There is an exit

by Henry Farrell on February 2, 2025

Last week, I finished reading an advance copy of Cory Doctorow’s Picks and ShovelsNo spoilers about plot specifics, but the novel has a lot to say about two things. First, how Silicon Valley used to be a place where exit was possible and a good thing. If you didn’t like your boss, you went out and found somewhere else, or founded a company yourself. California didn’t recognize no-compete agreements, and the foundation myth of Silicon Valley is the Traitorous Eight. Eight engineers found William Shockley, a hateful unpredictable jerk and a pioneer of “racial realism,”  such a horrible person to work for that they all left to do their own thing, founding an engineering culture and start-ups that begat start-ups that begat start-ups.

The second theme of Cory’s novel is how easy it is to get trapped nonetheless. There is a cult-like aspect to many organizations, a quasi religious fervor. Once you get pulled in, you reconstruct your whole identity around a particular set of values. You may start in a place where it seems that there’s a strong alignment between the organizational culture and what you yourself aspire to.  You may discover that you are wrong, or the place may change. The wrong people end up taking over, or becoming influential. You find yourself in workplace conversations that leave you feeling weird and disturbed. But you aren’t sure what to do. Leaving would involve giving up on the values that you thought you shared, giving up, in a sense on your fundamental understanding of who you are.

Picks and Shovels is set in the 1980s – the dawn of the modern computer era. I haven’t talked to Cory, but I am guessing that the novel is in part an indirect comment on what Silicon Valley looks like today. It has gotten to be a weird place. For example, from conversation with friends who are younger and better connected than I am, it is an increasingly difficult place to be a woman of colour. Young men – ferociously competitive in a dog-eat-dog culture where visibility is crucial to getting ahead – try to outdo each other in saying outrageous things, and predating on the perceived weaknesses of those who are offended for attention.

The old – sometimes uneasy but often productive – detente between libertarianism and left-liberalism has broken. Instead, people who used to be libertarians or classical liberals are more and more enmeshed with the illiberal right. Democracy is out. Founder-worship and admiration for Donald Trump are in. Elon Musk seems to be copying Shockley’s degeneration at speed-run mode, but he is also in an extraordinarily powerful position. Hundreds of people (I am pretty sure they are mostly in the previously mentioned category of young men looking for attention and advancement) have volunteered to work for Elon Musk’s DOGE, where they are about to start trying to rip the guts out of the U.S. state.

So that’s one side of it. I am sure there are plenty of true converts in Silicon Valley, who’ve embraced their inner groyper, so that they believe that democracy is a category error, that sexual deviation should be outlawed, that Black people are truly inferior and that smashing the government is going to be awesome.

But I would also guess that there are significant numbers of Silicon Valley libertarians and classical liberals who are unhappy with how things are going, and reasonably worried that they are going to get worse. I know at least that they exist: I’ve talked to a couple of them. They thought they were signing up to a culture that was all about people being at liberty to decide how they wanted to live, with a government that would keep the show on the road, but wouldn’t interfere. That’s not what they look to be getting.

I can understand how difficult they feel their situation is, and how hard it is to break free from a culture and a set of social structures that are what they’re used to, even if it’s going sour. But that culture may be fraying, and ought to fray.

The main glue that holds the anti-democratic right and libertarians together is a shared detestation for DEI. There is a stark choice ahead for those who value actual diversity of identities, cultures and beliefs, but who believe that DEI is being imposed on them. Do they think that the kind of culture that the Trump administration wants to impose – through far more sweeping and totalizing uses of state power – is going to be better or worse? If they have principled objections to the imposition of ideology by power, they cannot, actually, celebrate the likes of Chris Rufo, who have made it emphatically clear that government imposition of ideology, and the treading down into the dust of those who disagree with them is what they are all about.

Classical liberalism – as it descends from thinkers like Hume – is about peaceful relations between factions, and a competent state that does not exceed its bounds. It is also about exit. The message of Cory’s book as I read it, and of what Silicon Valley used to be, is that there is an exit for classical liberals and libertarians, from what is happening in the Silicon Valley right, if they only choose to take it. They don’t have to go down with Captain William Shockley and the ship. They can find other options, provided that they are willing to step out of the comfortable.

This doesn’t mean that they have to embrace or even start talking more to the left (though I at least would welcome them if they did). They can still do their own thing – build up their own spaces, their own communities, their own identities.

do think that they should get off Twitter/X, if they are still on it, as soon as they can. It is hard to think straight when you are in a perpetual conversation that is systematically twisted around the obsessions of a particular individual, presenting a skewed and distorted understanding of what other people believe and say. There is a clear aversion among libertarians and classical liberals to Bluesky, presumably because they see it as dominated by the culture that they dislike. But the key difference with Twitter is that Bluesky is based on principles of exit and individual control at the level of the protocol. There isn’t an algorithmic feed that is imposed upon you. Instead, you can roll your own feeds according to your own criteria. If you build your own community of people who you follow, you won’t have ‘recommended’ posts and the like interpolated in among their posts. And if Bluesky begins to renege on all of this, there are (complicated but doable) means built in for defection from the platform as a whole, while keeping access to protocols and communities.

I also think people who are worried and unhappy should get out soon. Bad things are happening already. They are going to get worse, and quickly.

Those who are actually liberal, in the broadest sense of the word, whether left liberal, right liberal, classical liberal, conservative democratic or uncategorizable, are committed to a shared set of minimal basic norms: pluralism, democracy, and an effective state that doesn’t exceed its bounds. The Silicon Valley right is now together with – in some cases is an integral part of – a movement that is radically anti-pluralistic, that is only tolerant of democracy when it wins, and is set on degrading some parts of the state, while using others to destroy their ideological enemies. Professional friendships, funding relationships etc are fungible. Basic philosophical commitments are not. Take your picks and shovels and start digging your tunnel to the surface. It will be easier than it probably feels right now.

{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }

1

DS 02.02.25 at 1:50 pm

Apropos of nothing, how are things going over at Marginal Revolution these days?

2

engels 02.02.25 at 2:40 pm

Prior to the Musk takeover I had serious misgivings Twitter’s basic design, and the way it enshrines a kind of quantified Hobbesian war for popularity and attention: a cross between an intellectual stock exchange and a dystopian American high school. The result of these selection processes working on a predominantly liberal ecosystem was wokism and cancel culture; the effect on the organisms in Musk’s more right-wing Petri dish will doubtless be something worse. I didn’t get the impression Bluesky is any improvement in this respect, or even tries to be.

3

Tom Slee 02.02.25 at 3:49 pm

Thank you for making the general point of understanding “how hard it is to break free”. But of course, as this is a comment thread, so I want to pick up on the protocol topic. The idea that some protocols and architectures are inherently better has led down several dead ends. Not that there’s anything wrong with a creative technical architecture, but…
– We saw the whole EFF/John Perry Barlow “Declaration of independence” thing in the 1990s. Has not aged well.
– We saw the free software movement, but the surveillance state and the US defence establishment is built on SE Linux and all major commercial platforms are built on open source software.
– We saw the Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, which lives on solely in Wikipedia from what I can see.
– We saw the TOR/Dead Cow anarcho-security crowd, which enabled Silk Road.
– Ten years ago we saw arguments for how the blockchain was going to be liberatory (and I was at progressive conferences where people saw it as THE path forward).
– Signal is a fine application, but I’ve heard that Musk’s crowd now use it to communicate.
Again – these architectures also supported many fine initiatives – I’ve no interest in a “tech is bad” claim – but protocol as progressive politics seems like a dead end.

4

Henry Farrell 02.02.25 at 5:37 pm

Hi Tom – equally, it would be silly to argue that all protocols have identical valences/affordances. The point I am making here is narrower – if you buy into the notion of exit as a fundamental basis for political organization, then you shouldn’t be blackpilled against a protocol that is built precisely around making that possible. There is a lot of what some might call mood affiliation involved in libertarians clinging to Twitter as it swirls down the drain – I am trying to suggest that even if you qua classical liberal don’t like the people on an alternative protocol, or the perceived values of its users, there is nothing stopping you from putting it to your own purposes, and a lot of ways in which it reflects the notions of politics that you say you want to see realized. You could of course say much the same about Mastodon, but Mastodon is a tougher sell for simple readiness-of-use reasons as we all know.

I think that there are a lot of problems with Bluesky’s community myself, but that is a topic for another piece that I am ruminating on.

5

Tom Slee 02.02.25 at 6:33 pm

Henry #4 : I do agree with your point about “exit” (even if I might not tie it to protocol comparisons) and hope that the attention drain away from Twitter continues. I would look forward to a piece on the Bluesky usership.

6

Kartik Agaram 02.02.25 at 6:53 pm

As a liberal in Silicon Valley, I’d like to add a couple of points:

I think plenty of long-tail companies in US tech are still liberal.
I would like to believe plenty of the people who work in US tech are still liberal. It’s just hard to find each other right now. Perhaps one thing we’re seeing happen is a process of sorting out, as people with illiberal biases now feel empowered to voice them. Choice of microblogging site does seem like one way for this sorting to take place.
“Leave Twitter” feels like the barest scratch on the question of what liberals are to do next. I left Twitter 2 years ago. But what now? I’d appreciate suggestions, but my best answer so far is, “keep your powder dry.” Mostly I’m ignoring politics except through indirect/infrequent means like Crooked Timber. I’m a programmer, I like to work on programming projects (like this blog post last week).

A significant fraction of the US seems to have thought (at least through inaction) in the election that we’re far enough from the precipice to risk giving the current regime a try. That “DEI” was the battle to fight at this moment in history. I hope they’re right that we can afford to do so without dropping all the other balls the world is juggling right now.

7

Peter Dorman 02.02.25 at 7:24 pm

I think there’s a political economy dimension to all this that needs to be kept in mind. Yes, ideas and perspectives mutate and evolve, reflecting multiple dimensions of the larger culture, historical contingency, and everything else. But the role of wealth seeking and accumulation shouldn’t be overlooked. In fact, it has always (IMO) been the snake in the libertarian-utopian garden.

Other people who have studied this must have written useful stuff about Silicon Valley as a site of wealth generation and how those dynamics spilled over into its culture, organizational structure, etc. As mostly an outsider to all this, I see the influence on social media largely through the role of advertising in funding it. For those interested, I posted a while back “In the Virtual World, the Original Sin Is Advertising”. What is Bluesky’s funding model?

8

wkw 02.02.25 at 7:40 pm

Re Kartik @6, you ask “But what now?”

IME what is needed is two things in the short/medium-run, and one thing in the longer-run.

First, preparation for a general strike. A general strike may never happen, and if it does it will be very messy and haphazard, but it’s a good idea to be prepared in case the right moment coalesces. (Trade wars will make this easier.)

Second, a cultural blockade / mass boycott of all tech (and non-tech) companies that kiss the ring, as well as all cultural commentators and “ideas industry” people who do the same (or think they can be sideline reporters without getting burned). This needs to be as global as possible, and probably as de-centered as possible (i.e., not tied to any particular candidate or movement). Call it an “emergent norm”. Ideally the shift will be palpable, resemble a stampede.

Third, in the longer run, a mass emigration of experts in tech, science, academia, etc. There are countries currently open to inward migrants, especially if they are skilled, and more soon will be. If that eventuality seems like something you might pursue, then use the time now to reduce consumption, divest goods/property that is not essential, and make executable plans that cover a variety of scenarios.

These three things directly attack the network linkages that produced this situation, while beginning to develop new structures that can potentially rival/supplant the existing social networks. That is the goal, both micro and macro: fragment their networks, one community at a time, while maintaining alternative organizational forms that could replace them should the moment arise.

In the meantime, brush up on your Zweig, Havel, and Goldman.

9

engels 02.02.25 at 7:52 pm

Three American-owned addictive surveillance capitalist micro-blogging platforms for the liberals under the blue sky,
Seven for the edgelords in their basements of stone,
Nine for ageing boomers, doomed to die…

Pascal says, more or less: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.” Twitter and Bluesky alike force their users to perform—anxiously, repetitively, hyper-competitively—the ritual movements of neoliberal entrepreneurship of the self: quantified status competition based on glibness and groupthink (a kind of parody of contemporary professional careerism) is the broken record visible participants must play at all times at maximum volume, regardless of ostensible content (which all the while is being mercilessly mined and hoarded by our future AI overlords). Sometimes the only thing you can do with a ring is chuck it in a volcano.

10

anon/portly 02.02.25 at 9:38 pm

There isn’t [on Bluesky] an algorithmic feed that is imposed upon you. Instead, you can roll your own feeds according to your own criteria. If you build your own community of people who you follow, you won’t have ‘recommended’ posts and the like interpolated in among their posts.

I confess to being somewhat perplexed here. This isn’t exactly like Twitter, when you click on “Following?”

Of course a person can also click on “For You.” That’s the actual complaint here, not that they’re on Twitter, but that they’re using (or tend to use, or are allowed to use, or that’s it too much effort to not use) the “For You” tab?

11

Alex SL 02.03.25 at 12:23 am

What gets me going most about this post is this:

They thought they were signing up to a culture that was all about people being at liberty to decide how they wanted to live, with a government that would keep the show on the road, but wouldn’t interfere.

There is no way of putting this more politely: Did these people you know not listen to a single word Trump, Vance, and Musk said and wrote? Did they vote for a fantasy version of Trump that existed entirely in their heads, and if so, do they do the same in everyday life, like trying to pay five dollars for a product that is clearly labelled at two hundred, because the nicer version of the shop that they made up in their minds has lower prices?

those who value actual diversity of identities, cultures and beliefs, but who believe that DEI is being imposed on them

Do they think that there is any way of maintaining a diversity of identities, cultures, and beliefs without imposing tolerance of diverse identities, cultures, and beliefs on those who want to drive diverse identities, cultures, and beliefs out of society? If so, how would that work? Abolish DEI, their employer hires only white men, and then their workplace has the diversity they (claim to) value… how? I am genuinely perplexed how that works out in their heads.

Do they not understand that the imposition is the necessary condition for what they (claim to) value? And again, do they apply the same in everyday life, like saying that they value actual road safety but complaining that having to drive on the right side of the road and waiting at red lights is being imposed on them? Would they vote for a dictator who promises to abolish that imposition and then be surprised that road safety is gone?

Charitably, the problem here appears to be that people unthinkingly concluded that DEI must be bad because the angry man on the TV very confidently says so, without realising that all it means is “don’t discriminate”, and the rest is detail regarding how-to. I appreciate that there has to be an exit, a way for the little people to maintain face after realising they have into abetted evil, but that necessity stands in a strong tension with the observation that there also have to be repercussions for abetting evil, or evil will continue to be abetted. At the very least, it should be possible to take them aside at some point and say something to the effect of, “what did you think would happen? Have you considered a bit of self-reflection so that you don’t fall for the next affinity fraud when it comes along?” Just a bit of embarrassment among friends.

Regarding Bluesky, for better or for worse, it more or less directly replicates Twitter’s functionality before Musk. There are a ‘following tab’, where I see the people with whom I choose to interact, whose jokes I like, and whose announcements of new publications and initiatives I want to learn of, and a ‘for you’ algorithmic tab that I never use and do not understand why anybody would want to do anything with except burn it with extreme prejudice. There are likes and retweets and, in contrast to Mastodon, quote retweets. Most importantly, however, although weird crypto bots are proliferating on every network faster than they can be blocked, Bluesky isn’t overrun by Nazi trolls.

12

Richard Melvin 02.03.25 at 12:40 am

As a quick reminder, US 2024 Election results in California were a 20 point Democratic landslide, with such Republican vote as existed being almost entirely rural.

Pondering whether liberal tech workers still exist is a particular bad case of complete disconnection with reality. Even most business-owning captitalists equivocally backed the Democrats. It’s just that, that having failed, they are now doing what they can to avoid defenestration..

13

Matt 02.03.25 at 1:22 am

The main glue that holds the anti-democratic right and libertarians together is a shared detestation for DEI.

This isn’t wrong, but I think it’s important to recall that libertarians are also anti-democracy. This is one of the things that separates them from “classical liberals”. So, they also come together on being anti-democratic.

14

François 02.03.25 at 11:56 am

You could of course say much the same about Mastodon, but Mastodon is a tougher sell for simple readiness-of-use reasons as we all know.

I am under the impression that, probably unconsciously, you are putting a lot of bad faith in your advocacy for BlueSky. At the moment it is a platform entirely controlled by a private company, without any demonstrated exit strategy. On the other hand Mastodon is right there, with people moving in and out of various instances everyday. As for the technical difficulty of Mastodon, come on, you are posting this to the audience of a good old fashioned weblog.

15

Luis 02.03.25 at 10:16 pm

There is no way of putting this more politely: Did these people you know not listen to a single word Trump, Vance, and Musk said and wrote?

So, couple things:
(0) this is much more an elite management class thing than the bulk of tech. Google and Facebook employees, despite their bosses, still contributed overwhelmingly to Dems.
(1) among that elite class, they did listen but many convinced themselves it couldn’t be that bad. (This isn’t unique to tech; eg many recent Asian and Latin American immigrants did similar “yeah but he won’t deport me” leopard-face votes. This is, sadly, fairly bog-standard “voters aren’t that bright” stuff.
(2) others listened, but decided they’d rather have fascism than empowered workers. That’s the really big change, I think, for the elite management class. Their liberaltarianism was predicated on “tax me and do liberal-ish things with it, but I still get to act like a monarch inside my company”. When employees said “whoa, maybe we can push back when you hire all your pale male buddies” and “whoa, maybe we can complain when we take DoD contracts”… that was beyond the pale and broke the truce.

And that last is the scary part to me, I think. It’s one thing if you’re dumb (democracy just has to deal with that!), it’s another if you’ve consciously chosen that societal fascism is a price you’re willing to have others pay so that you’re not bothered at the workplace by protests and pronouns.

16

Tm 02.04.25 at 10:16 am

“people who used to be libertarians or classical liberals are more and more enmeshed with the illiberal right. Democracy is out. Founder-worship and admiration for Donald Trump are in.”

People who support fascism are not liberals and likely never have been. People who take part in Führer Worship have probably never been liberal in any meaningful sense of the word.

And what Alex said.

Re engels 2, not gonna let you get away rewriting history. Twitter’s algorithms have long before Musk been proven to systematically amplify right wing voices. Same for FB.

E. g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211695821000854

Regarding bsky, I’m glad you don’t like it so hopefully you’ll stay away.

17

MisterMr 02.04.25 at 12:22 pm

About the various “Do they not understand that …” by Alex Sl @11, the problem is that ideologies are halfway between a worldview and wish-fulfillment, so a lot of otherwise intelligent people will not understand what menaces their our ideology/sense-of-self etc. at times even when it is shoven into their faces.

This, and sometimes people have to pay a lot to have an exit from their workplace.

18

Tm 02.04.25 at 12:50 pm

And one more thing. Anybody who ever claimed to be concerned about “cancel culture” – anybody who ever claimed that calling out Nazis on social media and similar acts of “liberal wokism” was a threat to freedom of speech – and who isn’t up in arms and on the barricades against Mump’s purging the civil service along ideological and ethnic criteria and engaging in explicit government censorship, should now be completely discredited. These clowns never cared about freedom of speech – it was just an excuse to be assholes.

“From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.”
The list includes ‘woman’, ‘female’, ‘black’, …
https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lhczgu2tw22d

19

Alex SL 02.04.25 at 10:07 pm

Just saw an article about immigrants from Venezuela who are now surprised and angry at Trump for doing what he was always obviously going to do because they thought he “only meant the illegal immigrants”. It is truly astonishing how many people not only fall for a fraud but support those who are open like a book about hating them.

Still, as Tm points out, there are different groups of people to be considered here. There are those who now admit that they have been conned, and although one should maybe ask them if they have learned anything for next time they run into a con man, that is overall good. There are those who complain but do not accept any responsibility. Maybe they should be accepted as allies, but it means they will definitely fall for the next con, as they refuse to learn, so their value as allies is highly questionable. And then there are those who are totally fine with what is happening and will only pretend to have been against it on the day after Trumpism is widely discredited, be that six months from now as even far-right Republicans rebel because the government has seized up and most public services have evaporated, or in 2066 when the Rose Revolution forces Donald II to step down and democratic elections to be reinstated.

(Sadly, not optimistic regarding the first scenario, as those far-right Rs are unlikely to gain self-awareness even if things go bad for them: Musk’s and Trump’s ideas would have worked, but they have been sabotaged by the far-left Deep State! But will have to see.)

In other words, it is one thing to be for diversity but consider diversity policies to be an imposition but then be surprisingly surprised when one’s allies against diversity policies predictably turn out to be against diversity. That’s just being extremely stupid. It is another thing to LARP as a libertarian free speech crusader and then cheer on as the country’s research output is subject to Gleichschaltung. Those people should not have an exit but be shunned forever.

20

Howard NYC 02.06.25 at 12:20 pm

https://generalstrikeus.com/

pithy summary of a general strike’s intent: if they refuse to respect us, then we ought to show them we have power by way doing nothing until the store shelves are empty and they are as hungry and cold and miserable as we are

21

J-D 02.08.25 at 12:02 pm

https://generalstrikeus.com/

I look at that and I see this:
The declared intention is for the strike to happen once the number of people signed up to participate is 3.5% of the US population, which makes the target about eleven million people.

The website was launched in 2022.

After over two years, they have two hundred thousand people signed up.

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