Cloud countries and exit geographies

Abstract

In recent years, digital technology companies and Silicon Valley technologists have pursued virtual “start-ups” or “cloud countries.” For their promoters, these new digital realms are designed to provide an offramp, known as an exit, from mainstream forms of governance, democracy, and finance. These territories will be located online or within the blockchain. In this paper I first examine the politics of this development by placing it into the larger context of alt-right and neoreactionary (NRx) thinking. In the second part, I examine the specific digital geographies of one set of projects known as “network states,” a project of the tech entrepreneur and Bitcoin maximalist, Balaji Srinivasan. For this I draw on work that situates how digital geographies of exit “render” value for the “growth machine” under conditions of rentier capitalism. Taken together, it is now clear that tech entrepreneurs are no longer content to use digital exit geographies just to provide economic returns, but to acquire political power and influence. In the Conclusion, I discuss how analysis of exit geographies can contribute to how digital political economies improve theorizations of exit, and highlight how network states depend on a growth machine model.