My view from the Temple of Sin. Earlier this month I visited the Museum of Natural History, a towering, 155-year-old palace of knowledge overlooking New York City’s Central Park, and saw they’d finally taken down the giant monument to President Teddy Roosevelt that used to guard the entrance. Flanked by an indigenous American and a black American in what was clearly a pitch for racial unity at the time of its construction, political zealots have since framed the statue, along with President Roosevelt himself — and all American history — as hopelessly racist. But the museum’s facelift, I learned some moments later wandering the halls, was just the beginning of this cherished institution’s subtle transformation. Today, from the American woodlands to the deep sea, almost no exhibit covering a subject younger than a few hundred years fails to mention, with at least some small, casual note, the corrosive impact of either human civilization on nature, or white people, specifically, on human civilization. While this radical frame’s dominance over American culture is nothing new, I was curious how and when it happened here, and found my answers in a 2018 DEI directive signed by museum leadership. “The American Museum of Natural History is a global institution in one of the most diverse cities in the world,” reads their manifesto. A standard summary of radical dogma follows, with “diversity” the focus, but right there from that opening I found myself distracted by another word:

“Global.”

What a strange concept, I thought, and then I wondered: is it true? Is it even possible?

How is the Museum of Natural History, in any meaningful sense, “global”? Sure, it’s home to artifacts from all around the world, but a photo album of my trip to Rome would not itself be Roman. The museum is largely curated by Americans, for an overwhelmingly American audience. Are we to believe these Americans are, unlike the rest of us, in some sense “global,” and what exactly does that mean? Do they speak a global language? Do they enjoy global food, traditions, customs? Are there other global citizens abroad, in other countries? Have they built “global institutions” in their cities? Are there museums in Africa, Europe, or Asia where exhibits kindly remind guests to reflect on the feelings of New Yorkers, their like-minded kin on the other side of the planet? If so, how exactly do these “global institutions” function? There is no global government (thank God). There are no global taxes (thank God). Were it not for private donations, and funding from our American-funded state, the Museum of Natural History would cease to exist. In this context what, I wondered, could “global” possibly mean?

The answer, of course, is literally nothing. The notion that an institution, which exists physically in New York City, can be in some sense everywhere is just a total lie.

Institutions are the people who run them. They can only exist where they are, and are therefore only capable of expressing local culture. This is all obviously true in the case of physically instantiated institutions, like a museum, but is also true of internet-based institutions. What is Reddit, after all, but an expression of the people who run it, and the people who live there? How much has X changed since Elon took Twitter? In this way, any institution’s argument that it is in some way every culture, an abstract that can’t even be grasped let alone embodied, rather than the culture in which it is steeped, can only be an expression of contempt — for itself. Which certainly sounds familiar!

The people who run America today sort of famously hate America, and that self-loathing has given way to every manner of anti-American philosophy, from regressive racial politics and the anti-human faction of “environmentalism” to virulent Marxism. But to say our American institutions are rotted to their cores would be nothing new. Likewise, everyone knows our cities and country are rotted in the same way, by the same people, and for the same reason. The more interesting question is what to do about the rot, a subject that has divided the very best of America for years.

This brings us to the technology industry (stay winning, gentlemen).

In tech, the question of what to do about a rotted company is more familiar terrain. In a sense, dealing with rot is the business of tech. If an incumbent is broken, a startup will form to replace it, and any number of investors will line up to fund the battle. The old, useless institution dies, talented technologists happily migrate to the next giant, and the circle of life continues. But the question of what to do about the various non-corporate institutions comprising our cities and country, most of which are permanent by design, and most of which have turned against the people they are meant to serve, has proven more intractable.

Here, the popular question: should we “exit” from our rotted system in search of something better, or exercise our “voice” within this system in an effort to correct the rot. “Exit” and “voice” are typically framed as aligned, as both positions acknowledge and address the sickness of our country. But back in the museum, as I stood beneath the great blue whale scrolling through that crazy manifesto, it occurred to me a view of America as something to “exit” is just as contemptuous of the country as the self-loathing sickness it purportedly rejects. It also implies a home beyond the country, which is just fundamentally a “global” perspective.

Let’s speak a little more specifically. There are several variations of “exit,” and they really are quite different.

First, there’s exit within America, say from San Francisco to Austin or Miami. This is an understandable impulse, and closest to the “voice” position if paired with strong local engagement in, for example, a proponent’s new home in Austin or Miami. Then, there’s “exit” out of politics completely, and in some cases the physical world. Arguments here tend to focus on the regulations governing our cities and countries, which are often designed by anti-human crusaders to be unworkable. Proponents of this form of “exit” usually make the case for meaningful change in the world through business, and especially through software, where there are fewer impediments to building. One obvious problem with both positions is national politics. The failure of a state like California, accelerated by exit, will impact every state in the country, both in terms of immigration (imagine refugees from Los Angeles) and federal taxation (emergency care packages for the slums of Manhattan). Inevitably, business will be the scapegoat, and the warning signs are already obvious. From Elizabeth Warren’s grab for unrealized gains, which would end the concept of startups, to Lina Khan’s crusade against the concept of successful companies, the federal government is increasingly animated by war with industry. Eventually, if these trends continue, there will be nowhere left to run but from the country. Exit, then, even in its more reasonable form, is implicitly global.

Now, in its purest, philosophical distillation, proponents of exit retreat to the internet with a search for answers to our institutional rot that concludes in everything from enthusiasm for virtual reality to the concept of Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State: “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”

A little more colorfully, “The internet,” Balaji writes in a recent post worth checking out in full, “is the next America.” Roughly, the argument here is technologists in San Francisco have more in common with technologists in Shenzhen or sub-Saharan Lagos than they do with a farmer in Napa, or a communist barista living in the Haight. As “netizens” slowly come to realize this, they will naturally form a class consciousness, followed by a desire to live among each other, and ultimately a nation in the real world.

Obviously, there are many standing questions here in terms of how the future nations of our netizens will form, thrive, and defend themselves from what, following the Ayn Randian brain drain, will presumably be a large and growing number of starving nuclear powers. But I’m still stuck on the premise of the netizen itself. What does he love? What does he worship? When entrepreneurs and technologists from disparate cultures around the world come together like those kids in Captain Planet, and form their digital community, what language do they speak? As fate would have it, we recently got a pretty good glimpse of tech’s “global community,” and holy shit am I not interested in buying the subscription.

Let’s “delve” into the drama, shall we?

Last week, in a now viral tweet, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham critiqued a pitch he received, in which a founder’s use of the word “delve” seemed to indicate they used ChatGPT to write their email (strangely, the AI’s love of the word is actually a thing). For Paul, an influential voice in tech who has written for years on the topic of great writing, the broader point simply seemed to be his preference for simplicity in prose. But for the nation of Nigeria? This was an act of unimaginable provocation.

Shortly after Paul’s post, a handful of Nigerian influencers, for whom use of the word “delve” was apparently not only common, but semi-sacred, decided this advice from Paul, on how to successfully pitch a company to Paul, constituted a kind of international oppression. It was yet another example of spectacular bias, the mob cried. This was a “colonial” mindset. This was (drum roll, please) racist. Within hours, thousands of Nigerians — engineers, entrepreneurs, and tech workers all among them — had piled on. In the first place, they argued, Nigerians spoke English better than Americans and Brits. Who was Paul, a white man, telling Africans, who clearly knew many more English words than Paul, how to speak? It was an incredible injustice, and an arrogance too great to ignore.

Phenomenal dust-up, frankly, and another great day on X. But as is typically the case in the Clown World, there is a lesson in the funhouse mirror.

There is no such thing as “global culture.” It doesn’t matter what a person does for work. It doesn’t matter if a person spends a lot of time on social media, or also loves to talk about the singularity. People fight for their own cultures and norms, even in an ostensibly “global” environment like X, and their culture is overwhelmingly shaped by where they are — physically. Americans interested in “netizenship,” and exit to some new, internet-based culture, are not acting in accordance with some new human awakening. They are acting in accordance with a distinctly western sense of self-loathing. Nigerians, generally speaking, actually like themselves, and that, for the most part, was the strange thing we were looking at last week. Happy for them. But we will not be moving to an island utopia together.

In hindsight, it’s obvious “exit vs. voice” was constructed by men in favor of exit. “Voice” implies vote, but that’s not what saving a city, or a country, looks like. In reality, the local position is something more like “build,” and fight.

A couple weeks back, I had a great conversation with Jan Sramek, the founder of California Forever, which is attempting to found a new city in the Bay Area (piece and video here, full transcript here). If successful, the project will serve as an inspiring example of progress in a state where progress has largely been legislated out of existence. It will relieve housing costs throughout the Bay Area, opening up a path to immigration from the rest of the country, and altering the demographics of the region in favor of a far more progressive (the real kind) perspective. We’re talking about a new city here, but is this “exit”? Fighting within the rotted California system? No, it's a clever attempt at “build,” which is our best shot at unseating America’s agents of chaos: building new institutions into the system, rather than exiting, which not only produce value in their own right, but alter the wider system.

Naturally, California Forever has attracted almost universal contempt from our self-loathing press and government, and now faces a tremendous uphill climb for approval from a local voter base long taught that progress is regressive. But that just means we’re over the target — in their hatred of a project, America’s chaos agents always tell you exactly where they’re vulnerable. Seems like a great place to apply more pressure.

New companies, new PACs, new nonprofits, and all of them ruthlessly local. Utopia doesn’t begin with some master plan for “globalism, but in a good way.” It begins with a city block.

You can’t live inside the internet, and if you could it would be a nightmare. The real world will be built and run by people who seek to build and run the real world, and everyone else — no matter their intelligence, no matter their intention — will lose. “Exit vs. voice” is a lie. Our choices are “vanish” or “build,” and “build” will be a fight.

But it’s better to fight than to run.

-SOLANA