No Exit

A conversation about the darkness behind 'Techno-Optimism'

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A century ago, America was exploring new frontiers. “But,” Patri Friedman wrote in 2008 with a sense of disappointment, “the frontier became civilization, and the world moved away from freedom, federalism, and experimentation.”

Fate would bring Friedman back to that sense of adventure. He had grown to believe that man’s sense of exploration could be revived — on the high seas. On the wild west of the internet, he happened across another man, Wayne Gramlich, who had a similar belief. And they just so happened to live in the same city.

So Gramlich and Friedman got together and wrote a book — Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas.

After nearly 200 pages of discussing the logistics and practicalities of moving society onto raised platforms floating in international waters, the pair made a rather revealing point.

“Many people assume that replacing a democracy with a corporation would be a terrible thing,” they wrote. “Yet there are strong arguments to the contrary (I get much better service at my Honda dealer than the DMV).”

Their concept stayed stuck in port for years. Friedman moved on: He started a family, got a job at Google. And then fate intervened again: A reader introduced Friedman to Peter Thiel. After meeting over dinner, the PayPal co-founder cut a $500,000 cheque and the Seasteading Institute was born. Their quest to sail away from democracy was finally catching the wind.

There is much work on the horizon, Friedman wrote, “but the prize of busting open the monopolistic government industry is worth it. Together, we'll create a world with diverse societies to choose from, where governments serve citizens rather than exploiting them — on both land and sea. A revolution fueled by hard work and hard cash, not blood and violence, and backed by pragmatism and openness, not idealism or the One True Way.” He hailed anti-democracy thinker Curtis Yarvin as a guiding light in that regard. (Dispatch #131)

Fate didn’t intervene again. The project went nowhere. Friedman went on to found a somewhat successful floating music festival, a Burning Man on water, which continues to this day. He went on to try and establish charter cities inside the confines of an existing state: That fell apart quickly. Today, Friedman — grandson of Milton — uses his venture capital firm to finance other organizations looking to build new micro-societies, detached from national governments and free to pursue their own kind of self-governance. All of those projects, too, were likely to be forgotten.

But then Thiel helped finance the return of America’s anti-democracy president. Suddenly, one of the outfits funded by Friedman is pitching itself as a consultant-colonist firm for a new kind of decentralized imperialism: They want to found a tech utopia in Greenland.

These men all pine for the same thing: Exit. That is, a retreat from civilization, from the norms of polite society, from obligations to each other, from the normal ways of doing things. And, fundamentally, from the tyranny of living with people they disagree with.

Last week, I wrote about how the figure of fascist philosopher Curtis Yarvin was looming large over the increasingly-lawless American regime. For that piece, written last year, I had a long, fascinating, somewhat destabilizing conversation with SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs

Henry Farrell

. This week, I want to present you that transcript in full. Despite the fact that it was recorded before Trump’s improbable re-election, everything we discussed remains pertinent and concerning.

So this week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, we investigate why the new American right is so obsessed with exit. If you’ve been thinking about starting a paid subscription, now is the time: The full transcript and audio (scroll down) is available only to subscribers.

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BE&S: Maybe a good starting point is the background of why you wrote this piece. It feels like we are definitely behind the eight ball a little bit, in terms of trying to understand the philosophy that underpins where these — I'll just call them the tech bros/the tech reactionaries — really get their whole ethos.

Henry Farrell: So I wrote the piece because this is a conversation that I've been following in a very, very indirect way for decades. Which is to say: I'm not a Silicon Valley person myself, but I was one of the bloggers back in the dawn age, when this was a weird-seeming hobby. And because of that, I guess I have been engaged with some of the people in these arguments and fights for a long, long time. I think one of the major reasons why I decided to jump into this debate was my disappointment and my dismay with how this conversation was going.

In particular, with the ways in which some fundamentally interesting people — who I treated in the past as being sometimes somewhat obnoxious, who I had disagreed with, like Mark Andreessen — suddenly seemed to go off in a completely different and completely unhealthy direction. And so part of what I was trying to do in the piece was to really try to figure out, first, from my own perspective, where did this split happen?

There was this weird convergence of reactionary tendency back in the late 2000s: People like Curtis Yarvin, whose ideas were taken up by Nick Land. There’s all of these older tendencies, going back to science fiction, which I think has had an incredible formative influence on these debates. For example, the work of Neal Stephenson — who I think is a super smart, super interesting writer — but taking those thoughts in some very, very strange directions.

The idea behind this piece is to say: Okay, if you actually take these ideas seriously, to some extent, you're going in the wrong direction. Here are some other places that you can go in order to figure out better routes forward for your values.

Using Project 2025 is a really helpful way, I think, of showing all of the different constituencies. Some of them trace their lineage to very, very social conservative principles. Some to Bitcoin evangelists. But before we get into some of the individual camps, is it strange to you — it's strange to me — that they're so able to, at least in this individual moment, make common cause with each other? There are so many disparate parts of this current movement that really should be clawing each other's eyes out, right? Because they're really at cross purposes in a bunch of directions, but they've managed to get on the same page. The fact that there is now this coalescing behind Trump, that there is this kind of coalescing around this fertility obsession. Is it surprising to you that they've managed to put the differences aside and figure out a single path to row forward towards?

Not so much, because I think that, in a sense, this is the story of any political movement/intellectual movement, and it's also, in particular, the story of conservatism. So you have, I think, two useful examples that you could look back to is back in the 1960s, 1970s, the idea of fusionism. That is, you've got these people like Russell Kirk who were trying to figure out how to bring together libertarians and social conservatives in the broader Republican movement. On a less intellectual level, you've got the kinds of things that Rick Perlstein documents in his book Before the Storm, which is really about how this much more radical version of conservatism comes together. You get libertarians like Barry Goldwater figuring out — somewhat grudgingly, somewhat reluctantly, but nonetheless doing it — how to make common cause with more traditional racist elements in conservatism and what kinds of alliances that would involve. And then you have, more recently, people like Grover Norquist, who used to have these lunches, where the idea was you have lots of different people from different perspectives coming together, and you try to create an extremely minimal set of common values that's going to unite them together so that they can work towards these same causes.

So I think that the story of tensions and of incoherences and of people waving away problems and disagreements, this is a very, very old story. And this is, in a certain sense, the story of political entrepreneurialism. What I think is interesting here are these specific coalitions that are being made.

What we're seeing here is a convergence between some elements in Silicon Valley who are a mixture of libertarianism and conservatism. And, of course, there's some sort of this further-right convergence you see being represented by people like J.D. Vance. And if I tried to pull these things together, I’d say the first thing that you're seeing here is a very strong emphasis on ‘exit.’ That is, I think, one of the key things that I try to hammer home in the article — this really is about trying to figure out ways to exit from a society, from a political system that people think is fundamentally going wrong. And you've got very different versions of this.

So you've got people like Rod Dreher, for example, this religious conservative who's all about The Benedict Option, which is: You need to withdraw from this corrupt and rotten society. You've also got the Balaji Srinivasan version, which is: We need to effectively create an entire alternative system of world politics that will allow for Bitcoin and Web 3.0 and all of these new awesome forms of social organization to mushroom. And you've got people like Peter Thiel, who is, as you know, a pronounced skeptic on democracy and on the democratic system. And you've got people like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin trying to pull this together into a semi coherent alternative political logic, where effectively this is based around the idea that the world ought to be organized as if it were Silicon Valley, with founders.

You have founders creating alternative societies, and that the disciplining force on them is the ability of people to move from society to society. If the boss/godking/CEO isn't actually working out for them. And I don't know how many people deeply and sincerely believe in the underlying ideas. I don't think that Yarvin, frankly, is a particularly good or interesting thinker on these topics — I think he's also a god-awful, terrible writer. But nonetheless, a lot of the language, the notions of ‘The Cathedral’ that you're fighting against, this notion that we really ought to have much more possibilities for exit, much more possibilities for innovation. All of these things are creating a still somewhat incoherent alliance.

But at the least, I think these ideologies are eyeing each other up in the singles bar. They're engaging in some heavy flirtation, and they're trying to figure out if they go home together, whose home they're actually going to end up in.