A Civilization of Strangers
On Balaji Srinivasan’s Spiritually Empty Future
Balaji Srinivasan moved to Singapore. This matters not as gossip but as revelation. When you build a theory of governance around exit as primary mechanism and consumer choice as organizing principle, you eventually must demonstrate your commitment by actually choosing. Balaji chose Singapore—an authoritarian city-state that executes people for drug trafficking.
When Sam Harris interviewed him on the Making Sense podcast and pressed on Singapore’s use of capital punishment for drug trafficking offenses, Balaji defended the policy, citing the historical traumas of the opium wars.
Balaji is a demagogue for the mobile elite, selling a faux vision of freedom through exit, of governance as consumer choice, of optimization through jurisdiction shopping—and when he actually exercised that choice, he chose a regime that uses capital punishment for drug trafficking. And when challenged, he defended it.
This is not a mere ancillary detail. This is, in fact, the entire game revealed. When freed from democratic constraint, when able to shop for governance optimized to his preferences, Balaji chose authoritarian brutality and found comfortable rationalizations for why the powerful should be free to choose such systems while the powerless living under them have no voice.
I mention the pattern because I’m seeing it everywhere. My former friend Peter McCormack declared today: “Why I don’t vote. Only options are decay. The machinery of government is broken. I withdraw my consent.” Trey Walsh, who styles himself the “Progressive Bitcoiner” and has been quite upset at me for my recent critiques of Bitcoin, now echoes the same refrain: “The system is beyond repair. Opt out is the only way.”
Walsh matters here not as individual case but as pattern made visible. He built his platform claiming Bitcoin could serve progressive values—offering it as tool for the marginalized rather than just the wealthy. But when pushed on the contradictions, when forced to reckon with Bitcoin’s actual effects versus its rhetoric, he’s arrived at the same place as every other mobile elite: exit. The trajectory is depressingly familiar.
Walsh’s statement deserves full attention because it reveals the pathology in its purest form. He writes: “I long for a nation and government that embodies the principles of our constitution, life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness. But I’m afraid our govt has gone too far off that path, with no way of coming back. The fight for freedom... is far bigger than what the government, our politicians, and this system can deliver. The system is beyond repair. Opt out is the only way, and influencing and manipulating these players where we are able (because the incentive structure is also perverted).”
One ought to linger on what is revealed here. The revealed preferences, that is. He’s admitting to bad faith engagement with democratic systems while declaring them beyond repair. He’ll manipulate when useful, but his real strategy is exit. This is not principled withdrawal—it’s opportunistic abandonment dressed as moral clarity.
I responded to his declaration: “You abandon America at her darkest hour. Says everything.”
He blocked me. Then, apparently thinking better of it, unblocked me.
A curious progression of events, I think—if you truly believed democratic engagement was futile, if you genuinely thought the system was beyond repair, why would you care what someone says about your exit? Why block, then unblock? The fragility of the response reveals the deeper truth: these men know what they’re doing is abandonment. They know it’s cowardice. And they cannot bear having it named plainly.
Men of means deciding they no longer need to stay in the room. Men who benefited enormously from institutions built by those who stayed now announcing those institutions are broken and exiting is the only rational response. Men who mistake their ability to leave for everyone’s ability to leave. Men who confuse their exhaustion with democracy’s failure.
Among these men, Balaji stands as perhaps the most articulate and therefore most dangerous, because he’s wrapped this ancient aristocratic exit strategy in network theory and startup optimism and called it innovation. His “Network State” vision—citizenship as subscription, law as service bundle, jurisdiction as consumer choice—promises freedom and flourishing. What it actually delivers is the dissolution of everything that makes freedom meaningful.
I’m diagnosing a pathology. A spiritual sickness masquerading as practical wisdom. A vision so fundamentally confused about what human life requires that it would destroy civilization while claiming to perfect it.
Balaji’s confusion begins with misunderstanding what civilization is. He thinks it’s infrastructure you can opt into—a set of services you subscribe to, optimizing for your preferences, exiting when dissatisfied. Shop for governance the way you shop for streaming platforms. Find the jurisdiction that best suits your needs. Fork when you disagree. Migrate when constrained.
Civilization is not infrastructure. Civilization is what you build by staying when leaving would be easier.
Civilization is trust accumulated through repeated interaction where betrayal has cost. Norms that emerge from working through conflict rather than exiting from it. Institutions that constrain even the powerful because no one can simply leave when asked to share power or bear obligations. Shared values that limit individual optimization for collective good. Stories and meanings that bind people across time and difference.
You cannot buy this. You cannot subscribe to it. You cannot optimize it or fork it or migrate to a better version. You can only build it through the costly, frustrating, inefficient work of staying in relationship with people you cannot dismiss as “not my jurisdiction.” Through the discipline of remaining in conversation with those you didn’t choose. Through the commitment to working things out rather than walking away.
This is what marriage is, when marriage works. This is what citizenship is, when citizenship means something. This is what obligation is—the constraint on individual preference for the sake of collective possibility.
Every freedom Balaji values exists because prior generations paid the cost of building systems where the powerful couldn’t simply exit when asked to contribute. Property rights require institutions strong enough to bind even the wealthy. Contract enforcement demands governments accountable to those who cannot leave. Innovation rests on public goods—education, research, infrastructure—that couldn’t be opted out of.
Democracy isn’t a bug in civilization. It’s the feature that makes everything else possible. It’s how we built institutions powerful enough that even the wealthy must negotiate rather than exit. It’s how we constrained power through shared fate.
Balaji wants to escape these constraints while keeping their benefits. Property rights without democratic accountability. Contract enforcement without obligation to the immobile. Innovation without paying for the public goods that enabled it. This is not innovation. This is free-riding dressed in startup language.
His vision systematically destroys what he doesn’t understand he depends on. When exit is cheap and optimization is primary, when you can shop for governance and fork when dissatisfied, when jurisdiction becomes consumer choice—trust cannot accumulate. Why honor commitments when you can migrate to a jurisdiction without enforcement? Shared values cannot emerge. Why work through disagreement when you can fragment into preference-aligned subcommunities? Institutions cannot bind the powerful. Why accept democratic constraint when you can shop for governance that doesn’t regulate you?
What remains is the immanent malaise of procedural economic exchange. Endless optimization of revealed preferences by atomized individuals in relationships that last exactly as long as they’re convenient. Strangers in parallel, optimizing in isolation, bound by nothing, trusting no one, building nothing that lasts.
I know something about this. A lot of my friends, and a handful of executive recruiters, found my public disapproval of the Trump presidency very inconvenient last winter. The unreturned emails and texts spoke more than words. This is what optimization looks like when applied to human relationship: the efficient shedding of anyone whose presence costs you something, whose values constrain your preferences, whose judgment you’d rather not face.
I know this world. I lived adjacent to it in Silicon Valley for years. I’ve watched men convince themselves that efficiency can replace solidarity, that optimization can substitute for meaning, that exit can provide what only staying can build. I’ve seen the spiritual emptiness that masquerades as freedom. The loneliness that calls itself autonomy. The alienation that presents as empowerment.
Human beings don’t flourish by optimizing preferences. We flourish by being known by people who cannot easily exit from relationship with us. By contributing to projects larger than our individual optimization. By being constrained by values we share with others. By staying in relationships that cost us something. By building things that outlast our individual lives.
None of this is possible when everything reduces to consumer choice about jurisdiction. Balaji has confused having everything you want with having anything worth wanting. His vision produces a world where you can optimize every preference—and none of them matter, because you’re utterly alone in the endless procedural exchange, with no one who truly knows you, no values you genuinely share, no trust that persists across difficulty, no meaning that transcends transaction.
He looks at this spiritual wasteland and calls it progress.
We’ve run this experiment. Every time elites have created exit options that let them escape democratic constraint while maintaining access to its benefits, the result has been remarkably consistent.
Corporate company towns in late industrial America: employers created private governance systems optimized for productivity. The result was brutal labor exploitation, violent suppression of organizing, economic serfdom for those who couldn’t leave while owners retained full mobility.
Colonial charter cities throughout imperial history: trading companies governed territories with no accountability to inhabitants. The result was extractive brutality, wealth flowing to mobile capital while immobile populations suffered under systems they had no voice in shaping.
Special economic zones in our contemporary moment: jurisdictions compete by offering light regulation to attract capital. The result is a race to the bottom on labor rights, environmental protection, and democratic accountability, with the mobile capturing benefits while the immobile bear costs.
Singapore itself—Balaji’s chosen jurisdiction—offers the clearest example. An authoritarian city-state that executes people for drug trafficking, that constrains speech and assembly, that offers efficient governance for capital while denying voice to its citizens. This is what governance-as-consumer-choice produces when you actually follow the logic: the wealthy shop for systems that optimize their preferences while the immobile live under brutality they have no power to change.
The pattern is clear and unambiguous: when the powerful can exit, they optimize their own preferences at the expense of those who cannot leave. Always. Not because they’re uniquely evil. Because the system creates precisely these incentives. When you can exit costs but capture benefits, when you can shop for governance without bearing obligations, when you can fork rather than compromise—brutality becomes economically rational.
Balaji thinks he’s innovating. He’s regressing. He’s rediscovered feudalism—governance as property of the mobile, with the immobile as subjects rather than citizens—and wrapped it in network theory. He’s mistaken the dissolution of civilization for its advancement.
His vision would destroy the very conditions that make his own life possible. He has wealth because institutions constrained power, preventing the powerful from exiting obligations while capturing benefits. He has freedom because democratic governments protected rights, making even the wealthy subject to law. He has the capacity for innovation because of public goods that couldn’t be opted out of—education systems, research funding, infrastructure maintained through taxation that didn’t allow exit.
All of this required that people stay in the room. That the powerful couldn’t simply leave when asked to contribute. That democracy constrained even those with exit optionality.
And now he wants to escape these very constraints, and he thinks he’s liberating humanity.
He sees democratic constraint as oppression rather than what prevents tyranny. He sees obligation as servitude rather than what creates trust. He sees staying in the room as weakness rather than what maintains civilization. He sees exit as empowerment rather than abandonment.
But material capital—everything he’s accumulated—only functions within systems built on social capital. Property rights require trust in institutions. Contracts require enforcement by governments no one can simply leave. Markets require rules that constrain all players. Wealth requires stability that comes from shared commitment to staying even when leaving seems easier.
Strip away the social capital, and his material capital becomes worthless. No one will honor property rights if they can exit to jurisdictions that don’t recognize them. No one will enforce contracts if there’s no shared value that contracts matter. No one will maintain infrastructure if everyone’s optimizing individual exit.
He’s trying to eat the seed corn and call it a harvest.
I think about the people who cannot exit. The people for whom Balaji’s vision isn’t empowerment but abandonment. The factory worker who cannot shop for jurisdiction. The single mother who cannot fork to a governance system better aligned with her preferences. The elderly person who cannot optimize their way out of dependence on public systems. The disabled person who requires institutions that persist across time and don’t fragment when inconvenient.
These are the people who bear the cost when the wealthy exit. These are the people left behind when the mobile optimize their preferences elsewhere. These are the people who need the powerful to stay in the room, to remain subject to democratic constraint, to bear obligations they cannot escape through consumer choice.
Balaji’s vision treats them as irrelevant to the conversation. As legacy costs to be optimized away. As people who simply haven’t understood that if governance were truly good, they’d be able to afford to exit too.
This is not innovation. This is contempt for those without exit optionality, dressed in the language of empowerment.
When Peter McCormack announces he’s withdrawing his consent because “the machinery of government is broken,” I want to ask: broken for whom? Not for those who depend on it for survival. Not for those who need public schools and healthcare and infrastructure that doesn’t fragment when the wealthy leave. Broken for those wealthy enough to imagine they don’t need these things. Broken for those who’ve benefited most from systems built by those who stayed.
When Trey Walsh declares the system is “beyond repair” while admitting he’ll still “manipulate” it when useful, I see not principled withdrawal but opportunistic bad faith. He’ll engage when it serves him, exit when it costs him, and call this freedom.
Their withdrawal of consent is not resistance. It’s abandonment of those who don’t have the luxury of withdrawing.
The real innovation—the one that actually liberated humanity—wasn’t exit. It was making even the powerful stay in the room. Democracy is revolutionary not because it’s efficient but because it forces those with exit optionality to negotiate with those who have none. It makes the wealthy subject to law. It gives voice to the immobile. It constrains power through shared fate.
This is hard-won. It’s fragile. It requires constant maintenance and vigilance. And there are always aristocrats selling visions of escape, telling the mobile elite they don’t need to stay, don’t need to negotiate, don’t need to share fate with the powerless.
Balaji is just the latest in this ancient line. He’s wrapped it in network theory and called it progress, but the substance is old: the powerful don’t need to bear obligations to the powerless, don’t need to stay in institutions that constrain them, don’t need to participate in the messy work of democratic governance.
Just optimize your preferences, shop for better governance, exit when dissatisfied. Let the immobile inherit whatever remains.
I’ve seen this pattern across domains. Bitcoin maximalists dreaming of exiting fiat while living on infrastructure fiat built. Austrian economists insisting markets can replace all collective choice while depending on institutions that required collective choice to build. Technocrats claiming expert rule can bypass democratic messiness while ignoring that their expertise depends on democratic institutions protecting academic freedom. And now Network States promising you can exit civic obligation while somehow maintaining all the benefits citizenship provides.
Replace embedded coordination with individualist exit. Replace staying with leaving. Replace voice with shopping. Replace shared fate with consumer choice. Replace obligation with optimization. Replace citizenship with subscription.
And in every case, the result is the same: the destruction of the social capital that makes individual flourishing possible.
Civilization is built on a simple principle: we stay in the room together and work it out, even when it’s costly, even when exit seems easier. This is hard. It’s frustrating. It’s inefficient. It often feels like compromise with stupidity or evil.
But it’s the only way humans have ever built anything worth having.
Because the alternative—Balaji’s vision of endless exit and optimization—produces not freedom but fragmentation. Not flourishing but alienation. Not meaning but the empty efficiency of strangers optimizing preferences in parallel, bound by nothing, trusting no one, building nothing that lasts.
A civilization of strangers is not a civilization at all. It’s just strangers, alone together, with no one who truly knows them, no values genuinely shared, no trust that persists, no meaning that transcends the transaction.
When you strip away the network theory and startup optimism, that’s all Balaji’s offering: meaninglessness with better logistics. Spiritual emptiness with efficient infrastructure. The elimination of everything that makes freedom meaningful, packaged as liberation.
He’s profoundly confused about what makes human life good. He’s mistaken preference satisfaction for meaning. Consumer choice for freedom. Exit for empowerment. Optimization for flourishing.
And in his confusion, he’s selling a vision that would destroy everything that makes his own life possible—the trust, the institutions, the shared values, the democratic constraints that create the stability within which he’s prospered.
We should name this for what it is: not innovation but dissolution. Not progress but pathology. Not liberation but the elimination of everything that makes freedom meaningful.
I speak from inside the world Balaji came from. I know Silicon Valley’s seductions. I understand the exhaustion with institutions that seem broken, the frustration with democratic process that seems slow, the appeal of exit when voice seems futile. I know the temptation to believe that if you’re smart enough, wealthy enough, connected enough, you can simply opt out of the mess and build something better elsewhere.
But I also know what’s lost when the mobile abandon the immobile. When the powerful exit the constraints that made their power possible. When those who benefited most from civilization decide civilization is beneath them.
What’s lost is civilization itself. The possibility of collective meaning-making. The trust that accumulates across time. The institutions that persist across generations. The shared fate that makes democracy possible. The social capital that makes material capital meaningful.
And no amount of network theory can replace what’s destroyed when we reduce citizenship to subscription, obligation to preference, staying to shopping.
We should reject Balaji’s vision not because it’s technically unworkable—though it is—but because it’s spiritually empty. Because it offers a world where you can have everything and nothing matters. Where you can optimize every preference and remain utterly alone. Where you can exit every constraint and lose everything that makes constraint meaningful.
We reject it on behalf of those who cannot exit. On behalf of the future that requires us to stay. On behalf of civilization itself, which exists only because prior generations bore obligations they couldn’t escape through consumer choice.
We stay in the room. We build trust. We share values. We constrain power. We create meaning together. Not because it’s efficient. Because it’s what makes us human. Because it’s what makes freedom possible. Because it’s what distinguishes civilization from its dissolution.
Balaji can move to Singapore and rationalize capital punishment for drug trafficking. Peter McCormack can withdraw his consent. Trey Walsh can declare the system beyond repair while admitting he’ll manipulate it when useful. The aristocrats can exit when democratic constraint becomes inconvenient.
But some of us are staying. Not because we’re too stupid to see the machinery is broken. But because we understand that machinery built by those who stayed is what made their exit possible. Because we know the cost paid by those who can’t leave when the wealthy exit. Because we recognize that civilization requires the powerful to remain subject to democratic constraint, to stay in the room even when leaving would be easier.
This is not naivety. This is the hard wisdom that comes from understanding what civilization costs and what its dissolution produces. From seeing clearly that exit is not empowerment but abandonment. That consumer choice is not freedom but alienation. That optimization is not flourishing but spiritual death.
Balaji’s network state future is not the future we need. It’s not even a future anyone should want, once you see past the rhetoric to what it actually produces: a world of strangers, optimizing in parallel, bound by nothing, building nothing that lasts, knowing no one, trusted by no one, meaningful to no one.
A spiritually empty future where you can have everything and nothing matters.
We can do better. We must do better. Not by building better exit options, but by building institutions strong enough that even those with exit optionality choose to stay. Not by fragmenting into preference-aligned enclaves, but by working through disagreement in shared space. Not by optimizing individual preferences, but by creating collective meaning. Not by escaping civilization’s constraints, but by recognizing those constraints as what makes our freedom possible.
The choice before us is clear: civilization or its dissolution. Staying or abandonment. Shared fate or atomized optimization. The hard work of building trust across difference or the ease of exit into homogeneity.
I choose civilization. I choose staying. I choose the work of building meaning with others, even when it’s costly, even when it’s frustrating, even when exit seems easier.
Not because I’m certain it will work. But because I know the alternative produces nothing worth having.
And no network theory can change that truth.
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