come into being. Structured rational inquiry does not come naturally to human beings, who for most of history lived in societies where the prevailing beliefs were an arbitrary jumble of commonly accepted myths and shibboleths. We live in an improbable world where civil society is, for the most part, strong enough to restrain the state, and the state is strong enough to restrain civil society (from descending into religious war, for example). This is what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have called the “narrow corridor.” Gellner argues that this did not simply require the building up of state capacity, but the creation of a genuine civil society, in which people can freely enter and exit groups and other forms of economic, political, and social association without the swearing of blood oaths. He suggests that we might never have discovered this fragile equilibrium had it not been for chance outcomes in the struggle between religious sects and government a few centuries ago.
Thus, exit is important, but it cannot be the single sustaining principle of a healthy politics. The Silicon Valley business model of founders and start-ups competing in a market cannot, and should not be, extended into a universal basis for order. Left-wing critics of exit capitalism like Raymond Craib and Quinn Slobodian have provided histories of how the many past attempts to leave the system have either failed or turned out, like Ulbricht’s pirate kingdom, to involve their own accommodations with the man. But these criticisms do not come simply from the Left. A very broad body of right-leaning political economy comes to much the same conclusion—that one cannot separate out the system of market competition from its political and social underpinnings and expect it to thrive. If Silicon Valley wants to build new opportunities for exit as part of its business model, it should recognize the limits as well as the opportunities. There is some work by people sympathetic to the network state (notably that of Vitalik Buterin) that points in this direction, treating exit as a means of constraining the power of central authority rather than magically replacing it.