I have good news.
Yes, the land is moving in an illiberal direction. It’s disorderly anarcho-nationalism and anarcho-communism in America. And disturbingly ordered nationalist communism in China.
Businessmen are now randomly murdered in the USA and randomly expropriated in the PRC. All manner of hatred bursts forth every day on social media — against whites, nonwhites, men, women, the young, the old, and everyone in between. And the values of peace, trade, and win/win cooperation that built the modern world seem like they’re on the ropes.
But all is not lost.
Because the cloud is moving in the opposite direction. As the Internet is actually existing liberalism. After all, it is international capitalism. And preserves American values in the cloud even as both socialists and nationalist traduce them on American soil. Indeed, the Internet is to America as America was to Britain — the version 3.0 of global liberalism.
And the geographic center of liberalism is moving to the decentralized Internet just as it moved from London to DC. Just as we’ve already seen the torch passed from the British pound to the American dollar to the decentralized Bitcoin. But in this process the values of liberalism stay intact, and even strengthen, even as the mere geography (and demography!) changes.
Because the free Internet is an ideological zone, not a country. A proposition, not a nation, that anyone can subscribe to.
Now, the response from some at this point is usually that the Internet isn’t a place. That’s true…but Christianity isn’t a place either. Yet there are Christian places. There are churches, cathedrals, and entire countries with the cross on the flag. And also a billion Christians around the world, for whom Christian values are a major part of their identity.
Similarly, the Internet isn’t a place, but there are Internet places. There are startups, datacenters, tech conferences, and even countries where Bitcoin is the national currency. And there are now many millions of Bitcoiners around the world, for whom Bitcoin’s values are a major part of their identity. Bitcoiners are the first truly Internet-born nation, and arguably the most important, but they won’t be the last.
Those Internet nations can organize online, pool their funding, and peacefully buy pieces of territory all over the world. Thereby forming startup societies and, in the fullness of time, network states. Where liberal values are in fact valued.
So, I don’t count out liberalism. It has ascended to the cloud in a newer and stronger form. One where our rights are protected across borders (and within them) by hard code rather than soft laws.
For example: a failed state can vitiate the protections against unreasonable search and seizure, but it can’t break strong encryption. It can unbank you and denaturalize you, but it can’t strip your Bitcoin address or ENS name. And it can break Delaware’s contracts, but not smart contracts.
That means we have code that is in a deep sense stronger than unreasonable people and unjust laws. And so we can use it to reboot liberalism, from the cloud. Just like we reclaimed free speech, we can reclaim capitalism, science, media, equality, democracy, and progress itself.
i'm sorry to say that i've accepted postliberalism
i don't mean this in a normative sense but rather in a descriptive: postliberalism is the state of the existing world