Exit notes (#1)
Some notable attempts to dial back the NRx commitment to exit over voice, as inherited from Moldbug, have been seen recently. (I think NBS was crucial in advancing this argument, but I couldn’t find his post immediately — I’ll link to it if someone nudges me helpfully.) It’s undoubtedly a central discussion throughout the reactosphere at the moment.
Some preliminary thought-gathering on the topic:
(1) Exit is a scale-free concept. It can be applied rigorously to extreme cases of sociopolitical separation, from secession to extraterrestrial escapes. Yet these radical examples do not define it. It’s essence is the commercial relation, which necessarily involves a non-transaction option. Exit means: Take it or leave it (but don’t haggle). It is thus, at whatever scale of expression, the concrete social implementation of freedom as an operational principle.
(2) As a philosophical stance, Exit is anti-dialectical. That is to say, it is the insistence of an option against argument, especially refusing the idea of necessary political discussion (a notion which, if accepted, guarantees progression to the left). Let’s spatialize our disagreement is an alternative to resolution in time. Conversations can be prisons. No one is owed a hearing.