in a moment. Following our sort of two-track schema, I think particularly this week we're going to be challenged not to be diverted a little bit by the excitement of catabolic geopolitics which has gone a bit over the cliff in the last week. And I think it's possible to really try to do something interesting with this. I'll avoid the temptation which is not overwhelming in any case to drown you guys in journalistic references but I'm sure you've all been absorbing massive amounts of Brexit commentary.
I've got a few things that I'd like to just point to. The first, I've put this up in the schoolroom, but I'll just repeat it now because I think for our purposes it's crucially important that Patrick Friedman actually has put up a little Brexit Facebook post. I think it's small enough that I could just read it all straight out. He says, I'll just give you the link to that too.
He's a fan, but as we'll see, his position is a little bit anomalous in relation to much of the commentary that we've seen. He says, quote, Since the EU is basically the opposite of competitive governance, brackets imposing a large bureaucratic non-local adaptive non-multiple experiments governance structure on a diverse region, end brackets, I am delighted about Brexit and hopeful that it demonstrates a first world trend towards local autonomy and governance diversity. The answers to difficult questions like immigration, security and foreign policy should not come from a central organization that imposes a uniform solution on all. They should be both locally adaptive and answered in diverse ways so we can all learn from the
multiple parallel experiments. The diversity we need is of the things that matter, rules, ideas, institutions and culture. There should be a country with Germany's immigration policy and a country with Hungary's immigration policy. There need to be different interests and exchange rates for Greece and Germany. One size fits none. Glad that democracy can occasionally get something right and psyched for Scottish skexit or ukexit as well as the continuing failure of the Eurozone ECB to handle widely varied regional economic situations." So I think this little post acts as glue between the two sides of our discussion, some sort
of transition between this concrete, massively significant episode in catabolic geopolitics and our dynamic geography discussion which I hope will go into a full burn as well this week. OK, so just to stick with the concrete side of things a little bit, and in particular about I'm interested in just addressing the commentary about it.
Now I don't think it's escaped anyone's attention that the discussion subsequent to Brexit has perhaps been even more bad tempered than the discussion leading up to it. There's been an extraordinary level of animosity in a, I'm reluctant to call it conversation but I guess I'll do for now, following this decision. And I think that this is not in any way accidental or even uninteresting, I think there's something important going on here. And the suggestion I'd like to make to try and group things with some sort of philosophical
I mentioned here is that the discussion currently about what's at stake in Brexit and catapulted geopolitics more generally is rigorously pre-critical. And by that I mean that it hasn't been diagonalised. I've sort of promised people a sort of diagonalization matrix for this discussion and I think I have to deliver on that and I think this is a good opportunity to do it. And there's obviously various ways that one could attempt to do this, but I think the
The most helpful way is to take the terms connectivity and integration and treat them as our quasi-synonyms that therefore when we look at them closely open up the opportunity for a diagonalisation. So if I can just retreat for one minute back into the existing discussion, and people can obviously argue with me about this as about everything, but I think there's great consistency to what we've seen in the rancorous argument so far.
And I think it's crystallized quite well. I've got two little references, both from commenters on the left, but I don't honestly think it matters that much in this case, because structurally you could come in either direction and do the same thing. And the first little reference I'd like to make is a tweet from Christopher Hayes, which I think is actually pretty perfect for sort of capturing what I want to start with here, he says, I don't want a future in which politics is primarily a battle between cosmopolitan finance capitalism and ethno-nationalist backlash.
And I think this really does, I'm sorry if I'm being very repetitive here, but I think this captures extremely well the tenor of the discussion and a lot of the paradoxical positions that people have found themselves in. I've noticed a sort of interestingly twisted paradoxical thing of sort of reciprocal trolling between left and right commentary on Twitter where the rightists are sort of poking at the leftists and saying, oh wow, you guys for the first time are denouncing democracy and having conniptions about the fact that international capital markets are upset. And the leftists then push back, oh, for the first time you guys are saying ignore markets,
they don't matter, and I'm sure there's another side to make the whole thing nicely symmetrical. Like there is this very interesting, weird pattern that the voice of the markets, I would probably like to put some inverted commas around that, but the centralized financial institutions and their mode of public communication has been seized upon by people who have deep left-wing sympathies as being a sort of sign of the disastrous mistaken character of this decision. And this obviously cuts both ways and it's an indication that something really weird
is going on here. The second, rather than trying to sort of cite the tweet, maybe if I just quote it, if anyone wants to find it, I think they just stick it into Google and they will. So I'll just do that. I think it's a kind of classic comment historically. This is Christopher Hayes. The second reference is from Zizek that I think is on exactly the same point here.
He wrote an editorial for Newsweek about Brexit and again obviously coming from the left. He points to this, I think, the same structure, I'll quote him now too. He says he calls for a project that will break the vicious cycle of EU technocracy and nationalist populism. So I think EU technocracy and nationalist populism is for him carrying exactly the same antagonism,
neither side of which the left is comfortable identifying with, of course. And then his own proposal, which is a little bit vague, he says, "...the true division of our heaven is not between anemic technocracy and nationalist passions, but between their vicious cycle and a new pan-European project which addresses the true challenges that humanity confronts today." So as indicated, I'm going to take those brief remarks as summing up to some, in my opinion, fairly high level of adequacy, the tenor of the debate as it has taken place so far. If people think I've missed big structures of this controversy, of course, come back
at that in just a minute. And I think if we draw out our diagonalization matrix for this problem, we can see exactly where this is coming from, which is the fact that connectivity and integration have been brought into coincidence as if they are synonymous terms and are grouped together under this extremely, I think, awkward intrinsically paradoxical and complicated notion of globalization its opposite so that globalization is seen as being pro-connectivity, pro-integration
and it's to use Christopher Hayes' term ethno-nationalist backlash is a reaction against both connectivity and integration. So obviously the critical diagonal suggestion, which I think leads us directly into the sort of things that Patrick Friedman is trying to do with this course, is to uncouple these terms a little bit, put them onto a diagonalization matrix, and therefore suggest the possibility of so if we all if we have if everyone accepts it the current debate is dominated by the
notion that there's a high connectivity high integration option and its natural antonym is a low connectivity low integration option so you have a choice between globalization and insularity or xenophobia or whatever your terms more or less abusive for both of those sides, footloose cosmopolitans versus xenophobic nationalists or how everyone wants to put that distinction. What is not being tolerated or explored or critically entertained is the possibility of a low connectivity, high integration option. And I think this would be what Patrick Friedman's ideas are wanting to criticise, that it would
be interesting to see someone defend that. I'm worried about saying too much about it because I would be very tempted to strawman my own notions of a kind of nightmarish leftist politics there. I'll be interested whether people want to fight over that or not. And as its opposite vector, and this is what I think Friedman is wanting, and this is the repressed critical option in this whole thing, the diagonal, I would say positive diagonal trajectory of catapulted politics is a high connectivity, low integration model of geopolitical
organization. So that's to say what's the missing diagonal box there heading out on a diagonal from the terms of the debate that is utterly dominant at the moment is the notion of a connective disintegration. Now I think this plugs into the Patrick Friedman material that we're going to be talking about today, but I think it might be better for the sake of interaction if I sort of take a break before doing that and throw things open for some Brexit conversation and then maybe come
back to Patrick Friedman's text in a moment. I'm sure people must have masses of Brexit chat lined up like water behind the dam, so I'm not going to take this silence very seriously for another, unless it really prolongs itself. I pasted a link to a Twitter search which is for the phrase
the Brexit hashtag and then democracy and failed or fails or failure and there's kind of a constant stream of cries of democracy failing in the hashtag so I think maybe go ahead so I was just going to ask where do you think is that coming predominantly from anywhere or is that a kind of pan-ideological response to what's happening it's maybe difficult to tell but it so I would default to pan but it does seem
very, very, very common. So I wonder if maybe, I mean, if you look at the most recent secession efforts in the West in the last 20-odd years, I don't think any of them have succeeded, right? I don't think there has been a single case. So it's interesting that there's a sort of a, perhaps a retreat from democratic thinking that this has created I'm not sure if that's too reading too much into it when you say a retreat from democratic thinking you mean that people who think
this is a terrible mistake are therefore inclined to see it as a failure of democratic process yes and to sort of weaken the by democratic thinking I think I'm more pointing at the sort of generic civic mindedness or the very generic cultural belief in democracy as a as just the norm maybe has been weakened a little bit through ironically a democratic process yeah I mean, I don't think anyone could seriously suggest this isn't a huge thing to have happened.
And I mean, obviously because I've been banging away since this course started on it being a global wave towards catabolic process. I'm very inclined to run with this in this direction. I've seen lots of commentary on this in terms of people saying that it's going to be catalytic and it's going to encourage a whole bunch of other people to start splitting off. It's going to encourage disintegrative tendencies within the UK and Europe. in America might be seizing on it, there's this whole thing, this text it, hashtag. So I mean of course it's always possible to get massively excited about, but at least
people are concerned whether positively or negatively that this is something that's indicative of a much deeper trend rather than just a one-off event. I thought it was interesting also the sort of commentary around the motivations for leave voters and whether or not we can attribute nationalism or
immigration or the simple issue of sovereignty to to their voting decisions which I think is a funny exercise in the first place but I'm it seems as though there has been some post-Brexit polling done that indicates that it's actually a mix of various attitudes and not not a singular one whereas it has been perhaps painted solely with the nationalist brush yes you know I'm not I I'm having a bit of trouble with Joshua's
audio here I don't know whether other people have the same problem I was just going to say it's an interesting data point that nationalism is now, is couched almost exclusively in negative terms, whereas that's not the history of that idea at all. Now it's sort of like this, it gets deployed as like a synonym for, you know, fascism or whatever sort of nasty thing you want to substitute. but I I mean I this this board was a part for increasing the power of the nation versus the existing power structure it seems very hard to me to
put it in any other terms than nationalist arm it doesn't mean that that is necessarily like you people horrible thing but that's actually where so yeah I like just lost you then that's totally something some fault on my on my end are make do you want to drop and come back on or the is it fixed itself we we are going to
James, are you speaking or I've got your image up here? Which James, me? Yeah, yeah. I can if you want. I mean, because I've obviously got lots of British friends, and so I don't know whether the picture of the reaction that I've got is different from those of others who aren't based in Europe or in England. But I mean, there's a very strange set of circumstances which has led to it, because there's a real sort of split in the country between, and it's obviously represented geographically,
it's London and a few other big cities and Scotland, but Scotland's a separate case, against what really were traditional sort of Labour heartlands, you know, white working class people who have completely, you know, revolted against their people who took them who took them for granted and considered them as boats in the bag and whatever. But the reaction has been, I mean it's been almost like the seven stages of grief and we're really in anger at the moment. It's this sort of vitriol and really in almost class based terms, it's really explicit about
ignorant, what they consider to be ignorant people, not having known what they've done, having been misled, there's plenty of allusions to the sort of false consciousness type of argument. You know, sort of, this characterization of 17 million people as morons who've been manipulated into doing something that they shouldn't have been allowed to do. And there's, you know, there's, it was quite fun, I think, going through Twitter and trying to find, you know, the people losing their shit on their Twitter feeds.
The best one was Simon Sharma that I found. really just went bananas and was cursing everyone and I don't know, maybe it's important not to, there's definitely a trend and this has happened in quite specific circumstances I think because if you look at the sort of people who actually led the campaign and if consider your two connectivity and integration. If you look at someone like Daniel Hannon, who was a big figure in the Leave campaign, he's quite a libertarian Tory and he's gone on an interview since saying, I personally didn't argue for less immigration as a result
of this, which is sort of fuel on the fire for the people who are arguing that people were misled in voting for it. But there's a sort of alliance between, I suppose, Tories who had been Eurosceptic for years for their own reasons, and they have sort of piled together with this sort of UKIP-ish of people. I'm not interested in patronising anyone. But it's a strange confluence of a lot of different kinds of discontent. I almost feel it's like a quasi-heresy, what has sort
of happened, that's how it's viewed. There is a project, if you like, that the political class has been engaged in for years, which is more integration. To them, the immigration question which has been sort of the biggest one, there's no question for them that they want high immigration. It's just part of their, it's quite deep within their values. And so they've responded to what has been for many years quite obvious opposition to it, popular opposition to it, by either contemptuously dismissing it or in the case of the Tory party
who were elected making a promise to reduce immigration and then acting as completely ignoring it really and so the rate goes higher and higher and higher. And I suppose finally there has been some sort of response that they've had to listen to. Even things like the circumstances in which the referendum was called, it was to do with the UKIP threat, it was partially a Tory party thing, and the issue of Europe which has been a divide in the Tory party for years and years and years has finally, apparently been resolved in favour of the people in favour of leaving, which is, as someone who's been following It's a shock.
It's amazing. It's a shock. Yeah, and there are so many ways in which you can analyse it. What happens to the mainstream UK left is interesting as well, because they were almost all for remaining and especially with this backlash against really working class British people and the views that they hold. I'm sure that when England play Iceland tomorrow in the Euros that there are going to be some Brexit chants from, maybe not against Iceland but it's those people, it's the people who voted UKIP generally and there's... they've always relied on them for votes, but I almost
see now a sort of turning point where they don't want to kid themselves that actually these people are going to be persuaded if only we elect a Jeremy Corbyn who's a bit more left-wing because that's what they really wanted. I see them now sort of looking and And actually seeing what these people believe and not liking it at all, and finally sort of denouncing them rather than trying to kid themselves that this hasn't happened. I don't know. But it's difficult to get one's thoughts in order, to be honest. I've found it... Yeah, well I hope we can do that. Because emotions are still very high, especially here. You know, there are certain friends that I'm not looking forward to seeing again on Monday with work.
It's just very strange. But it seems to me like this kind of, what you're calling this white working class constituency, the way in which they would articulate the decision that they've made seems to me is very much within the terms of this binary structure. I mean, I'm seeing it all the time, that, you know, from both sides, oh, the ethno-nationalists have won, this is about, depending whether you like it or not, you use different adjectives, you know, xenophobia and insularity, or more positive conversations about tradition and local identity or whatever.
but the structural characteristics of the decision seem to me to be kind of an agreed common reference on both sides it's just whether or not you like this decision that's been made within the context of this conflict between when you say this project it seems to me the project, the elite project which again of course Just poke me on this if you think I'm taking a jump too far. But it seems to me that when people are using this term neoliberalism, they mean something very like this. And what they mean is something that the core of it is the notion that you cannot have or
promote connectivity without integration. That those two things totally belong together. The whole way people talk about Europe as a common market, you know, when Britain, where there was a much stronger kind of classical liberal tradition, the notion of a common market, you think of that as a kind of just a free trade zone. But in the history of the EU it's slowly come to mean something that involves much more political integration, standardization of rules and regulations, these increasingly condensing levels of supranational governance. So a common market doesn't mean anything, it's a political, it's a thick political
economic concept that is essentially about the fact that you cannot have connectivity without integration or vice versa. If you want all these productive links across national borders, then you have to agree to some level of fixed supranational governance and higher level regulatory organization. And that seems to me to be the elite project. And it's been, you know, there's an argument we had about the problems that it's run into and whether they're inherent in that idea and all of these kind of things. And then there's obviously this backlash that articulates itself in terms of a rejection of both terms of that.
You know, there's a sort of strong anti-free trade rhetoric in a lot of the most excited people involved in this, as well as an anti-supernational government thing. So, of course, it's complicated, and of course there's this weird position of libertarian-minded factions within it, and the way that they have, as you say, made this strange alliance. But, I mean, a rejection of free trade seems to me to be kicking around in the infosphere a lot, and aligned with this, what is seen as a trend towards a rejection of post-national cosmopolitanism that is accepting the terms of this elite project and just simply rejecting it as a whole.
I think that's definitely right. I actually really like the, I hadn't really thought about the idea of neoliberalism, because I've never really liked the term, I've always thought it's, because there's nobody who claims to be a neoliberal, it's almost used as a term of abuse really. But yeah, I think in terms of the connectivity integration, yeah, if you can split them. I think the left doesn't like the connectivity, and that's what they're referring to really with neoliberalism. And the assumption has been, I suppose, that you
can't have one without the other. I mean, the libertarians, I know that they're not, I suppose, all that crucial, but they are interesting because they're definitely pro-connectivity. Yes. I mean, they're not, because there's been this rhetoric of opening ourselves to the world and, you know, we shouldn't shackle ourselves to a declining continent, we should be looking further afield to India, Australia or wherever else. And that's obviously… Yeah. I mean there's obviously a problem for the simplified narrative on this by the fact that it is Britain doing this.
Because from the continental viewpoint, Britain is this redoubt of liberalism used in the old sense and as an insult. it's indifferent to questions of solidarity, it fetishizes economics and free trade, it's, you know, if you look at sort of the mainstream commentary from the continent, from French and German writers, you know, Britain has been a constant sort of pain in this whole thing, and it's because it is hyper-liberal, it's kind of, you know, economistic, it's too obsessed with free market fundamentalist, I think is the sort of language that you would use. And so it's not as if this has come from a kind of constituency in Europe
that would be traditionally folkish and communitarian. You know what I mean? Like you play all kinds of places you can go in Europe where you would expect that kind of blood and soil revolt against what let's say lots of inverted commas neoliberal capitalism or whatever we want to call it cosmopolitanism. I mean there's not so much as you can expect back. Britain is not the place and England which is obviously the part of Britain that voted for Brexit is the last part of Europe except maybe the Dutch or something I don't know who you would expect to be revolting against connectivity.
So people who say it's a very simple thing, you know, and you've got connectivity and integration on one side, and you've got a rejection of both on the other side, and now these blood and soil maniacs have turned over the apple cart, have a problem explaining, well, why the hell is Britain, the place, and England the place where this is coming from. It's already a diagonal thing that's taking place when you look at it in this more deeper cultural and geographical context. So even if you say, yes, of course overt libertarianism is not a huge political force,
but I think if you look at things from the side of the continent, you know, the influence of Britain has been seen as consistently and corrosively libertarian in orientation, and to the continual infuriation of more communitarian-minded political thinkers on the continent. Yeah, there was a tweet from, I'm not sure, I can't remember if it was Gianco or Donald Tusk, but it was quite sort of curt, and it said, Britain's relationship with Europe has been ambiguous for 40 years, and today they have made it clear once and for all. Right. I think that's true, that there was always a tension.
And I've read lots of times that Germany has thought that influence has been positive, maybe that's a North-South Europe thing, But I think there are certainly people in Europe who might press now for more integration, sort of on the grounds that we've got the awkward guy at the party who doesn't really fit in and wants to talk to. He's left and now we can actually get on to integrating our fiscal policy more and whatever else they have planned. Well, I mean, I would have thought on the diagonal side, the French must have a large political constituency that would want to go up the diagonal in the other direction
and say, can we cut back on this connectivity, this liberal connectivity stuff, and just focus on solidarity and integration and communitarianism and collective security and stop corrupting this process of integration with all that anglophone, liberal, capitalist stuff, you know, we can chuck that out. But I mean, let's see whether we see that. If we do see it, it's interesting precisely because it has a complement. If you can unlock these terms, then you can unlock them in both directions.
And I think the reason why I think this is an introduction into the Patrick Friedman material is that I think how they're setting up this dynamic geography question. As you have seen if you've looked at these texts, they're sort of versions of the same text. I don't think one of them completely obsolesces the other, but the seasteading text is the one that is a little bit more polished and takes up pretty much all the discussion from the earlier dynamic geography text.
And the common theme in terms of their project, if we're going to pose it to this again, I'm sorry to keep just doing the inverted commas thing, but lots of inverted commas, neoliberal project is that their fundamental orientation is towards competitive government. I'll quote a little thing, it's probably unnecessary at this point to do that but I will. I think a good place is their little abstract and seasteading place, to the seasteading piece where they see, this is their abstract, we did develop a dynamic theory of the industrial organization of government which combines the insights of public choice theory and a
dynamic understanding of competition. We argue that efforts to improve policy should be focused on the root of the problem, the uncompetitive governance industry and the technological environment out of which it emerges, and suggest that the most promising way to robustly improve policy is to develop the technology to settle the ocean. Now, the final sentence, I think, is the stopping place for a lot of people. I think we have to get onto that at some point, but maybe we can shelve it for a little while to get onto the kind of practical, technical questions about seasteading is, I think, understandably seen as kind of a massive torpedo hole
in their basic argument. But if I can just, at this stage, abstract it, I think as soon as you're talking about competitive government, you're obviously wanting to push your dynamic of connectivity. The whole thing is about connectivity. They're talking about markets because they want connectivity. They're using that sort of language because this thing is about creating a commercium, a kind of open trading environment. And within that they're wanting to insert politics as something that can be disciplined by markets. And the way it can be disciplined by markets requires a massive ratchet upwards of competition
between governments which they think is being obstructed by the current order and therefore I think we can say without any kind of stretch that they're obviously seeing disintegration as the route towards an intensification of connectivity. It's completely breaking out of the terms of the debate that there's governing this whole thing. you cannot improve your connective system unless you find some way of disintegrating it such that governments can be subject to savage competitive
pressures they can be treated like companies they can be liquidated they can fail systematically people can apply selective pressure to them in a way that is impossible in the current order and so the whole orientation I think this is uncontroversial of what Friedman is proposing here is is oriented towards disintegration and therefore it's completely at odds with this notion that the elite notion we've been talking about that if you want to improve your sort of commercial environment, expand it, you know, produce a common market, you have to engage in this systematic project of political integration.
That's the absolute opposite of what he is suggesting. And so when he then sort of remarks on Brexit, he's obviously coming from somewhere that is completely outside the terms that that debate is being structured by almost everywhere. Yeah, and the result isn't really a victory for, to be honest, for, you know, dynamic geography. It's more awkward than that. I mean, you know, I think maybe it's a step on the way. But the ethno-nationalist element to it is so powerful, I think.
You know, at least in terms of who the people were and why they voted. obviously there's probably plenty more options for them to be ignored which will probably happen as far as until it becomes completely impossible but yes it is interesting I mean when you say technical aspects do you mean I mean actually the vehicles or whatever the platforms themselves or do you mean the international frameworks getting them recognised No, I mean definitely. Or is it just like the fact that maybe it's hard to convince people to come and live on a raft? It reminds me of Snow Crash, the raft, if anyone's read that.
Right, sure, yeah. By Neil Stephenson. Yeah. Anyway. No, I mean more exactly these crunchy aspects. I think they're connected. You probably can't turn it into a completely technological aspect. And he's very attentive to the social side of that. The fact that people are rooted, people have what he calls high switching costs. Political exit has massive inertia and friction in opposition to it. People are generally very territorial, they have all kinds of attachments. They cannot just walk out as easily as they can walk out of a supermarket, even though that's of course the ideal from you know everything Patrick Friedman is trying to do
is to nudge things in the direction where people can treat governments as supermarkets but he's I think very attentive to the fact that it's a straightforward thing to do. Yeah I mean the one reservation I had when I was thinking about it just after I read it was, you've got that technological problem, because if it's going to be big enough, it's going to be building a city on the sea, which is no mean feat by itself. And so you've got these two problems that you need to solve at once. One is building this competitive nation state. One is actually getting a floating city on the sea working.
And the whole project could fail on either ground. It's like making it a hundred times harder for you by introducing this level of complication. I think this is really interesting. And I'm sort of hoping, I don't think anything's going to fall out into this neat order like this, but I sort of have this wild fantasy in my mind that we'll sort of move slowly towards these more and more crunchy technical problems, either late this time or next week we'll be really talking about bolting stuff together in the sea and all of this kind of stuff. But on a kind of abstract level in terms of what you've just said, whenever you've got this chicken and egg problem, that's what you've got there in a way, isn't it?
You need a good technological floating platform technology for people persuading to want to move to it and you need people willing to move onto dodgy floating islands before you've got the kind of technological and economic momentum to develop these kind of platforms. I'm not sure whether I'm totally fairly paraphrasing what you're saying like that, but I think when you say this double problem, at least in part it's that. It seems to be a sort of network transition problem. And as we've seen earlier, all network effects are like that.
You need the market for the technology, and the technology requires the market. And from one side, that is an obstacle, just as you say, of course, you know, they both seem to depend on each other, that reciprocal dependency. But on the other side, reciprocal dependency is a very explosive dynamic, you know, because once you start to move it, then what looks like an insuperable, obstructive problem becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic. So more people are interested, there's more resources, there's more technological innovation, more interested, it goes into a positive feedback loop.
And so that deep, I agree, totally deep problem with the C-Sledding project is a classic positive feedback catalysis problem or a classic network effects problem that you need to cross a threshold where you actually get that same chicken and egg obstacle turning into a positive reinforcement dynamism. And it's exactly the same cybernetic diagram in both cases, so it's like just a threshold thing. I'm not trying to say that minimizes it, but you don't have to change the dynamics is what I'm saying. The dynamics are great, but you just haven't got to ignition.
And once you get to ignition point, those same depressing dynamics become the dynamics that just push it forward with explosive force. Yeah. It was really from a comparative perspective that I was thinking about it. Because if you're the eccentric trillionaire who wants to drop a hundred billion into trying would you go with a raft or would you just go up to some poor African country and say look this bit of land here on the coast give us sovereignty over that and we'll give you a hundred billion dollars which is obviously a huge amount of money to you and grant us
proper sovereignty, we'll defend it with our AI automated robot machine army killers, and we'll be best friends. But you're starting from maybe somewhere that's already got some residents, that already does trade with places and that is already on the map and is a known quantity. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think this takes... Not to take it too far away. And also I'm talking too much and I should give up. No, no, it's good. It's good. But I think it's crucial to what you're saying that it takes in this question of what actually is meant by dynamic geography. And I think this is a really... it's not a
trivial question, and I think it's kind of ambivalent, and it's never, I think, precisely defined by Patrick Friedman. And there's a way of taking that term, which I tend to do, which I think is perhaps a bit inadequate. You know, that it's just something's... You're talking about dynamic geography as soon as you're talking about mobilizing ideological sorting dynamics to produce experimental societies. I mean, that's the minimal definition of it. But I think when you look at these texts, they really are calling for something more. And dynamic geography is really something, you know, almost has this cosmic dimension to it.
That it's about chunks of space being themselves dynamic. So it's about platforms. It's about mobile platforms, essentially, you know. If you go that route then what you've just said is that those ideas of some kind of, if one was going to be unconcerned about the political associations, some type of neo-colonial type of enterprise of taking a bit of territory and experimenting with a new type of government and they're buying the locals out in some way, is not dynamic geography. It's an affiliated thing.
But it's not dynamic geography because you can't float that off. It doesn't catalyze the same sort of processes. That for Friedman, it's crucial that when you've got these rafts, they're modules, he says, it's constantly possible to dissociate your geography. You know, you can just restructure your political geography at any time with low cost. You can separate off your modules from the existing modules. You can fuse them to some other set of modules that you think are preferable. There's no... You've completely escaped a certain set of territorial restrictions.
and that's you know so space itself has been kind of re-envisaged and he obviously says even more extreme when you get off planet where you've got platforms in space that can just be moved around according to at least partially ideological convenience so if you you don't have territorial problems of secession that you're going to be next door to the guys that you got so enraged with that you separated from them. Instead, you just move into another political constellation entirely
by moving these kind of habitation residency modules around. So I'm just saying that to say I agree that there's this continuum between these national charter cities and a whole sense of connected notions that are all tied up with dynamic geography in the wide, loose sense, but are not crossing this threshold into dynamic geography in the really tight sense of that term, where the space itself has become mobile. I'm now at the point where I can't keep up with what's going on in the sidebar at the
moment. But, I mean, just on this, like, you've got your eccentric trillionaires, and I love eccentric trillionaires and I wish there were more of them and they were a little bit more unhinged. But I think Patrick Friedman would be suspicious about that. He actually introduces this, there's this whole sort of little off-ramp that I'm just going to introduce at this point but not go down there. But I think it's a huge problem and I've characterised it in terms of saying, is dynamic geography an anglophone iteration of nomadology in the Deleuze and Qatari sense.
I think there's a really strong case for saying there is. I mean, I think it's tied up with the same re-envisioning of space. I think the two things really connect very tightly. And he actually uses, I'll quote Freeman here. He says in the first, in the dynamic geography essay, he says, if a government physically prevents modules from leaving, they have terrestrialized the city and can proceed to terrorize it. So he's now, he almost explicitly introduced this term terrestrialization.
now is terrestrialization territorialization it's at least extremely close to it it's maybe in some ways even more interesting terrestrialization has this ambivalence to it because does it mean terrestrial as opposed to oceanic or does it mean terrestrial as opposed to extraterrestrial in the terms that we mean and it obviously means both you know and he does this move always he says you know what works for the sea would work even better for once you get out of the terrestrial gravity well you know those terms are meant to flow into each other and so there is this
there is this it's dynamic geography is a kind of extraterrestrial political economic project and diagnosing that the problems we face as being totally tied up with terrestrialized structures, the main obstacle to which for him is high barriers to entry. It's almost impossible with a terrestrialized system to introduce a new regime. You can only do it by these extremely expensive ways such as overthrowing the government, having a revolution, perhaps a seeding.
All of them tend to be bloody and all of them tend to not lead to massive proliferation of government experimentation. If you overthrow one government with another government, you're not actually increasing your innovation space at all. You're just doing one experiment that was previously not allowed and shutting down a previous one. So I think this extraterrestrialization for him is essential to what this thing is. And he gets very locked into the seasteading side because he thinks that's practical now. But I think from a philosophical point of view it's a bit arbitrary.
It's not uninteresting but it's a bit arbitrary. What is really at stake is this critique of terrestrial political economy and the introduction of this point of leverage from outside that where the limitations of terrestrial geography are not any longer constraining your space of political innovation and harshly selection. You cannot have the same selective pressures on government in a terrestrial system than you can have in an extraterrestrial system.
There was one other thing that you... Go. Yeah, sorry. Go. I was just going to say I had this kind of thought while I was reading the first Rubin piece today, this kind of sudden realisation, just thinking about the figure of the sea and this distinction that he draws between the land and the sea and the kind of thinking that goes with the land and the sea. And it just kind of suddenly hit me that there's this, this is just an aesthetic observation I suppose, with a kind of conceptual undertow, that there's this whole lineage. in thinking the sea that goes through a lot of... I mean, I'm really glad that you just kind of made that connection between dynamic geography and nomadology explicit
because I've been kind of, I don't know, following this particular flow a lot. And this figure of the sea that just emerges as an alternative or a kind of critique precisely of Enlightenment, Kantian, Atlantean dynamics and through this alternative tradition that kind of flows through Nietzsche, Origaray, Deleuze and Guattari and even the secret, right, inter-dynamic geography and it's kind of nice seeing that. Yes, I mean Deleuze and Guattari mostly talk about Central Asian nomads to make it historically
concrete, but they say those grasslands are like a sea. They have these characteristics that they're low resource level, they're sort of homogenous, kind of normos of this kind of this ocean of grass that doesn't have much distinction about it and things therefore pass across it without these forms of territorial fixation. And then obviously they go from that into talking about the sea and sea power and strategy and you know, just as Friedman goes from the sea to orbit, Deleuze and Mattari in their homodology piece go from this ocean of grass to the actual sea.
So I do think, yeah, I'm agreeing with you, I think there is this thing. And you can see it's aesthetic, but I mean obviously I'm not going to take that as a critical point, because I think that aestheticism is latching onto something very real, definitely. I mean, I don't know. I mean, Taylor and Friedman do explicitly talk about the Bajau lab that actually don't have a fixed, so they're sea-based nomadic people in Southeast Asia that, you know.
The interesting thing with all these nomadic peoples and their relationship with the state and James C. Scott talks about this is like once you're a peasant you're stuck in that one place because your assets are all there with your house and your rice, right? That's very great for a state to come by and grab the rice and tax, right? nomadic peoples can move and they will have, so on the sea they can move the boat, that's their asset and their capital that they sort of manage. But you know, on land you get similar strategies where they'll plant things like cassava in lots of places and it takes three years to mature and stuff.
And so it's not obvious that you can just ride up your horse with your little army and there's a rice field there that you can tax. Right. And so it seems to me that even if it's not a criminal relationship that you need to have, that there's a similar sort of dynamic relationship between whatever nomad and the system of states that they're working against. The interesting thing about what Friedman and Taylor were talking about is they're kind of trying to have their cake and eat it too. and that they want to stay but they also want to move their geography around everywhere. They sort of they want to be nomads but they also want
a big cruiser ship sort of asset that they can keep and not live in this very sort of low profile way they're sort of translating this sort of experience of living within a city and a state to this sort of high connectivity, low integration context. Yes. Yes, I mean I think that part of that is that they want experimental government. So if you've got this existing dynamic between states and nomads, experimental government in a way gets missed from that, doesn't it?
It's very interesting, just concretely, in Hong Kong, you go to these places and there are just these floating cities as part of the island, just all these junks. Obviously, everyone could just move those out. It is a kind of proto-seasteading kind of thing, these weird floating cities. It's quite incredible. But obviously you don't really get a dynamic of experimental government from that on its own. I think Friedman is really wanting to say that the whole point of this is to try new governmental systems. It's not just purely for arbitrage against what is offered by the existing state structures.
I guess I sort of buy that. I think that there is an experimental dynamic and there's all sorts of evidence that people moved from one environment to another depending on sort of what was favourable at the time. So they would live in a state and then if the state was failing or like all the crops were failing on the rice or whatever they would go off into the mountains. So there was sort of a competition and you know there is a government in these nomadic tries, but they're kind of not on the same continuum in another way, which is it's kind of bringing this very European, American, or Anglophone even, sort of constitutional idea of like a written constitution
and this very explicit sort of contractual sort of vision of what governing is into this nomadic context where traditionally even they didn't there's evidence that even they gave up literacy because it was difficult to govern because you have a history as a form of resistance you mean yeah and as a form of being dynamic in their government and their history they weren't bound by whatever convention from X generations ago because it was written down yeah yeah
I mean I think in calling government an industry Friedman is obviously sort of suggesting that it provides valuable services however incompetently and you know however much he wants to just disrupt and dynamise and overturn that industry, he's implying that it's no less a valuable industry than the IT industry or any other industry. He's not rejecting the principle that there are government services. And that's probably getting to this tension, isn't it?
From a certain anarchist point of view, government is just a sort of intrinsically oppressive and you just simply want to escape, eliminate government. So as soon as you start talking about it as an industry, you're already in this very different kind of register than that, where you're saying it's not, their critique is not we don't have enough government, it's rather, no, sorry, their critique is that we don't have enough dynamism in the government industry.
The government industry is a slurotic, unproductive monopoly. It's not that we have an excess of it in a certain sense, it's rather that we just have a really bad governance industry and the thing they want him to do is to inject dynamism into that through competition. So yeah, there's definitely a tension there for sure. I mean from their side I would think that the criticism is just look, if you're simply in this resistance mode, nomadism as a form of resistance, then you end up basically negotiating between really bad governments. You're not ever going to see a good government emerge
in that scenario. You get more leverage in relation to the governments that exist and You're able to resist some of their predations, but you're not actually doing anything to produce good government except through very watered-down selection effects. Whereas dynamic geography, I think, has more ambition. It's actually going to produce models of government that become so competitively irresistible that they would just sweep away a lot of these old models entirely and just improve the general level of the governance industry globally. Yeah, so I agree with that reading.
I think on the technology aspect of it, the other obviously very striking thing is that you know you have agrarian nomads we have sort of like Honda nomads who have these sort of mercenary relationships to the state and they definitely don't, well they say they don't want any sort of criminal or slaver type relationship to the state and they don't seem to want to be subsistence type farmers or even like you know well fed subsistence farmers or whatever successful nomads so there's kind of this whole problem of well then they need an industry right what I need to provide services and they got well I it could be this work be about it it's I mean really the way to you so they don't really have a great answer
to it but on the other hand you someone goes well that suits really well actually and not contract bracket are but it's it's that's a industrial and on US service provision that it doesn't quite add up as it stands at the moment. Yeah. But when you see it doesn't add up, you mean you're not seeing what that service provision would look like, or you think it's... you think they're assuming too much about the function of government. I'm not sure I'm not sure if you're kidding. Yeah, I...
It's not that it seems impossible, it's just that they seem to not have a very good idea of what it is. And yeah, that's fair enough, because they sort of have a theory of how it works, sort of. But I don't know. I guess I'm also reminded of the way that cities usually depend on the hinterland, right? and so they also need a sort of ecosystem to exist in to get a community like this going especially if they want to be in a sort of middle class salary sort of running in a sort of 21st century technological environment
then that's what it implies to me that they have to live in an ecosystem of related states and economies to exist. Yeah. I'm sure that's something I'm sure that the dynamic geography people would totally accept. I mean, that seems to me back to this connectivity integration thing. I mean, that's the connectivity side. And I think it's safe to say that no one's interested in their stuff. if they're against connectivity. If their basic mode is towards a generalized withdrawal, just the negation of this neoliberal compact,
then you wouldn't go here. There's a lot of other places you'd go, but not here. Because I don't think they have any problems with the ecosystem aspect of it. They just think that that ecosystem... One whole interesting type of language they use is this whole thing to do with learning, evolutionary learning. Maybe I should just... Actually it's worth just quoting a little bit here. They say, the idea that competition is a knowledge generating process has also formed the basis
of the new discipline of evolutionary economics which sees the market process as driven by the Darwinian algorithm of variation, selection, retention. An initial population of ideas, routines or firms is subjected to market competition and the most successful as judged by human choice proliferate. time producers become better at satisfying consumers needs through a process of trial and error learning in which conjectures are tested against the realities of consumer preference and technological feasibility. So one of the interesting things about that quote is it's talking about functionality of the system. You know, it makes no sense to talk in those terms if you're talking about withdrawal into some unit, isolated unit.
It's actually trying to improve the learning algorithm of the system as a whole. So what is it that's learning in that system? It's not the node. The node doesn't learn. The system as a whole learns by the fact that the nodes are put into this dynamic competitive relation with each other. So that's why it just absolutely will not be crammed into some kind of disconnective, disintegrative choice on the pre-critical structure at all, because all the dynamics they're interested in are system dynamics.
But it's just that they think that those dynamics are inhibited by integration rather than being amplified or promoted by it. I think it's very interesting how these ideas and these analyses function as narratives, like this dialectic between mainland government and the sea, to use simple terminology you could compare it as ego versus like ego dissolution kind of dialectic. So each new form of government also needs to have a corresponding mode of consciousness to support that. So
we're also at the same time talking about these different ways of thinking about how we fit into a group of people. Yeah. I mean, you fit into the system at all of these levels. So if you... Because the whole thing is... A system of competition is obviously, actually a form of coordination. You know, so by sort of moving off into this Seastead and innovating these new forms of existence, you're not disconnecting yourself from the larger ecology, you're just renegotiating your relationship with that ecology.
That's I think if we go back to this whole Brexit structure it's very clear the way that all this thing works out because the argument as it stands is oh you have disintegrated this system and therefore you will be isolated as a punishment in order to prove to you that your connections depend upon integration. I mean that's the way this whole sadomasochistic structure of argument is going at the moment or it has these complicated elements to it of people on the other side saying we want to be isolated, you know, we don't want these connections anyway and whatever, you can elaborate
it anyway, anyway you like. But the point is that the attempt is made to hold together this alignment of integration and connectivity. You're not allowed to have the connections if you are refusing the integrity. So in terms of what you're saying about this kind of, you know, what is the ecological fabric, I don't think it's shrunk. Or if it does shrink, it shrinks only because of this actual dynamic of reciprocal aggression that comes out of it within the context that we can see.
It doesn't shrink as an intrinsic consequence of disintegration. Disintegration isn't about shrinking your commercia at all. It's simply about fluidizing your engagement within that commercia. Yeah. I mean, it's true. Actually, also, I should open this up,
because people obviously want to talk about it a little bit. We didn't really have any chance to talk about the whole Wolfentail thing last time. But I thought the case he was making was very important in the sense that it really captures some of the structures of this whole discussion, for sure. And it seemed to me that the question is, like, what is transcendental in this whole area? Is there that there's some transcendental commonality that frames the possibility of competition? Or is it that there's a transcendental structure of competition that frames islands of cooperation?
And that seemed to me the kind of absolutely fundamental point of controversy there. But maybe people have a different sense of what that argument was about. I mean, it seems, just to say one more thing, it seems like you could, it was very topical in terms of this whole Brexit thing, from my point of view. I mean, I would take it that Pete's position would clearly be very resistant to what's going on in Brexit, it and to say look if we've you know we have a collective series of institutional and social problems and we have to sort of solve them collectively and it's a kind of illusion to
think you can opt out of that collective decision process. The decision to do that is itself somehow collectively negotiated or presupposes some kind of collective agreement versus the The Brexit case, which is obviously, it's only from a position of disintegration that you put together a set of dynamics that are going to get these things worked out effectively. Actually, I'm going to bring him up again because why not. Goldberg presupposes that last point he made in the Patchwork series, where he basically
says as a premise that it is periods of history where Europe in particular has been disunited, have been the times when it has flourished at its best, creatively and whatever else, referring to medieval Italy. And warring states China, of course. Yeah, yeah. So I mean that was, I thought that was interesting, because it's obviously, especially I reread it this week because, I mean I don't think it's on the reading list, but it was a long time ago when I first read it and I forgot what he said. And so
So his presupposition in that regard is completely against the dominant narrative during the run up to the referendum which was, Europe has brought, a united Europe has brought 70 years of peace and collaboration and all this wonderful funding for movies and universities and science and other things. So there was, and it was sort of assumed, and there wasn't really a strong counter-narrative to it. People would say, you know, object and say, no, actually the security of the architecture of Europe is more complicated than that, NATO and the bomb. People didn't mention sort of the fact that this sort of ideological uniformity on a,
where there wasn't, you know. But yes, so that was interesting. That was interesting. I mean, it's the kind of thing that it reminded me of the, you know, you sort of get all those arguments with, I think, Scott Alexander was involved in them, and he had a back and forth with, what's his name, the Asinimov or Anissimov, that man, and about sort of whether historical monarchies were good or bad empirically. Right. It can never be settled because people's biases just rule what they want to take from the data that's available. But it's an interesting theory, I think.
Certainly. When you say the theory being that periods of intense conflict are abnormally culturally creative. Yes, not necessarily conflict, although, yeah, I mean, you've got to... Conflict, I'm sure. You can't ignore... Fragmentation, yeah. The fact that Florence and Siena were at war and whatever else. But yes, that... And whether the two are linked, you know, necessarily, you can't have one without the other, I don't know. But yes, that actually the unification sort of kills something that's actually creative and useful. Yeah. I mean, his model...
I think it's obvious that sort of generically, again, I'm back with my infanticomers, but on the right, the productivity of competition is sort of taken so axiomatically that it's kind of assumed that everyone will agree with it. And Friedman is a bit like that. I'm not really being critical because I'm very sympathetic, but I can see why someone from outside that would just say, well, you're just assuming the productivity of competition and there's no real argument for that there. But it's strange, given that, and given the supposed hegemony of this kind of thinking within this neoliberal construct, that the notion of competitive government is so utterly suppressed.
I mean, I never see it in any kind of mainstream debate, the notion that governments should be pressurised into competitive relations with each other as the only effective check on government is inter-government competition. I mean, sorry, that's very mould buggy of me, but I'll say that anyway. I was going to say competition implies losers, which is the… Well, competition in business implies losers. Oh, sorry, yeah, no, carry on. I'm presupposing. That's why you're saying people don't like it. Maybe. I mean, you do get things that aren't a million miles away. I think Michael Moore, maybe not the first person you'd expect to be referred to,
I think he has either a book or a film, and I wasn't really intending to watch it, but one where he goes as the, you know, it's almost stereotypical as an America to Europe and finds that there are all sorts of socialist policies. I think he goes to a series of countries and finds a policy that he likes in... All of them. And you can guess what they are. Right, yeah, yeah. But he's done a little tour, I think, and he's been to Finland for the schools. And there are instances of it. There was one thing that we didn't mention. I can't remember whether it was last week or the week before. We were talking about the sort of East Asian cities the Hong Kongs, the Singapours. The other set of jurisdictions, which is maybe the best
word, that seem to have some sort of competition between them is offshore financial centres. Right. So your British Virgin Islands, your Bermuda, you know. I worked in Bermuda for two months and the way that they, there is actually a real sense of competition between them and on constantly reforming laws and remaining nimble in that sense in order to attract capital and keep capital. It's an interesting, that dynamic does exist there. I found it very interesting and it could be worth looking into. I mean, that then raises the complicated question about the relation between those financial
centres and the political architecture of those states, which is very poorly formalised. You know, I mean, I'm sure that there are a whole number of small financial centres who basically the interests of the financial sector completely dominates the local politics. But I would be surprised, even if in those cases, if that was something that could be formally admitted, and that it would always have to be hidden under some smokescreen, and the actual institutional mechanisms involved would be very opaque and indirect. and you know so there's a
structural institutional problem there that you can't be honest about what is really happening yeah I mean they're each their own it is true I think in Bermuda that the reinsurance industry has really caused the shots to a great extent they had some I think it was when David Cameron was trying to do something about tax havens, you know, and they had some negotiations. And at the table was the governor and the heads of the two biggest reinsurance companies. Right. You know, it's, so that's true. But, I mean, you know, from a legal perspective, it's kind of interesting because you do have a much more lightweight legal just landscape
in terms of just numbers, things like numbers of laws that people, that, you know, that your libertarian will whinge about, you know. Obviously tax, but they're nice places to live, you know. And actually I thought quite, there wasn't, there was much less of a divide there between sort of rich and poor than in England, you know. and even the racial thing was, I thought, people that didn't quite agree with me all the time, that it was actually certainly much better than it seems to be in America or wherever else. I suppose because everyone has this, because it's quite a small place, everyone has this shared destiny,
that they're all in the same boat, and there's nothing really they can do about it. So you've got a party, the PLP is there, they're currently the opposition party. They're a Labour Party and there is also quite an ethnic divide. But they are very much in favour of the low tax regime that the country has and they're friendly-ish to capital and they realise that this is what pays the bills and whatever else. Right. I mean, obviously, from the sort of integrationist position, those tax haven type zones are themselves
a problem within a larger system. I mean, I'm not endorsing this position, but I mean, that would be the case, wouldn't it? Like, there's constant sort of rumblings within Europe to say, you know, Lichtenstein needs to be brought into line and it's a kind of parasitic thing that's happening there and that somehow it's a failure of a higher level of governance that is allowing those places to be so successful that the implicit thing being at the expense of less functional places that are suffering from the… Absolutely.
I mean, it's even more so than that because it's all about the tax rates and corporation tax rates. And you'll hear some people on the right saying, well, they're just out competing. And the solution is suppression of competition. Right. There's a dynamic to it of the big states telling the small states what to do, but I think even Jeremy Corbyn has said that for the British Crown territories they need to tell them what tax rate to set and it needs to be, you know it can't be much lower than the... That massively higher.
because otherwise we'll lose the competition with them. You know, it's explicitly anti-competitive, which is interesting. Yeah. But that's that. So that's all. Someone else. I've had too much time. I thought it was interesting that Friedman explicitly mentioned the case of reorganization of a firm versus the creation of a new one
and I think that's particularly relevant with Brexit at least and he makes the point that let's see if I can find it here when the internet changed the retail book business by removing the scarcity of retail display space. Entirely new organizational structures were required. It was the entry of Amazon rather than the reorganization of Barnes & Noble which led to organizational innovation. The problem of reorganization will be even more significant in the market for governance. Constitutions are designed to be enduring. So I thought that was an interesting note because once you've shifted into the frame of a theory of firms,
it being geopolitics, then sort of naturally those things, that type of realization seems obvious. That for true variation, reorganization will be extremely difficult to sort of push in the direction of achieving the variability necessary to get the dynamism of the selection process really going. I'm not sure if that's making sense but... No, no, it is. It's a really complicated
problem for sure. I mean, because what drives the reorganization is selection pressure. It doesn't have to be, I mean, in the most dramatic form, it's obviously that you have such a kind of luxuriant innovation pool that you can just brutally cull all the failures and their place is replaced by successful models. But I think that that's, you know, verging on the utopia. So one step down is that you have serious competitive threat of a sufficient vividness that it kind of drives organizational reorganization and firms, governments think that they will
fail unless they drastically renovate themselves in response to this competitive environment. Now obviously those effects are dampened hugely by the fact that to use the exit is weak or in the Friedman language the switching costs are so high. People still use the post office, they still use all these dysfunctional crappy monopolistic services long into the point where everyone knows that they're not working because of the fact that you just can't go anywhere else.
It's like the costs of leaving to an alternative supplier are so immense that you tolerate vast amounts of failure, and because of that, there's no effective political pressure to modify the way things are being pursued. And I don't think that Friedman overestimates this at all. I mean, I think it's totally right. I think that the amount of bad government that is tolerated is just vast beyond any easy comprehension because of the fact that switching is really difficult.
I thought the sort of meta point about constitutional policy reorganization being subject to the same political pressures as the democratic process itself, I thought that was an interesting point. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Because that also is not within a competitive milieu. Exactly. So if reorganization or ultimately soft succession of the form of something like Brexit ultimately doesn't really escape the problem. It just shifts it into another domain.
Yeah. You're only really addressing the problem if you are effectively increasing the level of regime diversity and by that has to be included the fact that you have real switching processes, real exit processes. If you're just breaking things into small units and people remain as terrestrialized on those small fragments as they were on the original large ones then absolutely you haven't really got any room for optimism that you're going to add to the pressure that you're looking for at all. I wonder, though, Europe's very, just to get back more concrete,
it's kind of ambiguous about that, because you obviously do have a lot of movement within Europe. And you have a lot of migration of valuable human resources, and you have a lot of migration of capital. And so it's not as if there's zero competitive pressure on governments here. I think this is why Europe doesn't like, the European establishment does not like Britain because Britain is a liberal outlier and London is full of talented French people who've all left France and worked in Britain, and I'm sure there's lots of European capital that has all migrated to the city of London.
And, you know, that jurisdictional arbitrage, even if it's nothing like as intense as Friedman is imagining, it's also not zero. It's also a constant source of political conflict. And within the European structure, the trade-off was, well, we will allow you to do this. We will allow you to compete in this way. But the payoff of that, the deal, is that you will accept this thicker and thicker level of collective European governance structure. And that is the deal that has broken down with Brexit.
And obviously the UK establishment is as shocked at that breakdown as anybody is. I mean they thought this deal was okay, I think. You know, London, it's no coincidence London is voted to remain. The parts of the country that actually were working that deal successfully have not given up on it. But that deal as a whole has collapsed now, whatever the reasons for that. Yeah, you get some of the, you get almost a sort of partial, some of the dynamics, but
so you get the effects of, I imagine in the sort of Friedman type model, you get people moving to a certain jurisdiction, a certain raft or whatever because it's winning if you like. Business is booming there, there are lots of jobs, there's lots of opportunity and what not. Or on the contrary, the raft they're currently on is going through hard times and they want to leave. And yeah, lots of people have left Spain, certainly, for London and so it sort of works in that respect. But at the same time, the rules that it imposes
on the countries prevents it from, it prevents actual, you know, a country responding by bonding by changing the way it operates, because there are so many fiscal tools that aren't available to these countries to try to compensate, and so you end up with this massive brain drain from one region to another. And it is ironic that actually Britain has been the place where it's all been going, and they've been the ones that have first decided to can it. But that's that. But yeah, so you do get some of the results that competition would provide.
But there isn't the freedom and the flexibility for nations to sort of compete with one another because there is this restriction on, especially with the Eurozone, that they all have to follow identical models of, and there's the dynamic with Germany, Germany having benefited as well. gotten rich off by selling cars to Greeks and lending them the money to do it and all that sort of stuff. But, yeah, it's not a successful model in that respect. I think it's clearly... But it actually shows the dynamics working of people actually moving, which is interesting. Sorry. Yes. No, that's true.
It's true. You can overstate the switching costs. I mean, obviously people do switch under census. That's right. That is an important point to make. But it's almost like the European project has been this, trying to impose a conservation law of solidarity, isn't it? Like, if you're a French citizen and you decide this country is a nightmare and I've got no opportunity or I'm going to move to London and the roads are paved with gold or whatever it is. So that is intrinsically, from a certain perspective, an act of betrayal against the social collectivity, isn't it? It's an act of desolidarity.
It's no coincidence that the exit concept is defined originally in Hirschman's thing with loyalty as a counter pole to that. And the European sort of approach is to say, well, there has to be a kind of conservation principle of solidarity. So if at the local level solidarity has been disrupted by this common market, then it has to be reimposed at a higher level. And so you've got all these regional adjustment funds, if some part of Europe is failing, the European project is to reduce the pressure for radical institutional reform by having
these various regional funds and they can carry on with the way they like doing things and they can address their policy environment to local democratic pressure rather than to systemic competitive pressure. And all of that is very un-Anglo and the Europeans know that and both sides have been in conflict about it. All the old classic Thatcher handbagging stuff was about why should we provide this money to compensate for the effects on your solidarity structures of competitive dynamics within this common economic space. That's a kind of liberal, in the old sense, liberal viewpoint that for most Europeans
was completely unintelligible and just seemed obnoxious. And we've now got the final fruit of that whole dispute. There you go. I wonder if you could hook back a little bit.
How, because in Taylor and Friedman, war is completely off the page. and I can't work out if that's like wishful thinking or whether there's some libertarian assumption that of course everyone's armed to the teeth and therefore it's all a fun standoff and we're all peaceful because we respect each other like gunslingers in the old west or whatever or what and then it would be worth interrogating independent of them like is that even a meaningful concept competition between these states without
routine war. The Warring States period is called the Warring States period for a reason. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of things that could be said about this and we've touched on some of them, but I'm not sure they're the sort of things that the Friedman would want us to be saying. I mean, it seems to me that if there is this catabolic, this is a repetitive point I'm making, if there is this catabolic trend in geopolitics, it's because of the fact that there is a, that deterrence is becoming much more widely distributed, deterrence capability. And so the prospect of a small rational political unit raising the costs of aggression above
its possible rewards is becoming much easier now than it has been. And to be honest, I think even in recent history that threshold has been high. It's hard to imagine, maybe again I'm being very, very repetitive in saying this, but it's hard to imagine the last war of international aggression that was actually economically rational. So of course you can go two ways where you can say, well don't overplay the role of economic rationality. But I'm pretty sure if you go back far enough into history wars were just systematically economically rational. If you couldn't plunder and loot more than it was going to cost you to wage war then of course you wouldn't even think of doing it.
And it's only in more modern times that ideological imperatives have perhaps to some extent shelved those direct economic motivations and it could be questioned even how much that is. Obviously this whole wars for oil mantra that has been so important in the closing years of the 20th and early 21st century implies that people still think that there are kind of commanding economic motivations for international conflict. So to make a sort of large, complicated, messy argument, bring it right down to the point,
there's a kind of basic game theoretic calculus, isn't there, about international aggression where you just need a full spectrum definition of benefits and costs of aggression and if If you can't push the other player's cost threshold above their benefits expectation, then you are going to get aggression. If you can't substantially push those expected costs above any anticipated benefits, then it seems strange that you would have international aggression as a major factor. I mean there's a lot of exotic stuff
that I'm very interested in because I think all this X-risk discussion you know the friendly AI stuff we were doing in the last course is actually totally fused with questions of deterrence you know like there's obviously the big problem with even like nuclear weapons just say you have a small highly advanced wealthy micro state that can afford nukes but to have an effective deterrent you still have to have credible second strike capability you know what I mean it's no good having your precious nuke somewhere in the center of your tiny little island you've got to have some submarine or you've got to have some reliable agent with a suitcase nuke in the relevant
international cities or somehow it has to seem to a potential aggressor that they will get nuked whatever they, if they, what they do to you crosses some threshold of aggression. So it's difficult, nuclear deterrence is complicated. But these kinds of X-risk deterrents that are coming in now are much less complicated. If you can do some kind of malevolent AI attack on a hostile power, that is much, much more difficult to contain. If you have people distributed throughout the world, they don't even have to be on enemy
hostile territory, they just have to be widely distributed. Some of them in capitals of societies that your enemies are scared to attack, and they can do something with a computer that unleashes horrific risk on your society. That's a very, schematically, that's a very neat deterrence option to have if you can destroy someone's whole information infrastructure from a computer in a foreign city if they cross some line of aggression against you. That's really good. That's, I think, much better, much easier for a small state to think of that than to
think about having some nuclear option against the enemy. So I'm just sort of saying that it's no coincidence that technology is bringing in this whole exotic flora and fauna of X risks and all of that, anything that can be an X risk, is a potential deterrence capability. And this is what any microstate valuing its independence should be thinking. If people are really terrified of this, whatever it might be, some biological weapon or some terrible form of self-improving computer virus or you name it, anything on their X-ray list
is a potential deterrence capability that we should formalize and exploit in that respect. That's quite a bold assertion, isn't it? Because I mean there's a PR element to it, isn't there, that there are going to be lots of people who, if anything like this ever happens, who are going to be just opposed to it on philosophical grounds, and lots of people who wouldn't move to one even if the perfect job for them came up or whatever on principle because you know it's not a liberal democracy. What do you mean if it was protected by something that they thought was too horrific? Yeah, what I mean is if they sort of started stockpiling anthrax or whatever and had
agents in New York City who knew the water system there or whatever, you know, I don't No, I mean, defence is something I'm not really, you know, have no expertise in, but it doesn't seem like it would be, unless you kept it very secret, in which case... No, that's useless. That's the Dr. Strangestad thing. How's it a deterrent? Yeah, a deterrent has to be public. Yeah. I think it can surely be cut. You don't want to actually be, like, frothing on television when you make your global announcement that you have this capability. But, I mean, if you're taking security seriously, then deterrence is surely the absolute spine
of that. And deterrence is the capability of you to inflict intolerable suffering on a potential aggressor. And I don't really see any way around that. It's true. But certainly modern states all have rules that they play by. Britain and America don't stop our chemical weapons, and if they find it that anyone else is, it's a reason to go in and do something about it. Well, I'm not sure what the logic of that is, though, are you? I mean it seems to me it's a logic that is tied up with a particular world order of a certain set of new powers that are all on the United Nations Security Council and consider
it acceptable that they have a monopoly on serious international deterrence capabilities. It requires Higemini I think. Yeah, so I mean it would strike me as inevitable as part of a catabolic trend in geopolitics that deterrence monopoly ceases to be plausible. I mean, you know, if you look at these little countries now, like everyone says, well, you know, are they really sovereign like Singapore? You know, what would Singapore do? You know, Singapore's only independent because America would help it defend against China or whatever. That's what this hegemonic structure means, isn't it?
That you don't have true, robust micro-sovereignty. That you get at the bottom line of this security discussion, you get your security from some kind of a negotiation with the hegemonic powers. So it follows from that automatically, that if this hegemonic structure ceases to obtain, you either have a relapse into even larger structures of imperial domination or you have distributed deterrence capability. I suppose sinking a seasteading raft would be a big way, maybe.
I don't know. I mean obviously there's all kinds of horrible things you can do. It's an existential problem that obviously land-based sovereigns don't have, it's that you can sort of pull the plug and watch your liver-topia disappear into the depths. I don't know whether that's true though. Once you can do a catastrophic nuclear strike against someone, you can't trump that, can you? The current security structure of the world is based upon the assumption that utter destruction can be triggered against even the largest states under certain circumstances. And without that assumption, people maybe don't like to think about it, and there's
not much discussion of this stuff since the end of the Cold War, really. I mean, during the Cold War, it was a completely explicit part of public consciousness, wasn't it? That any state, and indeed the world, could be obliterated, and that is an absolutely indispensable part of the geopolitical calculus. Now I don't see that going. I mean, I would be suspicious of certain types of libertarian wishful thinking if I thought people really felt that I just somehow vaporised for no good reason. I don't see the game theoretical structures changing very much.
You know, why would we no longer be living in that world anymore? It's true, but it might mean that you'd have to play ball a bit more with the structures that already exist. I mean we were talking about Frontier and the Sea it might not be that they're just willing to let you set up shop and have a zero tax rate and just sort of you know You mean because they'd have a threat of military aggression that you wouldn't be able to neutralise through an effective deterrence capability like obviously See if you had the capacity that you could drop a meteorite on someone from orbit, and
therefore any military threat they made against you could be fully compensated, then they couldn't mess with your tax rate of choice, could they? It just seems that as a way of getting from here to there, buying a nuke and saying to the world, haha, I have a nuke, you can't do anything to me is a bit of an outlandish way of going about it. It doesn't seem to me to be the easiest way to achieve basically what you want. Because I think certainly with Friedman, what he really wants is to introduce this dynamic and he thinks that if it happens and people see how great it is,
they're going to all come rushing and be converted. Yeah, but there's something naive if thinking that existing powers with the military capability to suppress such an experiment who are existentially threatened by such an experiment would just tolerate that experiment taking place. Oh, that's it. That's precisely the point. I mean it's, so the question is, so I mean are you saying that it needs to be, it needs to be, have an independent deterrent to ever get off the ground or? I think anything that really is any kind of microstate needs a credible deterrent capability
and I just don't see any way around that. I mean, I'd be fascinated to see alternatives to it, but I just absolutely can't. It seems to me that in saying Sovereign, you're saying with the capacity to deter all plausible threats. Yeah. But it's interesting, though, because war is sort of inherently dialectical, right? I mean, the nomadic strategy would usually be exit, right, or you'd sort of leave the space, whereas on the Earth today you could see from a GPS satellite or military hardware
or whatever where all of your seasteaders were. You could pinpoint that pretty simply, right? And that brings back this idea of deterrence, which is that it's about a competition and maybe you use some extra risk threat or whatever to maintain this metapolitical standoff, but it is more like a standoff than an actual exit in that dimension. Because it's still a form of political communication. Yeah, you know, not a fun form, but that's basically what it is. Yeah. I mean, I can see why that, I can see why something else would be better, of course,
except I just don't see what that other thing could be. I mean, one option is just to say all of these threats of military aggression are overrated. It's a complicated thing. I like to not buy that, right? I mean, like, that seems naive to me. Like, sooner or later someone's going to pull out a gun or an aircraft carrier or a drone, like, you know, squadron or whatever. I mean, honestly, I'm torn on it. because I think it probably is overrated. I think there's not much military aggression except for reasons that are not particularly relevant
to the cases that we're making. But I just think from the perspective of theoretical consistency, that will be made, that objection will be made. And you do have to have a response to it, and it is naive libertarianism just to say that people are going to be nice to each other. I mean, that assumption really should be scoffed at. So, yes, I think that you're just, there is an evasion involved if you're just trying to write off that possibility of military threat as an issue, for sure. and and and if it is a issue then the only response to it is some level
deterrence is that you can say well you know maybe doesn't even scaled up super massively maybe you know a small seastead that could plausibly on a second strike take out an American aircraft carrier maybe that would be okay I mean I don't know it's a complicated military calculus is well I wonder staying small is kind of a way of it might almost be a survival strategy right because it's more about proportionate cost at that point than it is about sort of overall so you don't have to because you're not a city of one million people see standing about like in this giant fleet
you're you know maybe you're in the tens of thousands or maybe it's just 10,000 or something. But if you have some deterrent that can sort of is self-defense and can impose significant costs on the aggressor, it's like, why would you bother? There are only 100,000 people, and therefore it's sort of like, okay, there are pain in the neck, that is too small to care about sort of levels almost seems more plausible to me than like, you know, a city the size of Hong Kong on the waves with nuclear capability.
Like, not only is it a fair way away, but it's like, well, that would be a threat in so many different ways that it would have to be really contained like a threat, and if you see what I mean. I mean, obviously, part of what I'm trying to say here is I think that the nuclear thing is in the rearview mirror a little bit. You know, it's not a very good deterrent structure. There's much, you know, you should go to these sort of ex-risk institutes for a much better sort of panoply of truly contemporary deterrence capabilities. So there's that side. Well, it kind of doesn't scale down very well either, right?
It's like, okay, you know, lower your tax rates. No, or we go nuclear, right? That doesn't work. But maybe you can do something more granular with, like, oh, okay, or we disable 30% of your electricity network or, I don't know, something like this. Yeah. Yeah. But on the other side of this, I have to say I do see an epoch of massive nuclear proliferation happening. You know, I think people who think we're in a stable equilibrium in terms of these traditional forms of mass destructive weaponry are deluding themselves, you know, and I think
there is a slow breakout, slow inexorable tendency towards mass breakout of nuclear capability taking place. I think that's a sort of, it's sort of an old angle to the stuff we're talking about. I don't think it's the same. And I would agree with you that the places that are most interesting from the purpose of this discussion are not the same places that are on the market for nuclear weapons. I think those two things are not the same, but I think they are happening in parallel. And I think that they are both parts of a larger catabolic process, that the structures of international hegemony that we've got used to are not stable and are in a process
of accelerating collapse. I mean Hong Kong is an interesting example on this, you know, because it's obviously not fully sovereign, but it's remarkably autonomous, and it's right next to a massive power that has already, I mean, if the Chinese government, whose special autonomous region it is, decided
tomorrow that they would flood the place with the Red Army and introduce any kind of regime structure there they wanted, that's fully within the scope of international law. There's no one could even do anything about that. So it's not the Singapore case where there's some possibility for playing people off against each other. So how does that level of autonomy get reinforced? And I think there are useful lessons, practical lessons to be learned from that. I mean obviously a lot of that is that the Chinese political elite has great advantage in the status of Hong Kong. The fact that they are able to park assets probably surreptitiously in some zone outside
their domestic economy is highly advantageous to them. And so there are complicated, again, public choice issues at stake here that are nothing to what they might appear on the subject, on the surface rather. And that I think would affect any of these little, assuming they'd all be, they'd all tend to be libertarianish for the same reason James said. Tax rates would be competed down. Anyone that involved a high level of economic sacrifice is setting another giant barrier for itself to exist. So let's just assume hypothetically that they all tend towards the libertarian end of the
spectrum. They are by nature able to cut private deals with elites all over the world. So at the same time that the public political position of those elites in their own countries is going to be this little place is an outrage and it's kind of too competitive and it's laundering drug money and all of that stuff, at the same time, what was that massive exposure on Wikileaks of everyone's offshore bank accounts that had recently? The elites are not wanting to subject themselves to the same rules of sound, public, altruistic
economic policy that they are publicly pronouncing as right for their societies. And I think that can be considered a stable situation. It's almost impossible to imagine a regime that would be consistently aligned with its own public pronouncements. So I think we can assume that the guy is threatening to sink the seastead, the high ups in that are that people most likely have some private economic motive, unstated private economic motive for not wanting that.
to eventuate. Yeah, I mean with Hong Kong, certainly when it joined, it was the biggest city in China by far in terms of economically, and then there's a certain measure of don't kill the goose laying the golden egg, you know, it's not in their interests to change it, they would be better to learn from it. And you know, if you had a state with nuclear capability that was willing to act as a protector of your experiment, the experiment could become so successful that again it would be an asset rather than something they would want to shut down. But getting from…
Yeah, the first step in that is hard to imagine. But, yeah, it is interesting where things are peeling off from. I mean, I heard of this discussion recently with someone. It's like China is very weirdly ambiguous like this, because on one hand, because of its history, it obviously has a huge investment in territorial integrity. There's no question at all that any discourse based on territorial fragmentation is going to become socially acceptable in China in the near future. I mean, it's unimaginable. Or just this redolent theme of imperialistic splittings of the country and 100 years of humiliation and all this kind of stuff.
It's unimaginable. Probably in India too, for the same reasons. But at the same time, they innovated the SEC. They have all these semi-autonomous regions around them. There's this whole weird economic halo around China of these places that just by you know, doffing the cat to the emperor, you can have a massive degree of autonomy that far exceeds what we're generally used to in the West. I mean, maybe Britain's a bit of an exception with the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands and stuff, but it's still extraordinary. So it's not as if there are not weird fragmentary dynamics that you can trace even in this seemingly unsympathetic environment.
Shanghai, which is, on one hand, it's the absolute core torture narrative of the century of humiliation, was the state of Shanghai. But on the other hand, it's also the great Chinese gateway of modernization. modernization it's been described as and there's a lot of ambivalent pride in it and it's always messing with ideas of these SEZ type things, special zones, zero tariff zones, trade zones, enterprise zones. It's kind of part of the kind of urban DNA that it's constantly exploring those ideas even though you would think they were on this point of neuralgic, absolutely neuralgic issues
of disturbance in terms of sort of modern Chinese history, where the status of Shanghai was epitomized the kind of humiliation of the whole nation. So, yeah, there's a lot of ambivalence in these things. yeah I mean I I have seen I think I even so then and contrast the relative decentralization China to the year here all in trying to draw exactly that sort of contrast you want to from you can circle back to the breaks it but the
you you are obviously the sort of democratic organization on isn't there in China but but I think a lot of people miss the point about China's decentralized political decentralization it's a by so yes the party's in charge and it's one country but then so much of the economy and the the party's actually government a provincial or city yeah love an awful law all integrity not just a can be satisfied symbolically you know it's a it's it's sort of strange like as not as long and I think this is something that goes
really deep into Chinese tradition is that you know if you if you make the right symbolic gestures as a sort of tributary dependent then the substantial consequences of that are extremely small. You know, the political centre is very happy with people just simply making a kind of extremely public affirmation of political subservience with no significant content to it at all. And I think that the whole politics of the region are shaped by that. It goes outside.
I think China's neighbours know there's something odd going on there like that. And that it's not the notion of a sort of economically predatory power that would tend to go the other way. I mean, I'm not saying this is right. There's a kind of anti-American narrative that you could lock into here. I'm not at all subscribing to that, but I'm just saying there's a model of American international activity that's the mirror image, the absolute symmetrical mirror image of the Chinese one, where there's a sort of nominal defensive massive degree of autonomy and respect for the political process in foreign countries and an absolute vice-like iron grip of economic
control and advantage in relation to that place. And I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying it's illustrative of the Chinese situation by inversion. I mean, it might be that this is changing, and as China modernizes it becomes a bit more cynical about this and a bit more economically pragmatic in his relations. But I think its traditions are open to a lot of tolerance of a lot of substantial autonomy that's just masked by some symbolic overlay. I mean, I guess you could argue that that tributary relationship, even when there's
no direct government sort of relationship is sort of like a promise of non-aggression in a way, it's like, okay, you're the supreme state and we're not going to attack you, you know, and we have this symbolic relationship, but then, and that's basically a way of establishing a non-aggression sort of relationship with something that's clearly a major power and managing that historically. Yeah, sort of renouncing certain potentials for independent foreign policy in a way, listener, like where you just say we will not enter into certain disrespectful relations
with hostile or competitive major powers out of respect for your position, but in terms of our economic micromanagement and the pursuit of material advantage it will have minimal consequences right and so I think for at least some of those and buddies it may bring my history from needs to be better but but there was no all major out that you could compare to China for those you know if you are something like a career or or I'll you can appear
that was a major regional power but still not as massive as China. So, like actually you can see that this is a metapolitical structure, I think is where we're going. You could stretch it to say that this is a metapolitical system of co-existence in a way. Right. Yeah. I think so. I mean, there's always going to be a metapolitical system, isn't it? Concretely, it's not like you're going to suddenly introduce one where there wasn't one before. So part of this whole question of spatial metapolitics is what is the actual spatial metapolitics in force in any particular domain?
you know, and there's just an analytical question about it. It's obviously because Friedman's thing is he has a project and he really wants to disrupt and change the metapolitical order, you can get locked onto that and lose the fact that there's just a purely analytical side to this. And so there are these particular metapolitical structures that are significantly heterogeneous. I think a lot of the stuff with China that's going on is recognizing this heterogeneity. And there's a whole literature saying you just cannot treat China as if it were an archetype of great power.
Just take your lessons from European great power politics and inflate them to the global level and say we're in the same world and we understand exactly what can happen. Now obviously there are counter arguments to that, there are people who will say no that's exactly what you should do, and I'm not saying that it's uninteresting, I'm not wanting to dismiss that, but there certainly is a counter case. things like the you know if you look at Jiang Zemin's in Jiang Zemin's sort of period in office the deal that was kind of drawn up to try and seduce Taiwan
to accept unification with China it was quite an interesting document because it really, when you say, well, what exactly is Taiwan being asked to give up? And, you know, it was quite hard to find. I mean, really, I think it was basically just independent foreign policy orientation. You know, the Chinese said, look, you can keep your own armed forces, your own police force, your own economic policy. You know what I mean? So you go down the list of substantial concessions to the integrated state and they're almost non-existent. It's like all that was being asked was that you just say there is one China and its government
is currently legitimately in power in Beijing and nothing else that would be recognized generally as a kind of automatic concession to that kind of admission of sovereignty was being asked for at all, in fact explicitly not being asked for. So I think it is hard to just transpose this European model over and say that what's going on with this kind of transformation of the structure of hegemony in East Asia is something we already understand from our experience of great power politics in Europe.
Yeah, so I guess the comparison appeals to me because sort of like Westphalian states are relatively similar size and scale and okay, you have a principally state versus are sort of major power, but it's, you know, an order of magnitude sort of thing. Whereas this seasteading or this other dynamic geography, if we come up with other funky sort of variations on it, it's massively, to me it has to be massively imbalanced. It's like sort of large villages versus like China or India, one billion people versus like a couple of thousand.
And so that very, that huge disparity in scale means that the relationship is not going to be like a sort of princely state relationship, even though there is a couple of European and sort of microstates. But something like that sort of, I don't know, acknowledging the United Nations as the emperor ruling over everything under heaven is almost like a better model, where it's like, yes, you're clearly so much larger than us that you could wipe us off the map, but we're not worth your trouble. We're just doing this interesting thing over here. And yeah, OK, we can cause you some trouble and return a few common buggers.
Sorry, I just sort of feel we've hit this kind of threshold now. There's obviously two sort of big zones for stuff that we feel we should do in this session. One of them is just anything people want to add about Brexit stuff. And the other one is anything from these Friedman pieces that is… I know that this other article is not just Friedman, and that is… I don't actually know this Brad Taylor guy except as a name on the seasteading thing,
so I should try and find out a bit more about where he's come from and stuff. So that's why I keep just saying Friedman, Friedman. I can't see… He seems, whoever he is, Brad Taylor, he seems so in tune with what Friedman is trying to do, that he doesn't really emerge with any independent identity there. So I don't know. Do people think there's a big hole that obviously needs to be poked at at the moment? I mean, it is obviously that we're sort of talking about two different things here whose
relation is complicated, isn't it? Like, you know, secession and dynamic geography are essentially very different things. They have some complicated relation between them. But if someone said, why are you even talking about these two things together? it would at least deserve a response. And Friedman very specifically is not talking about secession. He sees it as having all of these problems that dynamic geography is meant specifically to solve. Secession is still terrestrial.
So the fact I'm running them together only because I have a kind of implicit meta context to do with disintegrative planetary trends, but that probably shouldn't be obviously persuasive to people. No, it's reasonable because there's the possibility that the same trends that have led to this could, well they are the ones that will hopefully, you know, hopefully, will maybe open up the opportunity for, you know, something on the sea rather than terrestrial. You know, it's, they're similar processes aren't they, I think.
Yes, they're an abstract level. It's the context in which you might be able to emerge. I think certainly if you're considering something like seasteading, you can't ignore trends in geopolitics because it provides all of the context. Right. Yeah. I mean, Taylor's... because you link to the seasteading chapter in Taylor's thesis, Really his whole thesis is about exit versus voice and all sorts of different forms of exit, not just sort of spatial exit, but exit from the public school system by using charter schools and all sorts of stuff like that.
So there's definitely an exit sort of theme around all of that. Yeah. I mean, exit is an incredibly interesting term like that, because people do fixate upon certain dimensions of exit, and give them quite arbitrary emphasis. And I've noticed, for instance, that people almost treat exit as if it's a synonym for geopolitical secession, which is, I mean, it's obvious it's in relation to geopolitical, no one's denying that there is that association, but obviously that's, you've gone a strange
distance to get there, let alone treat them as being synonymous terms. And I mean, the fundamental bedrock of what is meant by exit is just captured in a normal commercial relation. It's shopping. When you walk away from a brand to another brand, that is the atom, the elementary commercial relation is what is incarnating Exit. And so these much larger sort of geopolitical ramifications of it are an extrapolation from this basic…
But if you say that we're going to look at all of this geopolitical stuff in terms of exit pressure, you're saying we're going to look at it as if it were commercial. We're going to use the structures of commercial relations as our matrix for political analysis. So yeah, that is odd. And obviously these school things and all these examples are closer in a way to the way that term originated, Hirschman's thing.
I mean this to me is like, in terms of the existing set of ideological articulations, It's a very interesting term because I don't think, for libertarians it's the whole deal, but it's not, most of the right would not see exit as being particularly right-aligned concept at all. And all of these ethno-nationalist types, I mean this is the really fascinating ambivalence and paradox of whole Brexit thing, is that that mentality of sort of localization and rootedness
and a revolt against cosmo-capitalism is the absolute opposite of exit. So in its grand form, you have this drama of exit from the European Union, but all the kind of psychodynamics of that are going in exactly the opposite direction. And it's a refusal of a sort of exit-structured world in some ways. In fact, there's just one more thing I'd like to, because I wanted to respond earlier about this, which is just, I think, a really crucial part of what Friedman is doing in this thing.
It's tied up with this pessimism, where he says, you know, the problem with folk politics is you're expecting people to actually want to do the sort of things that you want them to do, and you have to just give up on that. People aren't, you know, people are inert, this stuff is deep, you know, it's a lot of it's biological, he's saying, it's not even just culturally deep, it's ingrained into human genes, that they will do the things that are pissing you off, And they're not going to stop. And that's why he goes to this. This is what this meta move is about for him. It's about a certain kind of abandonment of political hope. That in a different context,
you want a context in which people being realistically what people are like will do the kind of stuff that you find more acceptable than what they're doing at the moment. If you just try to get people to change what they're doing, you will fail. And that is what folk politics means for him, and that's what's being abandoned. And I'm raising this now just because I think it takes us back to this Brexit thing, and what is the Brexit constituency, and all the room for various kinds of disillusionment and criticism of, you know, look at these people and look what they think, all of this. It's all in a certain sense contextualized already, enveloped by the sort of thing Friedman
is doing, where his realism is, you know, don't get caught up on what it is people want. You know, what they want isn't, A, it's not going to change, and B, it's kind of where they're responding to incentives within a particular structure. And you know, within that structure, you're not going to magically turn them around in sort of directions that you want to turn them around. And this is something that again I think is non-partisan. I mean I think the left is just as much, should be susceptible to that left as the right. The attempt to kind of get new man, new libertarian man or new socialist man, all of those new
new men are just never going to turn up, you know, whatever it is, whatever you want new man to be, you're just going to be waiting forever for new man to appear. And so what matters is what is the actual structure of incentives that people are operating within. Yeah, the people will always disappoint you is I think the lesson. Unless you preemptively disillusion yourself to a massive degree. Yeah. But there's also an interesting sort of distinction between the Brexit, that sort of momentum,
and what we're talking about is that there are all these issues of nation and ideas of a unified people. What's being proposed is sort of intended to operate outside of all of those considerations and outside also of sort of ideas of trust, I think, really. The sort of the trust that is supposed to form the basis of a traditional, you know, homogenous society. Certainly, you know, I suppose there's been an undermining of that with integration. as we would put it. But also these new, this direction if you like, of meta-politics is
not based on recapturing or renewing that ideal of a homogenous, trust-based society. It's quite the opposite. It's all sort of atomised, sort of contractual relations, formalised relations, which is also, I think, as an aside, the big split in the sort of reaction community. It's do you go one way to try and get that trust back and take your country back and make America great again or whatever, or do you accelerate the other way and go for a completely strictly formalised relationship? There's a sort of recognition that maybe what we have now is the worst of both worlds.
I don't know. Well, I think heterogeneity is to be expected, isn't it? It's like we're no doubt going to see all of these trends extrapolated for sure. And there's an extremely powerful current of this ethno-nationalist revolt against cosmopolitan capitalism happening. I think that's just unambiguous, isn't it? And the dominant rhetoric that I see around me, both in the left deploring this happening and on large chunks of the right celebrating it happening, is that.
It's exactly what the Christopher Hayes quote is about. So that's definitely happening. And I think equally as definite it's not the only thing that is happening, and however much it might want to be the only thing that's happening. There is these trends towards trustless contractuality are going parabolic. And everything we're seeing in terms of these commercial, techno-commercial possibilities of cryptocurrencies and really catalyzing the internet to do engaging contractual relations with distant, untrusted parties is something that's just a massive, massive trend.
And I suspect is actually part of what is provoking this reaction. And wouldn't it be nice if we were still dealing with people that we knew and had traditionally been raised among and understood and all of that, but that just isn't the world that we have. the the I'm right run up so it's gone and then again trying to combine those so all have this cake and eat it too if you want in terms of saying well if you allow the fragmentation then
each fragment can have the homogeneity and have that level of cultural consensus and trust. Yeah, that's right. I think that that's a really interesting point and part of one whole interesting thing about this dynamic geography thing is because of this new techno-capitalist element, you know, that building these new platforms is going to be hugely capitalist, capital intensive and technologically demanding and all of this it kind of selects against a lot of the social dynamics that historically have been behind this kind of fragmentational process you know those all those utopian
utopian socialist communities that obviously had a huge role in people trying to experiment with new types of governance and new types of social organization and and had their own kind of exit from the dominant culture, I think are in a much more difficult environment here than they have been in the past. If you have to actually do something that is extremely expensive and technologically demanding, then that seems to me to be more of a barrier against those kind of social options.
And I would have thought those social options probably have to hope that they end up being left behind, honestly. If I was wanting some sort of pure ethno-nationalist traditional community, I would not even for a single moment think that was going to be on a floating artificial island. I would be hoping that the kind of people who are complicating that for me domestically would be the ones heading off for the floating island, you know what I mean? And that it was possible to carve up some of my traditional territory in a way that was better suited to those conservative ideals or whatever.
Yeah, I pretty much agree. I think I have to digest it. Yeah. So I mean, I don't know. Everyone's in different time zones. I think we're a bit into overtime. Do you think we should be wrapping up now? Anyone want to push on into a last spurt of action? I can see that Amy's practically just melting into complete fatigue then.
She's got the worst time zone, I think. What do you think guys? Are we done? Yeah, I can leave it here. I have to work tomorrow too. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks guys. That was really good. So, yeah. Have a good week. Thanks a lot. Thanks for showing up. OK, bye. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye.