No Exit Opportunities: Business Models and Political Thought in Silicon Valley
It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard. Rothbard had argued that markets and individual connections were really all we needed. As the Dread Pirate, whose real name was Ross Ulbricht, summarized it, a happier world awaited those who took the exit road from ordinary politics. They could escape the “thieving murderous mits [sic]” of the state to embrace the freedom that emerged from a “multitude of voluntary interactions between individuals.”
For Ulbricht, Silk Road wasn’t just a way to make money but the tech-fueled expression of a political philosophy. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin had (supposedly) enabled a new realm of voluntary exchange outside the grasp of government, allowing people to buy and sell drugs and guns without the feds interfering. Of course, state tyranny might reemerge if voluntary organizations like Silk Road started to steal from their users, or spied on, or even killed them. Ulbricht, however, believed that the forces of market competition would prevent this from happening, leading to “freedom and prosperity the likes of which the world has never known.”
Ambitious libertarian projects to escape the sordid compromises of politics have been part of Silicon Valley culture since the beginning. But Ulbricht’s dream of escape from politics and its vexations has become increasingly influential in the decade since the Dread Pirate Roberts book club. Several prominent Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs have become disenchanted with the U.S. government, East Coast media, and even their own employees (which have all increasingly become disenchanted with them).
It isn’t surprising that entrepreneurs dream of discovering the off-ramp from a world of squalid political bargains to the dizzying freedom of market choice and unlimited technological progress. Perhaps it isn’t even a shock that many are willing to embrace pro-tariff, anti-immigration Donald Trump, who promises to crush their enemies (and commute Ulbricht’s life sentence for drug trafficking while he’s at it). Like Ulbricht, they draw inspiration and justification for their dreams from political philosophy, mixing old thinkers with new machinic visions of technology devouring and transforming humanity.
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.
But the contradictions become clear if you squint even a little. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs genuinely have a great amount to be proud of—some of their technological innovations have become cornerstones of modern society. Yet business plans and contemporary political spats are insecure foundations for grand theories of the deep future of human civilization and politics—a truth vividly illustrated when Silk Road’s founder attempted to hire hit men to stamp out extortionists, hastening the business’s demise. Profit models are not philosophies, and should not be gussied up as such, festooned with purloined intellectual gew-gaws and other pirate fineries. Serious thinkers should not be pressed into service merely as propagandists for the cause.
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.
Of course, this problem plagues the Left as well as the Right, cloistered academics just as much as Twitter iconoclasts. But good political philosophy and social science is badly suited to provide either intellectual ballast for business models or balm for the bruised egos of founders. It is, by its nature, awkward and vexing. It doesn’t provide a straight path to some blurry and glorious imaginary future but brings into sharper focus the tensions and difficulties of today.
If Silicon Valley thinkers are to take their political commitments to liberty and technological progress seriously, they need to acknowledge and deal with the contradictions in their ideological positions rather than papering over them. Rather than spinning out business models into unconvincing grand social theories, they ought start with good theories and think seriously about the implications for their business models.
Here, they might usefully learn from a consistent line of reasoning in classical liberalism that they currently neglect. Eighteenth-century liberals like Hume and the authors of The Federalist Papers were obsessed with the dangers of faction, and the need to channel it so that it did not overwhelm society. Their twentieth- and twenty-first-century heirs, like Ernest Gellner, Douglass North, and Barry Weingast, have adapted the tools of social science to understand the circumstances under which open societies can live and thrive despite, and sometimes thanks to, their internal contradictions.
The lessons are straightforward, even if they jar painfully with some common myths in the Valley. Actual free markets require a state that is both powerful and constrained. Real technological progress is not solely generated by risk-taking entrepreneur-heroes in a social vacuum. It is also the contingent by-product of a fragile set of common social and political arrangements. Without constitutional constraints, voluntary interactions tend, as Silk Road did, to degenerate into gangster capitalism. And the trick of creating a vibrant open order is not to try to escape the sordid bargains of politics, or to eliminate your enemies, but to channel disagreement usefully. You cannot escape the company of those whom you detest, however unpleasant you may find it—that is the fundamental premise of the open society. When you try, you discover (as many libertarian schemers looking to improve the human condition have discovered) that you bring the disagreements along with you. You have to figure out ways to live with those who oppose you and whom you oppose, and ideally to derive collective benefit from your mutual vexations.
How could that way of thinking best be adapted to understand the technological and political choices that we face today? This is an open question—but it is the one that both politicized Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their critics ought to ask themselves, given the gravity of the challenges we face today. An open society is a very good thing, so long as you can keep it. But understanding how to keep it requires the intellectual rigor to understand where your business model and your broader politics reinforce each other and where they are in violent contradiction, to comprehend that you cannot escape the disagreement and contention that are part of human life.
Silicon Valley’s Never-Ending Search for Exit Opportunities
While political documents like John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” and Tim May’s “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” have gotten plenty of attention, business models are the most important carrier wave of the Silicon Valley philosophy. The deep intellectual history of Silicon Valley is narrated in a never-ending succession of venture capital pitches and shareholder prospectuses, the business plans of start-ups and entrepreneurs.
Thus, when Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape and cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, argued in 2013 that “software is eating the world,” he was lucidly articulating Silicon Valley’s broader business ethos, rather than creating it. Andreessen invoked Joseph Schumpeter’s arguments about creative destruction, arguing that technology’s storm of progress was not just tearing the economy asunder but disrupting traditional government functions such as national defense. His op-ed pithily expressed the broader opinion among Silicon Valley founders and funders that the world was a morass of intersecting, janky incumbent systems, just begging to be disrupted.
But practice preceded justification. Uber famously started from the premise that local transport rules had been shaped to favor the incumbents. Its alternative business model involved persistent law-breaking in the expectation that flouting the rules would change them. PayPal went after much bigger game than local taxi monopolies. Its founders hoped that their product might displace the U.S. dollar, even though, as Peter Thiel later admitted, they didn’t really understand how international currencies worked.
Like Schumpeter, Silicon Valley combines its love of markets with a soft spot for monopoly. When the internet hit big, Silicon Valley “Netheads” set themselves up against the “Bellheads” of a previous generation of incumbent monopolists such as Bell AT&T. Still, within every lean, hungry, tech start-up founder, a bloated monopolist was struggling to get out. Thiel famously claimed that economic competition was for losers, and advised his students to look for opportunities to build monopolies. Venture capitalists loved start-ups that promised to move fast and break things—but hoped that the companies they invested in would create their own profitable strangleholds on markets.
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.
Others wanted to get away altogether. Balaji Srinivasan was just one among many thinkers and talkers in the Bay Area when he gave a speech at Y Combinator in 2013, riffing on Albert Hirschman’s famous book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Srinivasan suggested that Silicon Valley was much more about exit than voice. If you were doing it right, you were well advised to leave the old system rather than trying to change it from within. If you worked for Microsoft and had a good idea for something new, your best bet was not to tell your boss, but to jump ship. That was the lesson of Silicon Valley’s origin story, when the “traitorous eight” engineers left Fairchild Semiconductor to found their own firms.
That was also why Srinivasan argued that Silicon Valley had to embrace its own “ultimate exit” on a much larger scale. The Valley needed to get away from the rules and regulations made by “Paper Belt” cities such as Washington, D.C., and develop its own case for innovation. As Srinivasan emphasized, others too were interested in exit. Thiel favored “seasteading” (libertarian communities that lived on the sea, outside the territorial claims of grasping governments), while Elon Musk wanted to build colonies on Mars. You didn’t have to go so far as that: according to Srinivasan, just reading Reddit instead of watching television could be a kind of exit.
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).
These tensions erupted in 2020, when a New York Times writer started researching a story that threatened to reveal the identity of “Scott Alexander,” a pseudonymous blogger popular with Silicon Valley rationalists. Prominent technology industry figures responded indignantly. As the New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus explained it, they saw the somewhat hapless Times journalist as a living exemplar of everything they hated about the media “gatekeepers” who, they believed, were deliberately trying to tear Silicon Valley down.
This spurred a rush toward exit. Srinivasan, who by this point had embraced “web3,” which proposed to refound the internet on technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, no longer thought reading Reddit was enough to fight the system. Like Ulbricht, Srinivasan had come to the conclusion that cryptocurrencies provided the foundations for a completely different way of doing things, based on exit rather than coercion, which could challenge and transform state-based politics.
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.
As more people created new societies on blockchain, the new “Bitcoin/web3” social order would begin to struggle for dominance against its older rivals, “nyt/usd” (the combination of the U.S. media complex for brainwashing “non-player characters” and the U.S. dollar), and “ccp/rmb” (the Chinese Communist Party and China’s national currency). As smaller states defected from the cross-Pacific fight between the U.S. media-dollar nexus and Chinese communism, they might give diplomatic recognition to start-up societies, creating “network states” and remaking the foundations of the global political order.
The Network State was uncompelling, but succeeded magnificently in portraying the immediate political hopes and peeves of Silicon Valley as grand secular forces contending to shape the planet’s future. Srinivasan seemed to see technology entrepreneurs as the world-historical equivalent of Marx’s proletariat, like the neo-reactionary writer Curtis Yarvin, whom he sometimes leaned on. Founders were the hidden protagonists of history, the economic class whose particular interests and beliefs mapped onto the future weal of humanity. With their singular visions, they would disrupt the old ways of politics, generating a vast array of start-up societies that ordinary people could choose between, governed by the forces of market competition and the possibility of exit. You could leave your community if you didn’t like it or, if you had enough guts to be a founder, create your own. The critics and naysayers—bureaucrats, journalists, professors and their ilk—were the enemy, creators and purveyors of the unthinking consensus that Yarvin and Srinivasan dubbed the “Cathedral.”
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.
The creed had its own schedule of sins—decelerating the development of AI was a “form of murder”—and it sought to convert the unbelievers through vigorous pulpit-pounding. Those who had not yet seen the light needed to understand how humanity had been led astray by a “mass demoralization campaign for six decades—against technology and against life—under varying names like “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “ESG,” “Sustainable Development Goals,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “Precautionary Principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “de-growth,” “the limits of growth,” and so on. Such “enemies” of progress were holding us back from a future in which fifty billion people could live on earth, spreading out to other planets, so that “our descendents will live in the stars.”
Andreessen’s enemies list reflected the broader articles of faith that were emerging among a Silicon Valley subculture. Thiel had already read out his own “Enemies List” to a cheering audience at a 2022 Bitcoin conference, even though in 2021, he had suggested that Bitcoin was a Chinese financial weapon. After his public conversion to the blockchain, he announced that ESG—Environmental and Social Governance—was the “real enemy” of Bitcoin, and more or less identical with the Chinese Communist Party. Thiel called on his listeners to go out and “take over the world.” Like Srinivasan—indeed like Ulrich a decade before—he proposed a Manichaean view of the world as a struggle between the armies of cryptocurrency, freedom, and individuality, and the minions of the enemy, bent on frustrating the future and getting their thieving hands on the goodies.
There are many things that could be said about how this emerging worldview has brought people who sincerely believe themselves to be committed to liberty and progress together with those who reject these commitments. Andreessen enthusiastically referenced Nick Land’s arguments about the “technocapital machine,” but did not mention Land’s fantasies about how this machine would devour human individuality, replacing it, and perhaps the human race, with “machinic desire.” Looked at just a little askance, “software eats the world” is a Lovecraftian nightmare.
Yet there is a much simpler problem. Behind all the convoluted future scenarios about the victory of the network state, conquering Bitcoin armies, and the glorious future of techno-optimism lies a business model that mistakenly fancies itself a political philosophy. The notion of moving fast and breaking things apotheosizes into a kind of Hegelian world-spirit, so that the complexities of history boil away, leaving a sludge of repetitive claims about the endless battle between the forces of progress and the armies of darkness, the entrepreneurial disruptors against the defenders of Old Corruption.
Profit models blur into grand plans to improve the human condition, and vice versa. Srinivasan, in addition to writing about the benefits of exit, has invested heavily in crypto. His Network State conferences bring together investors and political activists into shared arguments and, perhaps, coordinated actions in the future. Andreessen Horowitz has not just invested in crypto, but AI start-ups too, and has expressed its frustration at big incumbents like Microsoft/OpenAI, which it tacitly criticizes for building regulatory moats to protect their AI monopoly from newcomers. Andreessen’s justified unhappiness with the AI existential risk cult seems to have spurred him to create his own chiliastic pseudo-religion, complete with “patron saints.” When Andreessen Horowitz organizes donations to friendly politicians, it promotes both its own investments and the larger causes of open source and web3 at the same time.
This is very far from crude cynicism. Leftists are fond of pointing fingers at the get-rich-quick culture of crypto and, increasingly, AI. They are far slower to recognize the core of genuine idealism at the heart of these movements. But idealism can make it harder, not easier, to see the truth of things, especially when your ideals reflect your own business model right back at you.
It is hard not to be tempted by an ideology which suggests that your industry’s approach to business and technology provides the basic matrix on which the entire future order of the planet and, perhaps, the nearer parts of the galaxy, ought be constructed. It becomes remarkably easy to view countertendencies that frustrate your business interests or critics who puncture your personal amour-propre as world-historic threats to progress, who need to be utterly defeated. Your business efforts can, almost imperceptibly, become entwined with grand narratives, in which you and your comrades are the heroes who bring about extraordinary changes in the history of the world and cosmos. All this makes it difficult even to discern the contradictions and awkward questions that attach to your ideology, as they do to all ideologies, let alone to address them.
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.
It is unlikely that anyone actually died—the affair probably began as an elaborate scam, and one of the purported hit men was actually an undercover fed. Ulbricht—who was increasingly besieged by scammers and denial-of-service extortionists—could hardly go to the cops. But when it came down to it, he was perfectly willing to reach his own accommodation with the man, collaborating, as he believed, with organized crime to get treacherous confederates rubbed out.
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.
None of the more recent Silicon Valley ideologists has done anything like what Ulbricht tried to do. But the same belief that we are on the verge of a vast transformation—provided only the right forces prevail, and the wrong ones are defeated—is leading in some unhealthy directions. A technological faction, mostly composed of people who are deeply and sincerely attached to the values of openness and progress, has become increasingly hostile to open debate with those who disagree with them, and to understandings of progress that are not fully consonant with their own.
Again, this is not hypocrisy, but the ordinary workings of human minds. Inside the bubble, the contradictions are invisible. From outside, they are glaringly obvious. To promote open inquiry and free, market-based technological progress, you need an open society, not one founded on the enemy principle. The understandable desire to escape criticism, misunderstanding, and the frustrations of ordinary politics does not entail the radical remaking of the global geoeconomic order to confound the New York Times and its allies. The cult of progress and the technocapital singularity are Hayek’s “religion of the engineers” with the valences reversed—so that markets and AI rather than the state become the objects of worship. Over the last few years, Silicon Valley thinking has gotten drunk on its own business model, in a feedback loop in which wild premises feed into wilder assertions and then back. It’s time to sober up.
Conditions of Liberty
Too many Silicon Valley thinkers seem to view the centuries-long history of progress through the fish-eye lens of their business model. What they should actually do, given their values, is look at their business model from the perspective of the centuries-long history of progress. I am very far myself from being a classical liberal, and am not the right person to say where this should end up. But I can make suggestions for where it ought to begin—by engaging with people within the same intellectual tradition, or related ones, who have tried to take this longer view.
At a minimum, today’s Silicon Valley thought leaders should reread the thinkers whom they cite as inspirations, to see where they actually say what they are taken to say, and where they come to different conclusions. Here, for example, Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty presents a rather more complex argument about the relationship between voice and exit than Srinivasan suggests. Hirschman’s famous essay on “Rival Views of Market Society” is politely skeptical about doux commerce theories like Srinivasan’s, which suggest that markets create their own basis for social order. Schumpeter believed that not just the “creative destruction” of entrepreneurs but the fiscal capacity of the state is essential to capitalist progress. Once, and not too long ago, Andreessen called for left-liberals to think about how the state might build too. It would be good to see him return to those arguments, and to genuine engagement with the people he disagrees with.
But different starting points might lead to more interesting destinations. Ernest Gellner is far less read these days than he ought to be, but classic books like Plough, Sword and Book and Conditions of Liberty provide a powerful and astringent perspective on what is actually needed to sustain a political order in which discovery can take place, and people can organize around their particular interests and notions of the good life.
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.
If Gellner is right, then the kinds of voluntary association that Ulbricht and Srinivasan prize do not exist independently, but as the contingent by-product of a particular set of political and social arrangements. The age of “modular man,” in which people can combine into “effective associations and institutions without these being total” is a product both of a fragile balance of power with the state, and the shared language, conventions, and national identity that the state underpins. Dreams of exit from the state-based system are just that: you cannot separate the parts of civil society that you like from the powers of government and the conflicting ambitions of other people with different political goals than yours. When you cut out government entirely, you revert to gangster capitalism (of the kind that Ulbricht was speeding towards), or the internal tyranny of the clan, or simple disorder. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.
Similarly, you cannot separate out technological progress from the political and social conditions that enable it, as Andreessen wants to. Markets and technological progress do not exist in isolation. Those who disagree with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs over sustainability or the representation of stakeholders in key decisions are not servants of the enemies of progress. They are fellow citizens, in a shared set of political, social, and economic arrangements, and their voices count too. When classical liberals daydream about how much easier things would be if only the engineers were in charge, they should look to the actual modern example of what this would involve: the People’s Republic of China. (And whatever else one may want to say about this regime, the Chinese Communist Party has not hesitated to punish venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs who run afoul of political authorities.)
Other writers in the classical liberal tradition also have lessons. Karl Popper’s arguments for the open society are still widely cited. Rather less attention is paid to his enthusiasm for economic experimentation by the state as well as by entrepreneurs. Douglass North won a Nobel Prize for his institutional account of how successful market economies evolved and came to work. He too stressed the necessity of the state as a final authority and an indispensable solution to the myriad transaction problems of the economy, provided that it was appropriately constrained. Together with John Joseph Wallis and Barry Weingast, he argued that “open access orders” required not just the creative destruction of the marketplace, but the creative destruction of democratic processes too, as those who lose elections innovate on policy to try to regain power. For openness to work, there needs to be a peaceful and predictable system for election transitions. Political competition furthermore serves as a partial antidote to corruption.
None of these writers is necessarily right: all arguments of this kind are subject to revision, and sometimes to refutation. But they demand attention from Silicon Valley libertarians because these writers are similarly committed to preserving the conditions for exit and progress, but under the aspect of eternity rather than Silicon Valley’s homebrewed current thing. Rather than extrapolating contemporary desires and complaints into a grand long-term argument, they begin with the long-term perspective, providing a framework from which people might work their way back to understand the contemporary.
How might this perspective be useful to the current problems that Silicon Valley, and the rest of us, face? Again, as someone who is not a classical liberal, I’m not the right person to provide answers. But some of the most important questions are clear.
First, one cannot just assume that progress creates the conditions for its own success. The enabling conditions of modernity may very well have arisen as a result of a wildly unlikely historical accident. Creative destruction helps provide the growth that enables liberal societies to sustain themselves, but it should not destroy its own political and social preconditions. There are strong reasons to believe that liberalism is extremely difficult to sustain without democratic politics and the orderly turnover of power after elections. It is not clear that Silicon Valley’s most vocal political commentators understand this, and indeed, as Rob Reich recounts, some important figures in Silicon Valley seem to be skeptical of democracy as such. But democracy seems to be inextricable from the open processes of discovery and self-determination that they do claim to value.
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.
Finally, and most generally, the open society is inevitably vexing. It is full of people who disagree with you, who have different aspirations and understandings of how to reach them, who will criticize you, annoy you, and make you generally unhappy. You can respond by pointing out the multitudinous ways in which they are wrong, and seem to be readily taken in by obviously ludicrous beliefs. They can respond by pointing out your own particular stupidities and flaws, almost certainly with equal justice.
For better or worse, this pain and mess is unavoidable. If you want to live in a free and open society, you have no choice but to endure it. When Silicon Valley thinkers fantasize about the exit door, it’s hard to avoid the impression that they would dearly prefer not to have to put up with disagreement. That is an unsurprising human reaction. None of us love being contradicted, and we are all individually incapable of seeing the huge flaws and mistakes in our views of the world.
These thinkers, and the rest of us too, should summon their courage to deal with it, and perhaps even turn their energies to thinking about how it could be channeled better and more usefully. Instead of book clubs that preach to the converted, and Twitter/X pronouncements laying down the party line, they might begin to actively engage with those who disagree with them, and work on projects that not only allow for that disagreement, but make it useful. Perhaps there’s a business model in that. Even if not, worsening geopolitics and internal political divides are amplifying each other more every day. Building a healthier relationship between technology entrepreneurs and the political institutions of a free society would benefit both the entrepreneurs themselves and their political opponents. There isn’t any exit door. We’re stuck in this together, and the sooner we all figure that out, the better.