PROPOSITION: For Political Change, Choose Exit Not Voice.

• Author: Borders, Max
• Position: The Debate Issue

AFFIRMATIVE: Liberating Ourselves by Starting Something New

ON OCTOBER 13, 2008, the heads of America's largest banks sat around a table with then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The bankers were there to accept what would become the largest financial bailout in history. Take it or else, Paulson said of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The bankers complied.

The bailouts prompted a handful of cypherpunks to speed up work on a great technological experiment. Innovators like Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney had already been playing around with ideas to challenge the existing monetary system. But on October 31,2008, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System."

That white paper was like universal acid poured over the gears of a great machine. The advent of the distributed ledger jolted many of us from our dogmas: If something as apparently core to state sovereignty as a working monetary system might be provided through a decentralized technological means, the world suddenly looked like a different place.

Up to that point, advocates of human freedom had pursued change largely through persuasion and advocacy. If you wanted to liberate people, you had to cry your teardrop in the swirling ocean of public opinion every election cycle and pray the tide would turn. If you wanted to change the law, you had to get your brilliant white paper into the hands of a congressman (who had probably just used those same hands to take a dirty campaign contribution).

Politics. Policy. Punditry. That's more or less the sum of "voice" as a strategy.

Both progressives and conservative populists are currently engaged in political trench warfare, which risks becoming less metaphorical as the tribes become more hostile. Such hostility is an inevitable byproduct of the voice theory of political change, but something better is coming: the end of politics as we know it.

ECONOMIST ALBERT O. Hirschman in his 1970 treatise Voice, Exit, and Loyalty explained that there are three ways to respond to any human system, be it a product, an organization, or a political regime. Voice--express yourself to persuade others to change the system. Exit--leave the system, joining another system or starting something new. Loyalty--stick by the system, even if it's less than ideal.

The 19th century was in many respects the era of loyalty (God and country). The 20th century was the era of voice (ballots over bullets). But the 21st century will be the age of exit (governance by choice).

One of the basic tests of "good" law is whether people actually want...