Would You Ditch All This Chaos for a Country in the Cloud?

You are on a fishing boat in the middle of the ocean. Things aren't going well in this story, so it's an old one. whales are trapped in a mile wide whirlpool that grinds them into pesto The younger brother drowned in a perfunctory half- sentence. A ringbolt is being held by your older brother. You are hanging on to a lashed-down empty water casks. The ship is pinned to the black lane of water as it rides the maelstrom. The whirl is up to one side. The rainbow is down to the other side.

Fear has made your brother angry. The romantic hopelessness of your situation is something that you should reflect on. When you turn in the narrowing gyre, you start to feel like you could die this way. I think it's pretty great. It seems like you and your brother are lucky to be there.

The run-me-over moment doesn't happen anymore. Home furnishings, construction materials, snapped-off trunks of trees, and other debris were sucked into the vortex along with your ship. A lot of stuff goes down into the funnel. There are some things that hold their place. Small cylindrical things don't descend at all. You are on top of a cylindrical literary device.

You waved an arm as if to tell your brother to join you. I was able to find us a ride. He won't let go of the ringbolt You wait for your moment and you are grieving. You cut loose when the time is right.

The ship spirals down and disappears below you. The maelstrom is no longer present. You must tell your story to a reporter.

The adopted seer of Silicon Valley was fond of this story. He was employed as a professor of English in Canada and his job was to help people program a strategy of evasion and survival. Participants in the electric age must be like Poe's fisherman, according to him. McLuhan once told a roomful of students that pattern recognition is the way out of the maelstrom. They could either learn to make the jump or die in the whirl.

Saint Marshall didn't live to use social media. What would he have said when he saw the emergence of a dirt cheap, globe-spanning communication technology in people's pockets? What patterns would he have seen as the great human network, with its political enmities, racial hatreds, economic uncertainties and climate fears? He may have pointed out something on the deck. He would have had to say when to jump.

The story you are reading isn't about McLuhan. The story is about a young investor in technology who does a lot of social media.

The potential head of the Food and Drug Administration is one of the many identities that Srinivasan has worn in public. His true calling is that of an ideological person. He developed flotation devices that could be used to escape the maelstrom. He is also very good in this area. He prophesied the future for nearly four hours when he first appeared on The Tim Ferriss Show. A former coworker of his told me that this is a typical occurrence. The Network State is a book written by Srinivasan that is meant to give some of the equipment and coaching you need to cut loose from this doomed ship.

The other people in this business are not the only ones. The consumer has an Ikean amount of casks to choose from. Like a lot of people, you may be wondering if the traditional manufacturers are putting out the most secure stuff. Over the years, you may have checked out a few models. Could this wood be yours? This is a democratic-Socialist one. There is a drum with gilt letters on it. Should you think about the communal living and digital nomadism? Is a bank account more secure than a digital wallet?

The barrel may not stand out from the pile. A mix of disdain for institutions, fear of wokeism, zeal for engineering, and enough money to buy an actual runway is what it seems to be.

Look more closely. The cask is covered with strange noises. The more mobile we are, the more cheaply we can change our laws.

What type of reality is this made for? When McLuhan looked out from the deck of the schooner, he saw a huge, overwhelming, destructive spiral. He believes that all progress happens on the Z- axis. From the page of the math textbook, you can see the imaginary axis. He means what he says. The punishing cyclicality of capitalist technological life is just a series of twists towards a grand goal. Humans go in circles to make progress. This theory is called a "helical theory of history."

There is a motion that is visible to mortal brains. If you want to make money, you either take something whole, dismantle it, and sell the parts, or you take some parts, put them together, and sell a whole. The example of the CD, which was unbundled into the mp3 and rebundled into the playlists, is often cited by Srinivasan. He says that the cycle is in computing. In history, that happened. In technology, it happens. It is happening here with nations and with states.

The nation state is unbundling. Covid has delivered the coup de grce after the giants of flesh and steel came down with Civilizational Diabetes. He thinks the end won't be pretty. The gerontocracy will be in charge. It will be hard for the dreams of the people to be fulfilled. There will be unresolved crisss. The potential will turn into despair. In the face of it all, he is here to teach us how to be square jawed Chads. Later, we will get to who we are. He is here to work towards the great acceleration. The time to jump is now, that is the message he is going to deliver.

Beyond the maelstrom, at the corkscrew's end, what await us? Freedom in the cloud is a new birth of government by the internet. The anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence is a good time to publish a book on how to build a startup. If he were to find his own cloud country, it would be based on three ideals: infinite frontier, money and eternal life. He calls it a bumper sticker that expands into a thesis. His bio is also on the social networking site.

Is this the type of drink you want? It's possible that it isn't. You might want to go down with the ship. Some of the squarest-jawed Chads on deck think the cask has qualities. You have to admit that the guy cares, but he doesn't sink, if anything he's been ascending. It's a good idea to go for a turn. What do you think about this cask? You might be able to come up with some ideas for building your own.

There is a caveat before we get to the lab-grown meat of this thing. He compared my job to that of the East German secret police when I spoke with him.

I am called a corporate journalist by the man. I am an editor at WIRED which is owned by a media company called Condé Nast which is owned by a media company called Advance Publications which is owned by the Newhouse family. At a time when Silicon Valley is attracting all these users and "all this money", media companies are jealous that their influence is waning. Much of what a journalist writes about him, or anyone in the industry, should be seen as coming from a sense of "wounded amour propre."

How do a group of English majors expect to win a fight? Of course we don't. We sat up here on the parapets of the First Amendment and took potshots at the civilization-builders down below. The mother of defamation isNecessity.

An exorcist respects Satan in the same way an exorcist respects us. He says that we know how to befriend and betrayal our subjects. The word "subjects" is used because we consider them to be beneath us. When we have gathered enoughKompromat on you, what do we do? It'sDeployed like malicious code Software is installed into the brains of your social network to turn them on. Which is why it is important to know which periodicals your friends like.

The subject is correct about us. We won't stop at anything. We will try to get you an interview. When almost none of them respond, and most of the ones who do say no, and most of the ones who say yes don't want to be quoted, we'll turn the weapons of Big Tech on itself. There will be days worth of your interview with us. We won't be able to figure out what to do with the resulting JSON file and our wounded amour propre will prevent us from asking for assistance. Through your old Hacker News comments, we will find you. We will live in the internet archive. We will take into account the historical and social context of your comments. We will get some of the emails you wrote and you will have to decide if to quote from them or not.

Don't trust me, that's the point Don't trust any of the other Newhouse people who worked on this file. The lives of other people are monetized by the Stasi.

Let's get started.

In October, it is a Saturday. The crowd is gathered at the center. They are here to attend a lecture series and networking event. The venue is similar to Mount Sinai because it was where Steve Jobs gave away the original Macintosh.

One of the lower-wattage speakers is Srinivasan. There is a person here who is the co-owner of the company. He will show the audience how to build a product that strikes a chord with everyone on the planet by standing at the podium and playing a French jazz tune for two and a half minutes. When Zuck describes Facebook's drive to connect the whole world, Paul Graham will say, "so it's a movement."

Silicon Valley is twisting the corkscrew in the same way that there is no tomorrow. The platform economies of Big Tech have been enjoying a nerdish cross-country romance for several years. Hackathons and network effects have sometimes caught the attention of corporate journalists.

There have been signs of an acrimonious unbundling for a while. The global economy went through a rough patch in 2008. The idea of a trustless financial system without big banks and regulators is threatening and beguiling. The famous dictum that software is eating the world was issued by the man. He used to say things like "take over," "invade," and "eviscerate." A group of people on Wall Street. After publishing an essay questioning whether freedom and democracy are compatible, Peter Thiel began making donations to Ted Cruz. Steve Jobs passed away. The spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed are referred to by Rebecca Solnit.

In the month leading up to startup school, the romance began to fall apart. Cruz and other Republicans in Washington caused the US federal government to shut down for more than two weeks due to a disagreement over funding for the health care law. The debacle of the healthcare.gov website revealed that the obama team was not good at building platforms. A prominent venture capitalist said that where value is created is no longer in New York, Washington, or LA, when the government paused for 16 days. Sam Biddle wrote that this asshole misses the shutdown. Kevin Roose wrote in New York magazine that the shutdown cut off essential services for low-income Americans and accused Silicon Valley of having a "dysfunctional fetish."

There is a charged atmosphere that leads to the podium being stepped up to. There is a chance that he is dressed like Steve Jobs at an Apple event. He sees a group of people. He looks confident even though his mouth is dry.

Srinivasan has been living in the valley for the past five years. He founded a startup that was funded by a number of people. It sells genetic tests for expectant parents to make sure they don't pass on heritable diseases. A triumphantentrepreneur, Srinivasan co-taught a big moolah called startup engineering. The course is called a spiritual sequel to Peter Thiel's course on startup. He is on the MIT Technology Review's list of inventors under 35. He co founded a company that is working on a dedicated chip for mining the virtual currency. He is going to become a general partner at the company.

The tech industry rose out of the blue, and by accident we put a horse head in all of their beds.

The political ideas of Srinivasan have undergone a few twists of the corkscrew. He will talk about a book that was recommended to him by Thiel in the future. The strength-to-weight ratio is something he appreciates. James Dale Davidson, an American investor, and William Rees-Mogg, a British baron and editor of The Times of London, argue that as digital technology makes wealth more difficult to tax, the nation-state will be dissolved. Government and industry will fall. Millions oflosers andneo-Luddites will find themselves out of work. A small group of people will be able to escape the tyranny of place and build a global meritocracy. Every tax-sheltered cent they earn will be kept and they will live wherever they please. This new realm of opportunity is called 'Bermuda in the sky with diamonds.' The 2020 edition's introduction was written byThiel.

One of the 12 people with his name in the Bay Area introduces himself to the startup schoolers. He scandalized the department and found a successful company. He isn't here to discuss that. The slide deck was brought up by him. He says he wants to talk about Silicon Valley's ultimate exit.

The next slide asks if the USA is the Microsoft of Nations. The evidence needs to be considered. The Constitution is an old code base in an obscure language. There is a system of distrust about security issues. The software maker doesn't like its suppliers very much. The audience is having a good time.

The next slide talks about what displaced Microsoft. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the two men who founded the company. Some guys in a garage is the force that most incumbents fear.

He must take a detour through a fundamental concept in political science in order to get to the first statement of his thesis. The author of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty was Albert O. Hirschman.

exit is taking your business elsewhere You hit the back button on your browser. The voice is still speaking up. Customers write letters to the CEO while citizens vote in elections. If you are more loyal to something you are less likely to leave.

The United States has been shaped by exit. It is not just a country of immigrants. It's also a nation of emigration. The Puritans fled religious persecution and the revolutionaries fled a tyrant king. The exit is about alternatives. Reducing the influence of bad policies over people's lives without getting involved in politics is what it is about.

What other choices are available? Silicon Valley is in a fight with the Paper Belt after the Rust Belt of yore. The entertainment industry, higher education, finance and media, and government are in the Paper Belt. Silicon Valley has been the best garage guy. We put a horse head in all of their beds because the tech industry rose out of nowhere. Yes, right? We are getting stronger than all of them.

Srinivasan wrote, "sheesh." This touched a nerve, that's clear.

The Paper Belt is pointing its finger at the IT department because it is experiencing a paper jam. The economy is going to be blamed on Silicon Valley, not the other way around. Correcting the record is important, but no good will come from too much fighting. He will describe anopt-in society, run by technology, for the next nine years.

The Valley is moving in this direction. There is a special zone for experimentation. An explosion will happen in the number of countries. He has proposed colonizing the ocean. If you want to take part in the ultimate exit, you could purchase a private island or telecommuting. If they want to think big, they should build technology for what the future society looks like.

The talk seems well received here in Cupertino. People post their notes from startup school and include helpful tips for entrepreneurs. It starts a klaxon in the media. In Valleywag, Tiku wrote, "This is the tea party with better gadgets." There are signs of a political personality type unique to Silicon Valley. His diagnosis was acution complex with undertones of class hostility.

The journalist Tim Carmody received an email from Srinivasan, who said there had been a misunderstanding. He writes that he is neither a libertarian nor a registered Democrat. Leaving the country of your birth in search of a better life is not a bad idea. The damage control isn't working. The headline is "Silicon Valley Dreams of Secession" In The New York Times, there is a story about the Silicon Valley. In The Wall Street Journal, there is a story titled "Silicon Valley has an arrogance problem".

On the Hacker News thread the next day, Srinivasan wrote, "sheesh." This touched a nerve, that's clear. He wants to clarify his position to a larger audience. It's one part apprehension, given what typically happens to talented would-be emigrants when the right of exit is denied, and one part hope, thinking that we can build something better with a clean slate. He drafts thousands more words about Exit over the next two weeks. He is working with an editor at WIRED to write an essay.

My tattered copy of the Stasi employee handbook states that I should sit down at my typewriter and punch out my assessment of how the Subject came to hold his views.

He doesn't spend a lot of cycles on his childhood. He was the son of physicians who migrated from India and showed impatience with institutions when he was young. Life in the United States begins with a mandatory minimum of 12 years, according to the libertarian economist.

The Solzhenitsyn was a smart-ass in class. When a physics teacher said that it was like washing clothes in the drying machine, he raised his hand and asked, "Don't you dry clothes in the drying machine?" This moment changed his life. He says he was making fun of him. The best kind of correct was when I was a kid. After the comment, he was kicked out of class and then allowed to do independent studies in math and science. He learned how to self-bootstrap from that.

In the winter of 2017, Srinivasan went to New York to apply for a job with the FDA.

Srinivasan and his brother Ramji were always told not to go into medicine by their dad. The land of action is called karmabhoomi while the land of action is called janmabhoomi. The man went west to get to the school. He majored in electrical engineering and went straight into a master's in the same field as a PhD in chemical engineering. He thought the human genome was the next internet. He was a lifer, clicking through slide decks until his hair and beard became socratic.

That would have been a bildungsroman. The dorm-room-to-board room startup was picked up by Srinivasan in 2007. He founded Counsyl with his brother and a group of friends. He told The New York Times that making sure your child doesn't die from a preventable disease is more relevant than anything else.

The WIRED essay is published on a Friday. The headline is "Software Is Reorganizing the World." The essay makes a softer case to the voters than the "Ultimate Exit" talk did.

Adults in the United States under the age of forty are expected to be poorer than their parents. In times of need, young people look abroad for opportunity. He writes that emigrates used to leave out of sadness and melancholy, and remained sad for the rest of their lives. He doesn't think of Exit as "going Galt." Making a new start and seeking communities of a kind only software can do is what it is.

The logical culmination of a world where two people can meet on Match.com and then make a life together, or a few can meet on Quora and form a housing co-op is what Srinivasan describes. He writes that there is no law preventing people from finding each other on the internet for a month or a year. As those trends continue, we may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and eventually cloud countries. In the future, these new polities will coalesce in physical space, in which the far- flung citizens of a cloud nation come together at some point on Earth. The tyranny of place has been eliminated by software. There is nothing technologists can do to bind other people to the soil.

As people abandon ship for their own cloud worlds, what will happen to your neighborhood, town, and country? What will happen to the people who can't or won't make the change? The rise ofBermuda in the Sky With Diamonds will be marked by violence and disorder according to the authors of the book. The author of WIRED doesn't get into it.

He is disappointed if he hopes that the essay will calm the uproar over the talk. Less than a day has passed since the Paper Belt published an article called Geeks for Monarchy. The neoreactionaries, a more stridently antidemocratic tribe of bloggers who are popular on the fringes of Silicon Valley, are the focus of the story.

Mencius Moldbug is the pen name of their leader thinker. He was once described to me as a Machiavelli. The first post on Unqualified Reservations was written in 2007, after he decided to build a new ideology. The Paper Belt is covered in a fig leaf of representative democracy, which includes swaths of traditional media, academics and government. Sovereign corporations take the place of nation-states and CEOs are territorial monarchs with absolute power over everything in his vision of the future. The world has become a mall.

There is more attention given to the transition from our political order to the next by moldbug. RAGE stands for "retire all government employees." He suggests that there is a humane alternative to genocide that can be used to deal with unproductive members of society. He thinks of them being imprisoned in a pleasant virtual reality world.

Finley doesn't want to implicating anyone in these ideas. It seems like he would find neoreactionary views repulsive. This isn't really true. Within hours of the story going live, there was an email thread about it. Some of the people are CC'd.

He is also known as Moldbug. He works on a software project that is described as a "clean-slate OS and network for the 21st century." The two early investors areThiel and the other early investors. Modern computing needs to be rebuilt from first principles. When versioning software, you usually count upVersion 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 The numbers don't count anymore.

The Seasteading Institute was founded by Patri Friedman, the son of anarcho- capitalist thinker David Friedman. He writes on a site called Let a Thousand Nations Bloom, which is dedicated to a Cambrian explosion in government. He has been saying for a long time that exit is the only universal human right.

One of the Hirschman stans is an apostate academic named Michael. The 1517 Fund is named for the year in which Martin Luther is said to have posted his 95 Theses on the Cathedral's door. He says he's a conservative.

When Masters was a student, he took a course from the man. Zero to One is a best-selling book on how to run a startup and build the future. The original notes contain an entry about a visit to class by Srinivasan in 2012 in which he talked about the futons-in- the-office stage of creating a successful company.

The email chain shows his sense of threat even though he has gotten off easy. The story is extremely dangerous, he says. He told the others that they should retaliate against journalists who report on them. Yarvin, whose name had been quietly linked withMoldbug's online for years but not paraded in the press, is implied to have been the victim of this. It also includes publicizing a street address or a phone number that might enable serious real-world harm. An attack-back strategy might work. He writes that moving to Singapore might be the end goal.

Yarvin calms down. He asked if he could control the frame. You must prove their point if you make a big thing of it. The man told the man that he and the man had different vulnerabilities because they were out of it. Our goal is to get sanity into the mainstream from different directions. The game rewards patience.

Friedman thinks that the best thing to do is not to do anything.

The two of them agree as well. The man is at a wedding.

The masters didn't reply.

No one should ever respond to a journalist according to a 6,000-word post written byMoldbug. Is that a Stasi-Mann?

In December of last year, Srinivasan joined the company. He uses his new position to follow his own advice to the startup schoolers to build the technology stack that the next society will run on. He handles the firm's first investment in civic tech, a company called Open Gov, whose goal is to make the complex workings of local government easy to understand. He is the co-owner of a company that is building a geographic search engine. He believes that government regulation is the greatest risk for tech companies.

There is a company that is in dire straits that has to be tended to by Srinivasan in 2015. There is a long story about the price of thecryptocurrencies crashing. He became a member of Donald Trump's transition team while he was doing so.

In the winter of 2017, Srinivasan went to New York to apply for a job at the FDA. In one of his deleted posts, he said that a doctor-run "Yelp for drugs" would work "vastly better than FDA" and that Trump's shtick was "amusing" but that he was "no". There is only one message for his audience, or is it a message for himself? Don't argue on the social networking site. Don't let the future go to waste.

I don't know what they talked about. He told me that it was realistic to exit the FDA like we exited the Fed. Many of the roles in government agencies are like white elephants, according to him. People are looking for brass rings that have been damaged. They are in the cockpit of a malfunctioning robot. The only thing it does is shoot a lot of bullets through the window. I like to build things myself.

The Trump years are good for Srinivasan even though he doesn't join the president's inner circle. He's not shy about saying that the company sells for $375 million. He sold his company for $120 million and became the chief technical officer of the country's biggest tHe venture turns around: Many eyebrow-raising shifts in strategy and two name changes later, he sells his company for $120 million and becomes the chief technical officer of the country's biggest He leaves after barely a year because he seems to strike many executives as brilliant and some employees as disruptive. He changed his bio to say that he is an angel investor.

A special term is used for the state of capitalist transcendence that has been attained by Srinivasan. It will be used in the interview. He says that you have had multiple exits. I think you're post- economic.

You're back on the boat. The year is late. Several hundred years' worth of America under various other influences is being churned with the maelstrom of Trump. If you could see over the lip of the funnel, you would see more trouble on the horizon.

A man senses something. On January 30, 2020, he asked his 130,000 followers if public health people had warned about the coronaviruses. Many trends would be accelerated by it. Those include border closings, nationalism, social isolation, and face masks. He has a lengthy thread.

Covid oracle is Srinivasan's newest identity. When the maelstrom seems like a chaotic horror to most people, he is the confident pattern-spotter. Thanks to his experience setting up a biomedicine company, his analysis is well informed and attracts new readers. Journalists are climbing down from the chteau wall to listen to what he has to say because most of them are technologists.

As he accrues hundreds of thousands more followers on the social networking site, he offers short-term advice, such as work from home, and long-term advice, such as not making comparisons with the flu. In the summer of 2020 he will speak about the virus breaking centralized states. The world is divided into two separate areas. The dawn of the internet age is represented by this moment.

It's a good time to escalate the war with the journalists. He offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could get the Covid article taken down. He's offering the same bounty to anyone who can make the best meme about the scrap he had with Taylor Lorenz. When I asked him about this during our Stasi interrogation, he said it was against the forces of corporate journalism. In early 2021, another Times reporter gets into hot water with the fans of Slate Star Codex, a rationalist blog whose audience has some overlap withMoldbug's. The author of Slate Star Codex received an email from a man who straddles a previously unrecognized border between endearing and frightening. He had a lot of ideas on how to deal with reporters. I don't think any of them were actionable while the convention was in effect.

Srinivasan fulfilled his prophecy and moved to Singapore.

According to a recent review of the book, The Network State, it was a provocation, an assault, an outcry, and a handbook. You can either have it as a traditional ebook or as a continuously updated website, but only if it's in digital form.

The Network State has something in common with the US Declaration of Independence. Much of the text is a defense of historic grievances. There is a new trio of political forces that is shaping the world order. In a chapter titled "If the News Is Fake, Imagine History," he names-checks The Sovereign Individual. He talks about his theories for a long time.

If you stop listening to the rants, you may be able to appreciate the vision of the future that was first broadcasted. His "Ultimate Exit" talk was an exclusive invitation for technologists to take their toys elsewhere, and his WIRED essay was a sanitized description of a world gently reshaped by new ways of connecting.

You want to have a child, so you enroll in a Nordic-style network state.

What does the future hold for Srinivasan? A world is slowly re-created in the image of the site. You will start out by forming your own virtual tribe by spending more and more time with other like-minded people. Maybe you all want to ban guns, maybe you all want your parents to be able to try experimental therapies for Alzheimer's, or maybe you all want abortion to be politically off the table. Soon you will discover that your friends on the infinite frontier matter more to you than the hominids who co-occupy your meat space. You will become a member of a network union. The great unbundling gave birth to a new bundle.

It is possible for you and your tribe to move towards founding yourselves a country, not a nation-state but a network state. The terms of a social smart contract will guarantee law, order, and freedom for you. Child care or cyberdefense can be crowdfunded if you like. It is possible to interact with your fellow citizens from behind the safety of a pseudonym, with your social reputation stored in the form of karma points on a block chain. You can either make firearm ownership a capital offense or issue every toddler a gun. Crowdfund a constellation of territories when the collective is strong. You will eventually get diplomatic recognition from other states.

Are you aware of the future? You want to have a child so you enroll in a network state with Nordic-style social benefits. If you want to Crispr human gametes, you have to move your lab to a locality. You want to live in a sugarless society, so you join a state called ketosis. The life you live is dependent on who you associate with. The people who are with you will be more interested in reaching a political consensus than the hominids were. You will simply look for another state if they can't. The kind of polityprizes exit above voice.

The coiner of those concepts didn't like prophesiers. He could see their Warhol-esque desire for air time. He was wary of the possibility of an Exit-based, Patchwork-style future. He wrote in 1978 that it was possible to see a state system in which each country would give its citizens different types of goods. They could Specialize in power, wealth, growth, equity, peacefulness, and so on. This vision was inspiring but perhaps too beautiful to be true. What would happen if a rival power invaded? Our old polity is vulnerable to many of the same risks as this new one. Our leader could turn out to be a bigot. We don't have enough resources to leave. We might not be able to live in another place we want to live in.

Which ones are we? My editor brain kept getting hung up on how many times he reached for that pronoun. He writes in the opening essay that he wants to be able to peacefully start a new state for the same reason he wants a blank sheet of paper. The closest thing to a physics of humanity is history. With truly open data sets, we may be able to develop an Asimovian psycho history.

Is "we" referring to people like the technologists, the self-bootstrappers, and the seekers of karmabhoomi? Is it weird that Dr. Bronner has a weird name for us. Is it possible that the other lovers of Exit are also included? They rose with the maelstrom. The influence of prominent Republicans was recently explored at length by Vanity Fair, as well as the reappearance of a newsletter on Substack by the man. The Republican nominee for the US Senate in Arizona is a man who jokes about RAGE on the campaign trail. Friedman invests in charter cities. Paper Belt on Fire is a book about how investors sparked a revolt against the University.

I think that all those people would find their notes quickly. The 19-year-old coding whiz in Mumbai, the graduate-school dropout in Costa Rica, and the billionaire investor in New Zealand are all examples of people who live according to their values. When you remove the techno-cruft, you see that the essential political philosophy here is pretty outdated. It is not known what to call it. Feudalism? Is it enlightened tribalism? What aboutCorkscrew cliquism? It shows a belief that the wrong people hold the power in modern society. Unbundling society will ensure that no one will bother you again, and re-bundling it will ensure that nobody will bother you again. Maybe that will turn out fine if no nukes get loose. If you go to your island in the sky and I go to my island in Sweden, we will both be happy. The imbalance of power, spread out across the constellation of the physical world we still see, feels just as bad as always. We desperately miss home most of the time.

If I could slip through the quantum foam at the bottom of the maelstrom, I believe I might eventually arrive in an alternate universe in which Srinivasan gives a talk called "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Voice." He might start it the same way, with a little fun at the government, praise the garage-guy ethos, and maybe even give a shout out to the startup schoolers. The ideal of American progress can be found in Silicon Valley. It's our job to offer not just solutioneering oratory and different repackagings of rare earth minerals, but also the tools of a better, fair future for all. Let's figure out how to update the crummy code base. I need your help clearing the FUD. Let's use our voice, whatever we believe, however we disagree.

I don't want to wonder what's down there. We have our own way out. We have the right to exit. The main character is us.

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