Online Meetup: Balaji Srinivasan on “Nation of Emigrants”

In our ongoing SlateStarCodex online series, Balaji Srinivasan will speak on “A Nation of Emigrants: How Technology Will Enable Collective Bargaining with Governments”. See abstract below.

After the talk and Q&A, we will also allow plenty of time for online mingling and discussion.

Click here to register, up to an hour before the talk, and we’ll send you an invitation to the Google Meet.

The talk is August 2 at at 10:30 PDT, 17:30 GMT, 20:30 IDT. This link shows your local time.

Abstract:

Technology is the driving force of history. It lies upstream of culture, and thus upstream of politics. And it determines which fringe ideas have become newly feasible, and what elements of official consensus have become suddenly obsolete.

Our thesis has five stages. First, we describe how recent technological developments have dramatically shifted the balance of power away from states and towards individuals. Next, we diagnose the problems with existing states—particularly related to immigration and regulation—that would drive individuals to seek alternatives. Third and fourth, we give a concrete set of recommendations enabled by modern technology that companies and individuals alike can act upon to gain financial independence.

Finally, we describe how the combination of technological driving forces, regulatory repulsion, and newly independent individuals leads to a novel phenomenon that we term crowdchoice: internet-coordinated mass migrations that enable collective bargaining with governments.