2013-10-30

Secession Is Going Mainstream: Silicon Valley Wants Out Of America

Once the elite begin to make a call for secession, the movements will pick up steam because the idea will become more popular.

Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call
In a nutshell, Mr. Srinivasan, a computer scientist and co-founder of the genomics company Counsyl, told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become “the Microsoft of nations”: outdated and obsolescent. When technology companies calcify, Mr. Srinivasan said, you don’t reform them. You exit and launch your own. Why not do so with America?

In practice, this vision calls for building actual communities that would be beyond the reach of the state that Silicon Valley’s libertarians despise. But in the near term, Mr. Srinivasan noted, there are piecemeal ways to opt out of the society — like spending unregulated digital currency, sleeping in unregulated hotels and manufacturing unregulated guns. What Mr. Srinivasan called “Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” he explained, “basically means build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the United States, run by technology.”
This is one path to secession: defacto secession by ignoring laws, or if not acting illegally, acting by the philosophy of wu wei (无为), non-action. The state requires support from the citizens to exist. Removing support and participation in its systems does not cause it to collapse, but if enough people leave it, that could be the eventual result.
Disruption makes enemies, Mr. Srinivasan said, but war is not an option: “They have aircraft carriers; we don’t.” His proposed solution is seceding from the society before the “backlash” against the Valley grows.

The tools are already here, he noted: 3-D printing makes it “impossible to ban physical objects,” from guns to drones. The borderless digital currency Bitcoin defies economic regulation. The Quantified Self movement helps people self-measure and opt out of the health care system. He urged his audience to invent opt-out tools of their own, including one “allowing people, the middle class, to make tax shelters.”

Mr. Srinivasan has influential support: Some of the biggest names in the Valley have variously proposed building a Mars colony, an unregulated zone of experimentation on Earth or floating libertarian islands at sea.
The difference between Silicon Valley and farmers in northern California is that Silicon Valley is cool. Secession is going to jump from the thing that wacko hippies in Vermont or crazy gun owners in Colorado want, to something seriously discussed.

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