This review is very long, so I will only react to the first maybe 20% of the book.
It seems to me that the idea of Exit is a very old one, and shared by people in every corner of the political spectrum. My first association was “Of the past let us wipe the slate clean” in The Internationale. (I suspect that its origins are among our ape ancestors, as a mechanism to split tribes. When you have many strong followers, but not enough to get more power within your tribe, perhaps it is time to leave and start a new tribe.)
The fact that it’s an old idea is not a criticism per se—an idea that appeals to different kinds of people in different generations is worth exploring. But if you rebrand the old idea using new words, you are throwing away the historical experience.
In software development, when the program gets complicated, there is often a strong temptation to throw it away and restart from scratch; this time it will certainly be better! And sometimes it is. But sometimes the programmers find out that the program was complicated because it was dealing with a complicated reality. When you start from scratch, the program is elegant, but it does not handle the special cases. And as you gradually add support for the special cases, the program may stop being elegant, and instead may start to resemble the old code; not much gained, and you wasted a lot of time to learn this.
Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. What makes you specifically believe that this one will?
It is easy to notice Moloch in the designs of your neighbor, but fail to notice it in your own. That’s kinda what Marx did—he described Moloch present in capitalism, quite correctly in my opinion, but his proposed solution was basically: “Let’s start from scratch, following this one weird trick capitalists don’t want you to hear about, and Moloch will magically disappear.” (Narrator: Moloch didn’t disappear.)
The known problem with socialism is that somehow after the revolution, the people who get to the top tend to be the ones who outmurder their competitors. Somehow, these people do not create the promised Heaven on Earth, and instead just keep murdering anyone who seems like a possible threat. So far, the most successful solution is China, which is basically a capitalist country ruled by a communist party; where the leaders learned how to play their backstabbing games without destroying the economy as a side effect.
The known problem with capitalism is that as soon as the capitalists succeed, they want to freeze the current situation with themselves on the top. Meritocracy becomes the new oligarchy. Competition feels good when you are rising from the bottom, but after you make it to the top, you start lobbying for more barriers to entry. Because that is the optimal thing to do in given situation, and the people who get to the top are the ones who are very skilled at taking the opportunity to do the optimal thing.
Why would the “techno-commercialists” act differently, if they succeed to get the power they dream about? If you think that capitalism implies e.g. freedom of speech, remember the non-disclosure agreements at OpenAI. Remember how eBay treated their critics. More into history, remember the Pinkertons. Give me one reason why this time it will be different because, comrades entrepreneurs, true capitalism has never been tried.
It seems to me that Land’s advice is based on “if we leave the current system, we will leave the Moloch behind.” It sounds nice, but the priors for doing that successfully are low.
Funny, I see “exit” as. more or less the opposite of the thing you are arguing against. Land (and Moldbug) refer to this book by Hirschman, where “exit” is contrasted with “voice”—the other way to counter institutional/organisational decay. In such model, exit is individual and aims to carve a space for a different way of doing things, while voice is collective, and aims to steer the system towards change.
Balaji’s network state, cryptocurrency, etc are all examples. Many can run parallel to existing institutions, working along different dimensions, and testing configurations which might one day end up being more effective than the legacy institutions themselves.
So, something like “quiet quitting”? You nominally stay a citizen of the country, but you mostly ignore its currency, its healthcare system, its education, etc., and instead you pay using cryptocurrency, etc.? The resistance to the Cathedral is that you stop reading the newspapers and drop out of college? And the idea is that if enough people do that, an alternative system will develop, where the employers will prefer to give good jobs to people without university education?
I am in favor of doing small things on your own. Write Linux code, learn math on Khan Academy, etc. But if you are dissatisfied with how the government works, I don’t think this will help. The government will keep doing its own things, and it will keep expecting you to pay taxes and obey the laws.
Well, no—not necessarily. And with all the epistemic charity in the world, I am starting to suspect you might benefit from actually reading the review at this point, just to have more of an idea of what we’re talking about.
This review is very long, so I will only react to the first maybe 20% of the book.
It seems to me that the idea of Exit is a very old one, and shared by people in every corner of the political spectrum. My first association was “Of the past let us wipe the slate clean” in The Internationale. (I suspect that its origins are among our ape ancestors, as a mechanism to split tribes. When you have many strong followers, but not enough to get more power within your tribe, perhaps it is time to leave and start a new tribe.)
The fact that it’s an old idea is not a criticism per se—an idea that appeals to different kinds of people in different generations is worth exploring. But if you rebrand the old idea using new words, you are throwing away the historical experience.
In software development, when the program gets complicated, there is often a strong temptation to throw it away and restart from scratch; this time it will certainly be better! And sometimes it is. But sometimes the programmers find out that the program was complicated because it was dealing with a complicated reality. When you start from scratch, the program is elegant, but it does not handle the special cases. And as you gradually add support for the special cases, the program may stop being elegant, and instead may start to resemble the old code; not much gained, and you wasted a lot of time to learn this.
Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. What makes you specifically believe that this one will?
It is easy to notice Moloch in the designs of your neighbor, but fail to notice it in your own. That’s kinda what Marx did—he described Moloch present in capitalism, quite correctly in my opinion, but his proposed solution was basically: “Let’s start from scratch, following this one weird trick capitalists don’t want you to hear about, and Moloch will magically disappear.” (Narrator: Moloch didn’t disappear.)
The known problem with socialism is that somehow after the revolution, the people who get to the top tend to be the ones who outmurder their competitors. Somehow, these people do not create the promised Heaven on Earth, and instead just keep murdering anyone who seems like a possible threat. So far, the most successful solution is China, which is basically a capitalist country ruled by a communist party; where the leaders learned how to play their backstabbing games without destroying the economy as a side effect.
The known problem with capitalism is that as soon as the capitalists succeed, they want to freeze the current situation with themselves on the top. Meritocracy becomes the new oligarchy. Competition feels good when you are rising from the bottom, but after you make it to the top, you start lobbying for more barriers to entry. Because that is the optimal thing to do in given situation, and the people who get to the top are the ones who are very skilled at taking the opportunity to do the optimal thing.
Why would the “techno-commercialists” act differently, if they succeed to get the power they dream about? If you think that capitalism implies e.g. freedom of speech, remember the non-disclosure agreements at OpenAI. Remember how eBay treated their critics. More into history, remember the Pinkertons. Give me one reason why this time it will be different because, comrades entrepreneurs, true capitalism has never been tried.
It seems to me that Land’s advice is based on “if we leave the current system, we will leave the Moloch behind.” It sounds nice, but the priors for doing that successfully are low.
Funny, I see “exit” as. more or less the opposite of the thing you are arguing against. Land (and Moldbug) refer to this book by Hirschman, where “exit” is contrasted with “voice”—the other way to counter institutional/organisational decay. In such model, exit is individual and aims to carve a space for a different way of doing things, while voice is collective, and aims to steer the system towards change.
Balaji’s network state, cryptocurrency, etc are all examples. Many can run parallel to existing institutions, working along different dimensions, and testing configurations which might one day end up being more effective than the legacy institutions themselves.
So, something like “quiet quitting”? You nominally stay a citizen of the country, but you mostly ignore its currency, its healthcare system, its education, etc., and instead you pay using cryptocurrency, etc.? The resistance to the Cathedral is that you stop reading the newspapers and drop out of college? And the idea is that if enough people do that, an alternative system will develop, where the employers will prefer to give good jobs to people without university education?
I am in favor of doing small things on your own. Write Linux code, learn math on Khan Academy, etc. But if you are dissatisfied with how the government works, I don’t think this will help. The government will keep doing its own things, and it will keep expecting you to pay taxes and obey the laws.
Well, no—not necessarily. And with all the epistemic charity in the world, I am starting to suspect you might benefit from actually reading the review at this point, just to have more of an idea of what we’re talking about.