Exit and Voice

Mainstream right-libertarianism has a long history of tending to prioritize what Albert O. Hirschman called “exit” (i.e., the ability to escape governance through relocation or circumvention) over “voice” (having a say in the governance process that one lives under).

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the notion of exit as such. Under an oppressive state, as Charles Johnson pointed out, there are frequently fewer transaction costs entailed in circumventing a harmful or disagreeable policy than in changing it through the political process. 

And left-libertarian — anarchist or libertarian socialist — visions of an ideal free society generally entail a healthy mixture of voice and exit. The optimal mixture is to facilitate permissionless coordination wherever possible, through horizontal or stigmergic organization, while guaranteeing that, in all cases where some agreed-upon policy is required, the decision be made democratically. One such model, the phyle system of the Las Indias movement, was envisioned as a horizontal global network of local territorial enclaves, each inhabited by cooperative work teams and governed by direct democracy.

The problem lies with those on the right, who are viscerally anti-democracy, and who embrace exit to the near or entire exclusion of voice. Despite the tendency of such people to identify as “libertarian,” there is simply no way that a world organized along the lines of exit, with no democracy at the places where people actually exist at any given time, can be capable of genuine freedom. No matter how distributed, how permissionless or stigmergically organized a society, there will be some irreducible nodes — workplaces, public utilities or microgrids, cohousing units, etc. — that must be governed by a single policy. The only alternative to voice is to turn each of those nodes into a feudal domain where all decisions reflect the will of the owner, and everyone else is a subject who can either submit or leave. 

We can see this, in the real world, with the actual authoritarian tendencies of the biggest promoters of exit-based models. In practice, such models quickly devolve into techno-feudalism — if they’re not consciously planned as such from the outset.

At the mildest end of the spectrum, there are projects like the “charter cities” promoted by Brian Doherty at Reason.  In an arrangement most would consider reminiscent of a cyberpunk dystopia, the investors and promoters who provide the startup capital and ongoing investment make the laws that govern the people who reside and work in their communities. It amounts to “freedom” for the owners, and feudalism for everyone else. 

From there, it quickly slides in a more ominous, neo-reactionary direction. We see it with the “patchwork” of Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and Balaji Srinivasan’s “network state.” Silicon Valley techbros like Peter Thiel and Musk who back such agendas, and politicians like JD Vance who act as stalking horses for it. 

Thiel, who is sometimes referred to as a “libertarian,” once declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” But in his vision of “freedom,” the only freedom for those without the capital to found their own Snow Crash burbclaves or private states is the freedom to choose which techno-feudal lord to be ruled by. Moldbug unapologetically states his authoritarian vision in Patchwork:

The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all “exit,” no “voice.”

That’s also the basic vision of Hoppeanism — an influence on Yarvin, incidentally — in which everyone is either an owner, a tenant, or a trespasser.

A world of all exit and no voice is incompatible with genuine human freedom. Human agency and flourishing — real freedom — requires more than the right to decide which landlord or boss you find it least objectionable to live under. It means the right to a say in the decisions affecting your life where you live now.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative