Henry Farrell in American Affairs: It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard. Rothbard had argued that markets and individual connections were really all we needed. As the Dread Pirate, whose real name was Ross Ulbricht, summarized it, a happier world awaited those who took the exit road from ordinary politics. They could escape the “thieving murderous mits [sic]” of the state to embrace the freedom that emerged from a “multitude of voluntary interactions between individuals.”
For Ulbricht, Silk Road wasn’t just a way to make money but the tech-fueled expression of a political philosophy. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin had (supposedly) enabled a new realm of voluntary exchange outside the grasp of government, allowing people to buy and sell drugs and guns without the feds interfering. Of course, state tyranny might reemerge if voluntary organizations like Silk Road started to steal from their users, or spied on, or even killed them. Ulbricht, however, believed that the forces of market competition would prevent this from happening, leading to “freedom and prosperity the likes of which the world has never known.”
Ambitious libertarian projects to escape the sordid compromises of politics have been part of Silicon Valley culture since the beginning. But Ulbricht’s dream of escape from politics and its vexations has become increasingly influential in the decade since the Dread Pirate Roberts book club. Several prominent Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs have become disenchanted with the U.S. government, East Coast media, and even their own employees (which have all increasingly become disenchanted with them).
It isn’t surprising that entrepreneurs dream of discovering the off-ramp from a world of squalid political bargains to the dizzying freedom of market choice and unlimited technological progress. Perhaps it isn’t even a shock that many are willing to embrace pro-tariff, anti-immigration Donald Trump, who promises to crush their enemies (and commute Ulbricht’s life sentence for drug trafficking while he’s at it). Like Ulbricht, they draw inspiration and justification for their dreams from political philosophy, mixing old thinkers with new machinic visions of technology devouring and transforming humanity.
Just as with Silk Road, the political philosophy and business model appear to go hand-in-hand. The accumulated wisdom of the ages seems to have very encouraging things to say about tech entrepreneurs, when read through the right lenses. Just one weird trick—remaking global geopolitics around the model of Silicon Valley start-ups—will foster all the freedom and prosperity one could reasonably ask for. The very best way for humanity to spread to the stars, and perhaps even remake the universe, is to just let Silicon Valley engineers do their thing. A new life awaits in the off-world colonies, provided only that the demands of officious bureaucrats, mendacious East Coast journalists, social justice whiners, and other enemies of progress are swept into the midden.
But the contradictions become clear if you squint even a little. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs genuinely have a great amount to be proud of—some of their technological innovations have become cornerstones of modern society. Yet business plans and contemporary political spats are insecure foundations for grand theories of the deep future of human civilization and politics—a truth vividly illustrated when Silk Road’s founder attempted to hire hit men to stamp out extortionists, hastening the business’s demise. Profit models are not philosophies, and should not be gussied up as such, festooned with purloined intellectual gew-gaws and other pirate fineries. Serious thinkers should not be pressed into service merely as propagandists for the cause.
The problem is not that arguments for freedom and technological innovation are stupid or wicked. They are not. It is that political theory can’t do its proper job when it becomes an instrument of self-justification and self-soothing. It is very easy for highly intelligent people to find arguments and justifications for why they are right and ought to be allowed to do exactly what they want. This becomes even easier when they are surrounded by others who agree with them and sometimes even venerate them. The cryptographer Bruce Schneier is famous for Schneier’s law: the dictum that anyone can invent a security system so clever that he or she can’t break it. Cognitive psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have shown that much the same is true for arguments. Anyone can make a political case so compelling that he or she can’t see the flaws in it.
Of course, this problem plagues the Left as well as the Right, cloistered academics just as much as Twitter iconoclasts. But good political philosophy and social science is badly suited to provide either intellectual ballast for business models or balm for the bruised egos of founders. It is, by its nature, awkward and vexing. It doesn’t provide a straight path to some blurry and glorious imaginary future but brings into sharper focus the tensions and difficulties of today.
If Silicon Valley thinkers are to take their political commitments to liberty and technological progress seriously, they need to acknowledge and deal with the contradictions in their ideological positions rather than papering over them. Rather than spinning out business models into unconvincing grand social theories, they ought start with good theories and think seriously about the implications for their business models.
Here, they might usefully learn from a consistent line of reasoning in classical liberalism that they currently neglect. Eighteenth-century liberals like Hume and the authors of The Federalist Papers were obsessed with the dangers of faction, and the need to channel it so that it did not overwhelm society. Their twentieth- and twenty-first-century heirs, like Ernest Gellner, Douglass North, and Barry Weingast, have adapted the tools of social science to understand the circumstances under which open societies can live and thrive despite, and sometimes thanks to, their internal contradictions.
The lessons are straightforward, even if they jar painfully with some common myths in the Valley. Actual free markets require a state that is both powerful and constrained. Real technological progress is not solely generated by risk-taking entrepreneur-heroes in a social vacuum. It is also the contingent by-product of a fragile set of common social and political arrangements. Without constitutional constraints, voluntary interactions tend, as Silk Road did, to degenerate into gangster capitalism. And the trick of creating a vibrant open order is not to try to escape the sordid bargains of politics, or to eliminate your enemies, but to channel disagreement usefully. You cannot escape the company of those whom you detest, however unpleasant you may find it—that is the fundamental premise of the open society. When you try, you discover (as many libertarian schemers looking to improve the human condition have discovered) that you bring the disagreements along with you. You have to figure out ways to live with those who oppose you and whom you oppose, and ideally to derive collective benefit from your mutual vexations.
How could that way of thinking best be adapted to understand the technological and political choices that we face today? This is an open question—but it is the one that both politicized Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their critics ought to ask themselves, given the gravity of the challenges we face today. An open society is a very good thing, so long as you can keep it. But understanding how to keep it requires the intellectual rigor to understand where your business model and your broader politics reinforce each other and where they are in violent contradiction, to comprehend that you cannot escape the disagreement and contention that are part of human life.
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