Book Review
Four Essays on the Techno-Libertarian Origins of Competitive Governance
The modern competitive governance movement, which can include a wide range of ideas like charter cities, seasteads, and network states, is largely the brainchild of the techno-libertarians, and adjacent groups like the rationalists. These thinkers come from the world of Silicon Valley, where progress, innovation, and entrepreneurialism are championed – social, technological, material, and other problems can all be overcome, so long as we possess the freedom to try. However, bridging the gap from software to the real world can be difficult – we’re of course still waiting on the flying cars.
For the techno-libertarians, poor governance is the principal barrier to greater progress. With better governance, less harmful regulation, and the right incentives, innovation and the material progress it delivers are eminently achievable. Some techno-libertarians have been banging this drum for decades. For others, the spectacular institutional failures experienced at home and around the world during COVID-19 laid bare just how badly state capacity had declined throughout much of the West, and how badly a rot or sclerosis had set in. While “competition” is traditionally associated with the market for goods and services, the techno-libertarians contend that competition for better governance or state capacity is just as viable as a market.
While some of the CCI staff were familiar with these ideas, having read and interacted with the Silicon Valley and adjacent crowds for years, they were new to others. Being an active participant in the charter cities ecosystem requires an understanding of this history, even if most of CCI’s partner projects take a very different focus from those championed by the techno-libertarians. To that end, I selected four essays that examine these key ideas from slightly different perspectives: Balaji Srinivasan’s “The Network State in One Essay” (2022), Marc Andreesen’s “It’s Time to Build” (2020), Scott Alexander’s “Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism” (2014), and Patri Friedman’s “Beyond Folk Activism” (2009).
In his 1970 book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, economist Albert Hirschman argues that we have two options when dissatisfied with the state of an organization or polity to which we are a member. “Voice” refers to changing the system from within, or reform. The enterprise is fixable and redeemable with the right changes, which are best achieved by working with the existing power structures. “Exit”, on the other hand, posits that you are better served by building a new organization or institution, rather than spending your effort trying to fix the problems with the existing entity. Balaji is the champion of exit, and it is technology that makes organizing that exit possible.
Balaji proposes the creation of network states, or online communities bound together by some common tie, which could, with sufficient scale, resources, and member commitment, make the jump from organizing online to organizing in the real world. And by starting from a clean slate, the members of an individual network state can determine the rules, norms, and structures that best serve their desired ends. In theory, a sufficiently organized and resourced network state could acquire land and create a common polity with recognition like any traditional country.
If Balaji is the voice for exit, Marc Andreesen is a voice for loyalty. In the wake of the pandemic, the decay and incompetence of many of our critical institutions was laid on full display, for several years. Andreesen published his essay in April 2020, as the lack of medical supplies, medical facilities, and other shortcomings rapidly became clear. These shortages in products or facilities were generally not novel or particularly complex problems. Decisions needed to be made quickly under uncertainty, money needed to be transferred, and so on. Yet these things did not happen. Much of the Western world was caught completely by surprise in March and April of 2020. But if you had been following the right corner of Twitter in 2020, as the techno-libertarians like Andreesen were, you knew what was coming as early as January and you largely learned about it from anonymous and semi-anonymous posters.
Andreesen calls for a reinvigorated, and explicitly political, effort from the right to make aggressive investments in new technologies, facilities, and in science. He’s speaking in the context of the pandemic, but this logic applies across our entire society. From housing to energy to education and beyond, our current systems are ripe for disruption which ushers in a wave of abundance. But not that Andreesen is largely talking about fixing the polities and the systems we have by making it possible to build new things, rather than building an entirely new society.
The anonymous Twitter user with the anime profile picture who correctly sounded the alarm bell about the pandemic in January 2020 was likely a member of or adjacent to the “rationalist” community. It’s hard to define exactly what the rationalist community is might be summarized as a group deeply interested in (1) truth-seeking (empiricism, recognition of cognitive biases, etc), (2) a commitment to impact, often on utilitarian grounds (reducing existential risk, AI-alignment, reducing extreme poverty), and (3) self-improvement and community building (see here for an extended discussion, my summary doesn’t do the topic proper justice). The blog of Bay Area psychiatrist Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex (now on Substack as Astral Codex Ten), has been a central node of the rationalist community, along with other forums like LessWrong.
In one of his more well-known essays, Alexander sketches out a type of middle ground between pure, gated-community style exit and pure, fix-the-system loyalty. His “archipelago” consists of distinct communities which can exercise their own rules and follow their own principles, and that individuals should be free to leave or join those communities as they see fit, in accordance with the rules and norms of those communities. In essence, a world of subcultures which are broadly tolerant of other subcultures. Note that Alexander is both talking in a more generalized or online setting than explicitly calling for action in the physical world, at least compared to the other authors presented here. In contrast to many of the more explicitly libertarian or exit-minded thinkers, Alexander’s idea is much more strongly rooted in the mold of John Stuart Mill’s tolerant liberalism for its own sake and for the outcomes it might create, rather than in more material, technological, or policy objectives.
Patri Friedman is the “doer” of this group, in that since 2008 he has been working to bring competitive governance into the world in one form or another. Coming out of the anarcho-capitalist tradition, Friedman envisioned creating “seasteads”, or autonomous floating communities in international waters. These seasteads, if technically feasible, would be entirely voluntary and allow for the creation of new governments. A seastead could even be made modularly – if you’re unhappy with the seastead you’re in, detach your platform and join another. Setting aside the technical feasibility of a seastead, Friedman recognizes the value of what some call “governance as a service”.
Governments already compete for investment – what might convince you to build a factory in Vietnam versus Thailand? Friedman argues that creating seasteads substantially lowers the barriers to competition in the market for governance. And if you’re a tech entrepreneur, the norms, structures, policies, and other conditions of a seastead could be far more conducive to your success than those in existing jurisdictions. And building on the ocean, in theory, solves the problem with land, which all belongs to at least one country. And that country might not be willing to allow the level of freedom desired, or could easily renege on any agreement. Although to date seasteading has not panned out, Friedman now leads a venture capital fund which invests in a wide range of projects across the competitive governance landscape.
Conclusion
The competitive governance ecosystem is both wide and deep. It can be difficult to fully appreciate the nuances at play if you haven’t been an avid reader of the right set of blogs for the past 10-15 years! But this four-essay sampling of the competitive governance landscape and its techno-libertarian origins is (hopefully) a useful crash course into a rich history of bold, wacky, and inspiring ideas for improving humanity’s material, social, and personal well-being.
