Exit Is Not Enough

on impact and change: with your ballot, wallet, hands, or feet

In case you missed it, I had my first podcast appearance on the Speakeasy Pod where I briefly discussed the cost of exit and touch on how someone might consider exit as a viable option. Below, some expanded thoughts on the four ways you exercise your “vote” everyday, and examining why the vote to exit itself, may not be enough.

---

On Change

In 1970, economist Albert O. Hirschman published Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, a slim book that reframed how we think about dissatisfaction. When a firm, an organization, or a state declines in quality, members have two basic responses: voice (agitate for change from within) or exit (leave). Loyalty, Hirschman argued, is what delays exit and gives voice its power.

It’s an elegant framework. But it’s incomplete. It treats human agency as binary. You either stay and speak, or go. Real life is messier. People don’t just talk or walk. They build, buy, boycott, riot, relocate. They exercise agency in overlapping, sometimes contradictory ways, often all at once.

What follows is an expansion. Not two levers but four. Every act of change, whether individual or collective, channels through one of four mechanisms: your ballot, your wallet, your hands, or your feet. Each has a logic, a failure mode, and a breaking point. Understanding the interplay between them is critical for anyone thinking seriously about governance, sovereignty, and the emerging landscape of network states and parallel societies.

We are sitting in the conditions that make all four votes salient: collapsing institutional trust, inflation, AI-driven labor disruption, and geopolitical fracture are converging simultaneously. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a decent chance you’re already weighing which vote to cast next.

Cracks in the System

Before examining the four votes, it’s worth naming what’s driving people to reconsider where they place their agency.

Trust in institutions is not just declining. It is structurally fracturing along generational and partisan lines. Pew’s September 2025 data shows that only 16% of Americans trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time, down from 73% in 1958. Gallup’s 2025 confidence survey found that only three of eighteen tracked institutions: small business, the military, and science, still command majority confidence. Congress sits at roughly 10%. Television news is in the same range. Trust in mass media hit a new all-time low at 28% in 2025, a sharp drop of 40 percentage points since its 1972 peak of 68%.

These numbers reflect polling aggregates that cut across demographics. Among Americans aged 18 to 29, trust in media is below 28% regardless of party affiliation. That’s the generation entering peak civic and economic participation.

Layer on the rest: the Epstein files and the absence of meaningful prosecution. Education costs rising while outcomes stagnate. Courts overwhelmed with backlogs and uneven sentencing. Inflation eroding purchasing power in real terms. AI and robotics advancing faster than policy can adapt, with credible projections that automation could displace hundreds of millions of jobs globally by 2030. Taxation regimes like California’s rules on unsold equity (effectively taxing unrealized gains) driving founders out of the state and hollowing the startup ecosystem they helped build.

The cracks are not new. What’s new is their simultaneity, their visibility, and the shrinking faith that any existing mechanism can patch them.

Voting With Your Ballot

The ballot is the most legible form of political agency. Elections at the local, provincial, and federal level. Referenda. Recalls. It’s the mechanism most people think of when they hear “democracy.”

It also has serious structural limitations.

Democratic systems were designed at specific historical moments. The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788. Canada’s Confederation Act in 1867. These documents and the institutions they spawned were products of their era. Over time, they ossify. The distance between the rules as written and the world as lived grows wider. Amendment processes are slow. Institutional inertia compounds. Regulatory capture accelerates.

The irony is that the level of government most likely to affect your daily life, municipal and local, is the one most people engage with least. Studies consistently show that most citizens can’t name their local city councilor or school board representative, even though these officials determine zoning, policing, infrastructure, and education in your neighborhood.

Federal elections, meanwhile, absorb the lion’s share of public attention and emotional investment. Yet their outcomes increasingly reflect the preferences of organized lobbying blocs, donor networks, and party machinery rather than the diffuse preferences of individual voters. In a two-party system, the ballot becomes a forced choice between pre-selected options. The mechanism designed to express popular will, becomes the bottleneck that filters it.

None of this is secret. It’s structural. The question is what happens when enough people stop believing the ballot can produce meaningful change.

Voting With Your Wallet

Your wallet is the second vote. Every purchase, every investment, every boycott is a signal. Where you put your money is a statement about what you value, or at least, what you’re willing to fund.

Consumer boycotts are a visible example. The ongoing Canadian boycott of American goods in response to U.S. trade policy is a case study in wallet-based political expression: coordinated purchasing decisions intended to exert economic pressure on a sovereign government. “Buy local” movements worldwide share the same logic: redirect capital flows as a form of protest or affirmation.

But the wallet vote has constraints that limit its democratic potential.

First, the wallet vote is not equally distributed. A billionaire’s purchasing decisions carry exponentially more weight than a minimum-wage worker’s. When large enough pools of capital consolidate; be it through lobbying, campaign donations, or outright regulatory capture, the wallet vote becomes a tool of the few rather than the many. This is why campaign finance reform is perennially contentious. Money in politics can drown voices rather than amplify them.

Second, forced choices limit genuine expression. In markets dominated by oligopolies like Canada’s banking sector, its grocery duopoly (Loblaw and Empire dominate roughly 60% of market share), or the U.S. telecom cartel, consumers technically “choose” between options, but the range of those options is so narrow that the choice is barely meaningful. Voting with your wallet presumes a competitive market. Monopoly and oligopoly undermine that premise.

Third, inflation is the silent tax on your wallet’s voting power. If the currency you hold loses purchasing power faster than your income grows, your vote weakens every year. The only hedge is to hold assets that appreciate faster than the denominator, like equity, real estate, Bitcoin. However, each of these asset classes carry their own volatility and risk, and it ultimately leaves the individual feeling powerless because one feels they have to park their liquidity into risk on assets that might not reflect the risk tolerance, just to maintain purchasing power.

Additionally, access to those instruments is itself unevenly distributed, creating a feedback loop where the wallet vote becomes increasingly plutocratic over time.

There’s a crypto-native reframe here worth flagging. One of the core arguments for Bitcoin and decentralized finance is that they give individuals a wallet vote that cannot be inflated away by central banks or confiscated by governments. Whether that holds in practice (exchange hacks, regulatory seizure, volatility) is debatable, but the philosophical appeal is rooted in the same frustration: people want a wallet vote that actually counts. The illusion that buying the right products is a substitute for structural change just compounds on top of the losing power of the wallet vote.

Voting With Your Hands

Hands build, and hands destroy.

The constructive side is entrepreneurship, community organizing, grassroots institution-building. Starting a local business. Founding a cooperative. Launching a nonprofit. Building a charter city. Running a community garden. Coding an open-source protocol. These are all acts of creation that reshape micro and meso systems — neighborhoods, towns, and industries, all from the ground up.

The network state movement, charter cities like Próspera, digital cooperatives, cosmo-localist supply chains, regenerative agriculture collectives — these are all expressions of the hands vote. People dissatisfied with the existing system building something new rather than waiting for permission or reform. If the ballot is about influencing the system, and the wallet is about rewarding or punishing within it, the hands vote is about creating alternatives alongside it.

One framework worth mentioning here is cosmo-localism: the principle of "design global, manufacture local." Coined by researcher Wolfgang Sachs and developed further by researchers like Michel Bauwens, cosmo-localism argues that knowledge and design should flow freely across borders (the cosmo part) while physical production stays rooted in local communities using local materials and labor (the local part).

Think open-source hardware plans shared globally but fabricated in neighborhood makerspaces, or regenerative agriculture protocols developed collaboratively online and implemented by regional cooperatives. It's the hands vote scaled through networks: building locally while coordinating globally, without requiring permission from centralized supply chains or multinational gatekeepers. Early experiments include FarmHack (open-source farm tools), WikiHouse (open-source housing kits), and the broader Open Source Ecology project, which is developing a set of fifty industrial machines that can be built from scratch for a fraction of commercial cost.

The destructive side of voting with hands is also real and must be named honestly.

Protests. Riots. Revolutions. The toppling of governments. Guerrilla warfare. Domestic terrorism. When voice and exit fail, when the ballot is rigged, the wallet is captured, and the exits are blocked, people break, and they also sometimes break things. The logic isn’t always rational, fair, just, or even lead to a positive outcome. The American Revolution (1775-83) was a hands vote. So was the French Revolution (1789-99). So was the Arab Spring (2010). So was the January 6 Capitol breach (2021), and the Iranian protests movement (2025-26).

The Second Amendment in the United States is fundamentally a codification of the hands vote: the right of citizens to bear arms as a check on state power. Whether one agrees with its contemporary application, the underlying logic is Hirschmanian: if exit and voice both fail, the capacity for force is the last-resort check on institutional decline.

The hands vote occupies a morally complex space. On the constructive end, it produces cooperatives, startups, and regenerative communities. On the destructive end, it produces casualties and chaos. The boundary between legitimate protest and destructive violence is politically contested and historically contingent. What one era calls terrorism, the next may call a liberation movement. What matters for our purposes is the structural observation: when ballot, wallet, and the constructive hands all fail, the destructive hands become more likely. This is not advocacy of violence, but historical and human pattern recognition.

Voting With Your Feet

When you stop believing your ballot matters, when your wallet shrinks faster than it grows, when building locally hits a ceiling of bureaucracy and institutional resistance, and when you don’t want to break things, the remaining option is to leave.

Voting with your feet is the oldest form of political expression. Migration predates democracy, markets, and organized warfare. It is arguably the most fundamental act of sovereignty an individual can exercise, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes it explicitly in Article 13: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”. Any nation that is built by immigrants is, by definition, a nation comprised of emigrants. To arrive somewhere is the same as having left somewhere else. Mobility is thus not necessarily an ostracized activity, but a natural course of change as humanity carves its presence and builds a relationship to mother earth.

The feet vote encompasses the full spectrum of human movement: economic migration (skilled workers seeking better opportunities), family reunification, refugee and humanitarian flight, digital nomadism, expatriation, investment-based residency, currency arbitrage, sojourning, and temporary labor migration. The motivations vary but the underlying structure is consistent: the existing system no longer serves the individual, and a different system — or the possibility of building a new one elsewhere — becomes more attractive than reform.

The scale is significant and accelerating. The global digital nomad population has roughly doubled in five years, from approximately 20 million pre-pandemic to an estimated 40-60 million by 2025 (read my piece about digital nomads here). In the United States alone, MBO Partners’ 2025 report counts 18.5 million American digital nomads — a 153% increase since 2019, representing roughly 12% of the U.S. workforce. Over 70 countries now offer some form of dedicated digital nomad visa or remote worker residency permit, up from a handful in 2019. Estonia was the first mover in 2020; Spain, Portugal, Colombia, Thailand, and South Korea have since followed with their own programs.

This is less about lifestyle experimentation and more a structural shift in how talent, capital, and labor relate to geography. When high-earning, highly skilled workers can choose where to live and pay taxes, the competitive dynamics between nation-states change. Countries must now actively attract and retain talent. Not just through jobs, but through quality of life, regulatory environment, tax treatment, and digital infrastructure. The feet vote introduces market dynamics into governance and the early digital nomad boom in the 2010s was the first wave of such modern day structural flows.

Hirschman saw this clearly. In his analysis, the easier exit becomes, the less likely voice is. Latin American dictators, he noted, historically encouraged political opponents to self-exile; asylum as a “conspiracy in restraint of voice.” The lesson cuts both ways: exit can be liberating for the individual, but it can also serve as a pressure release valve that allows broken systems to persist.

If everyone who might organize for reform simply leaves, who stays to fix things?

The Cost of Exit

Voting with your feet sounds clean on paper. In practice, it’s the most personally expensive vote on the list.

Leaving means severing, or at least stretching ties to family, community, professional networks, cultural context, and often legal standing. It means navigating immigration bureaucracies that were not designed for a world of distributed work and fluid citizenship. It means learning new systems, sometimes new languages, and often new social norms.

The psychological costs are real too. Patriotism and national identity aren’t just propaganda; they’re deeply felt attachments forged through decades of shared experience, education, and social bonding. Choosing to exit requires a kind of emotional renegotiation: Why would I sacrifice for a government that doesn’t serve me? That’s not a question people ask lightly. It usually comes only after the social contract has already been broken from the other side: when the institutions that demanded loyalty failed to uphold their end of the bargain.

And exit doesn’t solve the systemic problems left behind. It often creates new ones. The Mexico City case is instructive. As digital nomads and remote workers, predominantly from the United States and Europe flooded neighborhoods like Roma Norte and Condesa after the pandemic, they brought spending power that outpaced local incomes. Rents rose. Local businesses were replaced by coworking spaces and vegan cafes. Anti-gentrification protests erupted in July 2025, with signs reading “Gringo go home” and “Death to Airbnb.” Between 2015 and 2020, the percentage of residents in affected neighborhoods reporting inadequate housing rose from 2.6% to 3.6%, while poverty and extreme poverty increased; a pattern that suggests the costs of gentrification fell disproportionately on those who couldn’t exit.

The lesson is critical for anyone in the network state and parallel society space: the receiving end matters as much as the exit itself. If exit creates enclaves of affluent newcomers that price out locals, it’s displacement rather than liberation. The systems designed to receive mobile talent: housing policy, immigration frameworks, integration infrastructure, and economic policy, are woefully underdeveloped. Most nations weren’t built for this kind of dynamic demand. And the ones that attract the most mobile capital often have the weakest protections for their existing residents.

This is the central design challenge for charter cities, network state experiments, and digital nomad hubs: how do you build communities that attract talent and capital without creating extractive dynamics? How do you scale without displacing? How do you maintain cultural coherence while remaining open? There are no proven answers yet, but the question is necessarily operational.

The Bridge That Doesn’t Yet Exist

The uncomfortable truth: the infrastructure for mass exit doesn’t exist.

Not enough has been invested in the immigration systems, housing pipelines, trade agreements, healthcare portability, or governance frameworks required to support large-scale voluntary (perhaps soon, involuntary) migration. A nation isn’t built overnight, and we are arguably entering a period where as Lenin has said “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen”.

Consider the convergence of pressures:

AI and labor disruption. The International Labour Organization estimates that generative AI could affect hundreds of millions of jobs globally, with white-collar knowledge work most immediately exposed. If Peter Thiel’s observation in Zero to One holds — that innovation has happened in bits faster than atoms, then software automation will eat white-collar work before robotics replaces blue-collar work. But the gap is narrowing. Once AI models mature in physical reasoning and embodiment, robotic labor becomes exponentially cheaper and more technically feasible to train and deploy.

Financial instability. Bank runs, currency crises, and asset seizures. These historical patterns recur during periods of institutional stress. Gold confiscation happened in the United States in 1933. Cyprus imposed emergency bank deposit levies in 2013. The possibility of similar measures during future crises, including crypto seizures or CBDC-enforced capital controls, is nonzero.

Universal Basic Income as a floor, not a ceiling. UBI experiments like Finland’s 2017-2018 trial showed modest positive effects on wellbeing and employment activity, but the payments were modest (€560/month) and the trial was limited. If automation-driven unemployment forces wider UBI adoption, the resulting standard of living is likely to be subsistence-level. Just enough to survive, not enough to thrive. Living on UBI alone is likely going to be a very barebones kind of life. “Escape the permanent underclass”, or whatever.

Geopolitical fracture. Ukraine. Iran. Taiwan. The post-Pax Americana world is not settling into a stable new order, but fragmenting into competing spheres of influence. For individuals caught in these fault lines, the feet vote is likely like a longterm vacation, and more like existential survival.

The nations and communities best positioned for what comes next will be the ones that build the bridge before the flood: proactive immigration policies, modular housing, flexible governance, economic integration infrastructure, mutual recognition of credentials and qualifications, portable healthcare, and digital-first civic services. Estonia’s e-Residency program is an early prototype. Some charter city experiments are attempting similar things. But the gap between what exists and what’s likely soon needed, is enormous.

Why Exit is Not Enough

Of the four votes, exit is the one that introduces the most systemic pressure. It forces competition between governance systems.

When talent, capital, and labor are mobile, governments must compete for them; not through propaganda or patriotic obligation, but through demonstrated quality of life, regulatory clarity, economic opportunity, and physical safety. This is the core thesis of the network state movement: that the ability to exit creates a market for governance, and markets, for all their flaws, tend to produce better outcomes than monopolies.

The right to exit is also the ultimate check on the other three votes. A ballot with no impact is a cage. A wallet trapped inside capital controls is a captive market. Hands that build but can’t relocate their creations are bound to a single jurisdiction’s whims.

Exit is what gives the other votes their teeth. But exit alone is not a solution.

It’s a catalyst.

If everyone who is disillusioned exits, the remaining population has even less voice, less talent, less capital to invest in reform. Brain drain is a real and documented phenomenon. Countries that hemorrhage skilled workers like Venezuela, Lebanon, and Zimbabwe don’t automatically improve because the dissatisfied left. They often spiral further. Exit without a functional destination is just displacement. And exit without voice, without the constructive feedback loop of people articulating what they need, produces enclaves without accountability.

The healthiest outcome in the market of governance is probably a dynamic equilibrium: systems where exit is possible (preserving individual sovereignty), voice is effective (preserving collective agency), hands have room to build (preserving innovation) and carefully destroy (reducing bureaucracy), and ballot voting produces actual accountability (preserving democratic legitimacy).

No existing system achieves all four simultaneously. Network state experiments are, at best, attempting to prototype something that does. The four votes are not a menu option, but a system of options to enact change. You might find yourself exercising any one of them at various points in your life.

Optionality is, after all, a hallmark of human agency and a foundation for individual and collective sovereignty.

---

Support the Blog:

• My guide: Decentralized Social Media 101: A Creator Flywheel. I’ve made a step-by-step guide with everything you need to set up and interoperate Farcaster, Paragraph, and Zora in one sitting.

• Collect this post as an NFT token here: $EXIT

Sponsors:

• YODL Pay - Go global. Pay local. Use crypto in currencies around the world

• Trezor - Open-source hardware wallets for sovereign custody

• Kraken - Exchange for buying, selling, swapping crypto and fiat