Greetings ultimate exit people. This is a new thing for me as most things are for everybody these days. It's all part of learning to inhabit the net. You all have a t-shirt right? This is the retro Cold War flavoured version. A quick and basically irrelevant nostalgia term. We owe the exit voice distinction to this man. Here's the crucial book. The third term tends to go missing. Perhaps that's because it seems to be inherently morally coercive.
I'm going to assume people here are thick-skinned enough to take it. The principal differential of the 21st century ideological spectrum will be loyalty. It will divide those at the extremes who invoke loyalty to various large-scale social collectives as the supreme political value from those professing or simply demonstrating minimal sensitivity to this appeal. While tempting and in certain respects plausible to map this spectrum back onto an ideological polarity stretching from radical collectivists to radical individualists much is missed by doing so. The disloyalists have their own model of collectivity biased to the commercial ideal of free exchange and to the technological ideal of virtual connectivity. The opportunity for
frictionless switching within a global network or network of networks epitomizes disloyalty as a positive techno commercial achievement and networks are collectivities. The distinction between the politics of loyalty and its other is more productively drawn between hot and cold collectivities. Hot collectivities are based on passionate attachments. Cold collectivities are based on pragmatic calculations. Hot collectivists have motherlands and fatherlands. Cold collectivists shop around. Loyalty in this ideological sense is essentially
a macro-social phenomenon. Disloyalists are probably no less loyal to their families, friends and dogs, although they are quite likely have smaller and more highly nucleated families, more carefully selected friends, and cats or lizards rather than dogs. They're a discussion to be had about differential rates of divorce and parental abandonment within the spectrum, and we can be confident that the loyalist social conservative constituency will ensure such a discussion takes place. The pure loyalist idea of society is that of a big family. Well for disloyalists it is a functional arrangement of strangers. If strangers seem somehow like a bad thing your loyalism is showing. Humans are excitable social animals.
If this spectrum were reducible to loyalty and its denial, there is little reason to doubt that matters would have been already resolved definitively in the loyalists' favour. That the spectrum exists as an ideological generator and not merely a measure of departure from virtue is due to the positive sense of the disloyal power, which is competence. If there is a single striking pattern to modern history, it is that disloyalists or cold collectivities tend to win. Romantic losers are losers for a reason. Pretty much whatever it is that you're trying to do, doing it coldly works best.
Loyalism, after all, precludes selection. To choose among options is already disloyalism at work. The discrimination between success and failure only operates outside the sphere of loyalty. Pragmatic calculation selects between connections. Passionate attachment, by definition, does not. Run a performance-selected system against an unselected one, and the outcome is predictable. The tense and primarily disjunctive relation between loyalty and competence is the keystone of modern social science. It is rediscovered every time a social phenomenon proves tractable to models based on games,
systems of exchange, or unintended spontaneous order. Every theory of modernisation that appeals to some species of alienation acknowledges it. Social process and loyalty degrees are catilaxing, and that is the only social phenomenon that is understood to work. There are other things that work naturally, but their functional principles are incalculable. Loyalists have traditions that work well enough to still exist, which is hard. Anything that isn't dead is doing something right. Hot collectivities are in their own way evidently functional. Their opacity to social scientific formalisation, however, is suggestive of a deeper disloyalty
at work. They have been tested and selected by cold forces beyond the social sphere. Every passionate attachment was honed dispassionately in the butcher's yard of nature and deep history. When orders of loyalty work, it is because they were not built in the same way they are sustained. The competitive dynamics they exclude have worked them even more ruthlessly from without. Whatever was done well, even the carving of a culture of passionate attachment was done coldly. Everything gets carved. the machinery inside and you have social Darwinism. Leave it outside and you still have social
Darwinism. This of course is a very cold way of looking at things. Some like it hot understandably. So there's an argument. Everything with which we have become familiar under the name of politics. The hot collectivity argument as it develops within modernity isn't easily identified with the left or right. It goes roughly like this. Look, we understand, we really do, that when things get cooled down enough, they can start superconducting. Truly extraordinary stuff starts to happen, we get that. It's unintelligibly extraordinary stuff these days. Growth, change, connectivity, artificial intelligence, whatever. But we're not made for this temperature, we need more warmth.
and we're going to insist our leaders deliver some for us. There's a whole thermopolitics discussion about squabbles over the temperature control which soon gets huge but that's not why we're here, is it? Ultimate exit begins where the fight over the thermostat stops. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Don't argue or compromise, split. Cold by nature and cold by destination. Antarctica, the seabed, the asteroid belt. I don't know whether anybody here is old enough to remember Siberia. That needs to come back. Political heat dissipation is what the 21st century is about. Archipelago is actually the warmest version.
Meta utopia sounds toasty but really it isn't. It's meta-etical and implicitly recognises that the integrity of an exit-based system depends fundamentally upon its moral indifference. Dynamic geography and experimental government searches for optimum switching conditions which are icy. And in the end, the great yeti, neocameralism. I'm going to assume that people here get all this stuff with cold clarity. Here's the prediction. There aren't a lot of cold collectivists, relatively speaking, but they're going to be better at getting out than hot collectivists are at keeping them in.