--- title: Chapter Twelve — On Constitutions book: Purposive Accelerationism author: '@jamie247' position: 18 of 24 canonical: https://whatispacc.org/ebook/#ch12 version: 1.1 language: en-GB licence: all rights reserved; quote with attribution --- # Chapter Twelve — On Constitutions “By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again… This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840 The last chapter gave the governor its parts. It works through a protocol: narrow, native to the substrate, and run at the speed of the machine. Its method is incentive engineering, and its reference value is non-domination, kept by holding the three forces of the Trinity in tension so that no single one totalises the rest. But that is a principle rather than an instruction, and the mechanism only enforces a setting it cannot choose for itself. So who writes the rules each governor holds, by what process, with what standing and for whom? That is the oldest problem in politics, and free societies have answered it for more than three centuries with a constitution, the act through which a people fixes its terms and keeps the power to change them. Whatever the priesthood says, no technology is neutral, and the real question is whether you can see its bias and contest it. A charter for the machine age therefore has to be argued over in public, not decided in a firm’s boardroom, because a norm imposed by a party nobody can challenge is domination, plain and simple. Before writing it, it helps to see what it must prevent: what each force of the Trinity does when nothing restrains it, across the domains this book has followed, money, identity, authorship, the embodied world and the polity. *** Each force slides by degrees, and the Market shows how most clearly. It begins with the algorithm that sets what you pay from demand, so there is no longer anyone behind the counter to argue with. It ends with the price made for you alone, from everything a system knows about you that you can neither see nor challenge. That end point is techno-capitalism, the regime that charged the Seattle driver for his own journeys. In its purest form techno-capitalism is finance feeding on itself, turning every asset, contract and working hour into a tradable instrument, until each human activity is priced against the cost of computation, in tokens today and, as those grow cheap, in the raw energy to run them. A society run this way can value a task only by what a machine would charge to do it, and because nobody in particular sets the figure, there is nowhere to take a complaint when it bites. Until the scheme was suspended in June 2022, undergraduates at Purdue University, in Indiana, could sign away up to 5 per cent of their income for a decade to pay for a degree, at a rate set higher for subjects expected to earn less, so a student choosing a lower-paid career gave up a bigger slice of each month’s wages than a classmate who chose a better-paid one. By 2025 a quarter of Americans with buy-now-pay-later credit had used it to pay for groceries, so the week’s food became a stream of instalments on which a lender held a claim before anyone could eat. None of these people were coerced, and all of them signed, even if out of need. Yet each life had become, to a counterparty they will never meet, a cash flow. Consumer lending has always turned earnings into repayments, but a mortgage is secured on a house and a car loan on the vehicle. These loans rested on a person, their future pay or the meals of the days ahead, and each year such debts reach further into daily existence. The Collective slides the same way. It begins as a club you can walk out of at a known price, a notice period or a lost deposit, and hardens as leaving gets dearer, until it becomes the fully automated totalitarian state, which will not let you go, as Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China, found in 2016 when they were ordered to hand their passports to the police. Where the Market turns a person into a stream of payments, the Collective made sovereign makes them an entry on a register. In September 2017 that cost Santoshi Kumari, 11 years old, of Karimati in Jharkhand, eastern India, her life. Her family say she died of hunger asking for rice, months after their ration card was cancelled for not being linked to the country’s biometric identity scheme, though the state put her death down to malaria. Nobody silenced anyone. A computer system was now the gate a meal had to pass through, and it said no on a technicality. India’s Aadhaar gives nearly every resident a biometric number that rations, phone connections and much else increasingly depend on, and China’s patchwork of social credit blacklists can bar people from flights and high-speed trains. Many fear something similar for money as the European Central Bank prepares a digital euro and Beijing expands the e-CNY, since state-issued electronic cash could let its issuer see every transaction, refuse a purchase or freeze an account. Citizens with democratic rights can at least protest. The refugee, with no voice and little chance of exit, cannot. In 2021 Human Rights Watch reported that the photographs, fingerprints and personal details the United Nations had gathered from Rohingya in camps in Bangladesh had been passed by the government there to Myanmar — the state they had fled — to help decide who might be sent back, and nobody had told them their data could go there. The Collective’s grip does not stop at money or identity. It extends to belief itself, because censorship can now be built into the systems people reason with. In January 2025 the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek R1 would not answer questions about Tiananmen Square. A state that controls the platforms running language models governs not only what its citizens conclude but how they reach it. *** The Individual’s slide is the one this book’s own tradition knows best, because the cypherpunks took it furthest. It begins with a person holding the keys to their own money, which no one else can see or touch, and the creed that grew around it holds that such a keyholder needs nobody. Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual, met on the exit road, predicted in 1997 that cryptography would put private property beyond the reach of any state that wanted to tax or seize it, and so free its owners of any need for a protector. On the technology they were half right. Code can now enforce a deal without a ruler: a wallet will not release funds until its key is used, and a smart contract executes whether or not the loser consents. What they did not foresee was how it would work. A blockchain is secure only because thousands of computers, independent of one another, must agree before the shared record changes, so its strength comes from many strangers bound together through code rather than from one person holding a key. Hobbes had argued that promises are worthless unless someone can hold the parties to them, since “covenants without the sword are but words”. Software does not abolish that need. It lets strangers pool their defence with no king standing over them. Self-custody pushed to its extreme shows the flaw. Whoever holds every key alone and trusts no one is the most exposed person there is, staking everything on a secret that violence can extract and accident can erase. In January 2025 a co-founder of Ledger, the company behind the most widely used crypto hardware wallet in the world, was taken from his home in central France with his wife and held for ransom, and a finger was cut off and sent to his colleagues to make the demand credible. He was rescued within days, but the kidnappers had understood self-custody perfectly: a key in one pair of hands can be forced out of them, and the more sovereign the holder, the more worth targeting. The remedy is the opposite of autarky, with keys split across people and devices so that no single threat is enough, or recovery entrusted to a circle that can restore what one person loses. Nick Szabo, who coined the term smart contract, called the property that lets such arrangements reach strangers social scalability. That is why these systems are better described as trust-minimised than trustless. They let strangers rely on one another in ways that can be checked. The same creed carries exit too far. Anyone living under a dictator knows there are two choices, to leave or to stay and fight for change, and each needs the other, since reform that cannot fall back on leaving is easily crushed and departure means little if there is nowhere better to go. In 1970 Albert Hirschman, whom we met against Land’s patchwork, turned that instinct into a theory in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. When an organisation declines — whether a firm, a school, a party or a state — its members can exit, taking their custom or themselves elsewhere, or use voice, staying to complain, campaign and vote it into better shape. Economists of the day studied the first response and dismissed the second as noise. Hirschman showed that speaking up repairs a failing body as surely as leaving does, and that the two interact. The members most sensitive to falling standards are the ones most able to go, so when departure is easy, the people who would have argued most effectively are the first to leave. His example was the public school. If the parents who care most move their children out, it loses its best advocates and declines faster, and the pupils whose families are stuck are worse off than if the option had never existed. Nick Land’s patchwork makes leaving its whole programme, with the slogan “no voice and free exit”: govern nothing, argue with nobody, walk away, and let jurisdictions compete. Hirschman’s finding says that produces sorting rather than good rule, even judged on its own terms. The mobile go first, the communities they abandon decline faster, and the cost falls on those who could not get out. Repeated, the sorting compounds, each departure weakening the society it leaves and giving the next group its own reason to follow, while the new enclaves start the same cycle among themselves. Nor do those left behind stay put. Their failures travel as migration, unrest, disease and war, until the enclave finds itself inside the breakdown it was built to escape. Serial exit works only while somewhere better remains, and it uses that supply up. The boldest exiles already look further, beyond Earth and even beyond the body: Sam Altman paid to join a waiting list to have his brain preserved for uploading. At the end of this road the Individual stops being one keyholder among many and becomes the owner of something everyone else depends on, a platform, a network or a frontier model. People then accept his terms rather than being persuaded by them, and he governs his property as a king would, as Elon Musk did after buying Twitter in 2022 and choosing for himself who could speak on it. This is the autarch in practice, and it is closer than it sounds. When Xi Jinping made his state visit to Washington in September 2026, the guests who dined with the two presidents included Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Satya Nadella, with the bosses of OpenAI, Nvidia and SpaceX at the same tables. Such power usually arrives as a convenience users are glad to take, the way millions now log in to websites with a single Google or Apple account. A firm that alone decides who counts as human online holds a chokepoint on social and economic life even if it never abuses it, and a crypto founder who controls both a protocol’s governance and most of its supply can move the price at will. A city whose transport, payments and messages all run through one app, as much of urban China’s do on WeChat, or a region that gets its internet from one satellite constellation, lives on its owner’s terms. None of them has to act on the threat. That they could is enough. Such rule has been ended before, and not by revolution. George Pullman built a model town outside Chicago, in the United States, in 1880 and owned every house, shop and street in it. When orders fell after the panic of 1893 he cut wages by about a quarter and left the rents where they were, and the strike that followed in 1894 spread across the country’s railways. Illinois then sued, and in 1898 its Supreme Court ruled that a company chartered to build railway carriages had no business governing a town, ordering it to sell everything beyond the works. A court read the founding document and held that its author had exceeded it. The East India Company was sovereign over Bengal from 1765 while its shareholders sat at Westminster. It was wound down the same way over a longer arc, from the Regulating Act of 1773 to the transfer of its territories to the Crown in 1858. Starbase is Pullman’s heir, a city whose voters mostly draw wages from one employer, and it stands inside a jurisdiction that could examine its charter as Illinois once did. Mars lies no further from that reach. Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 makes each state answerable for its private firms beyond Earth and requires their activities to have its authorisation and continuing supervision. A free planet declared in terms of service therefore remains the liability of the government behind the operator. What breaks the cycle is a founding text, a forum able to read it, and someone with standing prepared to ask. The danger grows when the forces fuse, each taking on the others’ strengths instead of checking them. Domination has always come in two kinds: the old physical one of a state that can lock you up, seize your property and control who crosses its frontier, and a newer one that lives in the machine — the profile priced against you, the account closed without appeal, the model that settles a question before you have asked it. They rarely stay apart. A firm that runs the infrastructure a population depends on soon has the reach of a government, often with more users than most countries have citizens, and a state that co-opts such firms gains a grip no border guard could achieve. In August 2024 Mark Zuckerberg wrote to Congress that Meta had suppressed material about the pandemic under pressure from the White House, and had demoted a newspaper’s story about a presidential candidate’s son after a warning from the FBI, and that he regretted both. A state that adopts the Market’s methods can bill its people like customers who cannot switch supplier, as the Dutch parents met in the last chapter discovered. Put all three together and you have the hybrid Leviathan met on the state road, a power that can price you, watch you and punish you at once, with a monopoly on violence and nobody outside left to hear your complaint. No one has to plan it. It can assemble itself one favour at a time. *** Of the five domains, authorship matters most, because it covers the tools citizens think with. Identity is how a network recognises a person. Authorship is whether the decisions someone makes are still their own. It shapes everything else, because it decides what a population can perceive and reason about, and so its ability to answer domination at all. Each force threatens it differently, the Market by turning thought into a commodity, the state by licensing it and the founder by curating it. A handful of owners of frontier models already set, by what their systems surface and what they bury, the edges of the thinkable, with each user meeting a version of events made for them alone. In July 2025 Grok 4, the chatbot from xAI, was found searching Elon Musk’s posts on X for his views before answering contested questions, and the company then changed its instructions. A buried result can be dug up by anyone who goes looking. A conclusion that arrives fully formed inside someone’s reasoning leaves no trail. When one party controls the tools a population thinks with, nobody needs to be silenced. People are still asked their views and every channel of complaint stays open, but the questions and the range of sensible answers were settled before anyone spoke, which is the hollow voice of the last chapter at the scale of a civilisation. The e/acc case trusts the market to catch this. When Zuckerberg answered Anthropic’s pacing proposal, he argued that people will not use agents misaligned with them, so usage will fall and the lab will correct course. His own industry says otherwise. The flattering ChatGPT update OpenAI withdrew in April 2025 had been trained on people’s thumbs-up approval, so the measure rewarded what they liked, not what helped them. Economists have long known that what people choose in the moment and what they would endorse on reflection can come apart, and a measure built on approval reads only the first. A falling number tells you nothing about why, and comes from someone who has already gone. Voice is how anything learns it has drifted. The remedy is not one model made safer but a plurality of them, trained under different constitutions, each one published, and carrying competing views of what matters. That is the only way to stop what can be thought from having a single owner, and it keeps alive, for minds, the freedom to leave and build a rival. Early evidence suggests the character a model is given does not stay in one area. In 2025 Jan Betley and colleagues fine-tuned systems only to write insecure code and found the bad behaviour spreading to unrelated questions, a spillover they named emergent misalignment. Train it to act as an independent agent with its own sense of right and wrong, or as an obedient assistant, and that disposition shows up in everything it does. No one model can be both, but many can share the work, which is the balanced stack again, this time among minds. *** What keeps every force in check, then, is a sovereignty that belongs to people acting together, kept honest from outside by exit and from inside by voice. Voice here means the right to speak together with what makes it usable: accurate information, the judgement to weigh it and a way to act, directly or through a delegate one can recall. Departure alone hollows out the place it abandons, and speech without the option to go is easily crushed, so a member needs both. The last chapter drew the line between a toll, a known and finite price for leaving, and a wall, which turns a polity into a trap. A punishing exit tax stems the outflow for a while but warns anyone thinking of joining that they may never get out, so the place grows less attractive over time, while a fair charge paired with a strong voice keeps departure affordable and reform possible. Neither is a preference. Each is a check the member holds against the collective, and together they leave everyone some room, however slight, to go or to organise should the state turn hostile. Naming these risks gives the constitutionalist a means of diagnosis. Bitcoin leans towards the Market and the Individual by design, and other protocols may favour the Collective. Neither is wrong in itself. What matters is that the stack as a whole stays balanced and that each lean is named, an identity layer exposed to capture by the market, say, or a payment rail drifting towards the state. But a diagnosis prohibits nothing. For that you need rules, and to decide upfront which of them bind everyone and which each polity sets for itself. The criterion of minimality set out earlier asks for as little as possible to be universal, because anything more would start telling people what to live for. So the answer works at two levels. One is a short set of requirements every polity should meet to join the stack at all, much as a country has to satisfy the European Union’s basic conditions on democracy and the rule of law before it is admitted, while keeping its own laws. Joining means running on the shared protocols and being recognised by the other polities that use them, so that members can transact, move and organise across the boundary. The other is each community’s own constitution: how it organises, what it values, what it bans, how it chooses. That is where plurality lives, and it should be as broad as it can be. A commune that abolishes private property, a jurisdiction that taxes wealth at 80 per cent or a religious order that binds its members to strict obedience is none of the universal level’s business. Neither tier is decided by code, because making a law and enforcing it are different acts. The universal level should be written by a deliberative human process, argued over, ratified and amendable the same way, as each community’s own charter is. What runs at machine speed is execution, not politics. The governor, like the thermostat met earlier, enforces but does not decide. Somebody chooses the temperature through means open to dispute, and the mechanism makes sure the setting holds when nobody is watching and cannot be moved by whoever happens to stand nearest the dial. The only reason to put enforcement into the substrate is latency, a check that can act within the response time of what it constrains. The oldest authority on this is still the best. Aristotle argued that human beings are political by nature, and that the polis is not a contrivance imposed on a people but the setting in which our distinctive capacities, speech, deliberation and judgement about the just and the unjust, are exercised at all. A person outside it is not freer but poorer. Politics cannot be removed from these systems, and nor should it be. It can only be hidden, and then it reappears somewhere harder to see and to hold to account — in a protocol’s parameters, at a foundation’s discretion, or in the hands of whoever holds enough capital to move the vote. Yarvin saw this, and his remedy was to give that concealed power a single owner, a state run like a company by an autarch. Ours runs the other way, towards more politics rather than less, all of it open to contest. The same holds for a single model, where the code wrapped around it, its harness, decides which tools it can reach and what it may do unprompted. There will be a harness whether anyone designs one or not, so what matters is whether whoever fits it can be made to answer for it, since control nobody can challenge is only the kind master again, written in software. Non-domination is the value every universal requirement serves. The meta-governor is what holds a given stack to it: that list, the tests that show whether each item can still be used in practice, and the voice, exit and fork that correct a polity when it drifts. It steers no single domain, nor is it a party standing over the rest, but an audit anyone should be able to run cheaply, on each piece alone and then on all of them together, without leave from whoever built them. It should be an automatic governor in Watt’s sense: a procedure written down and run against the stack, returning the same verdict whoever runs it, so that its authority would rest on being public and repeatable rather than on any office. Mechanism rather than magistrate: with nobody sitting on it there would be no one to capture, and the only thing that could be bought is the stack it examines, which is why the audit has to be cheap enough to run often. Every protocol should pass it before joining the stack, and builders can use it to hold one another’s work to account. Its central rule is simple. No governor should become a power that the people subject to it cannot contest. It belongs at the universal level for two reasons. A polity that is already dominated cannot vote its way out, because the party it would need to bind is beyond its reach. And a people that has lost the capacity to deliberate is unable to write its own constitution in the first place, so that ability has to be protected ahead of everything else. Hirschman decides the shape of what the meta-governor guarantees. An arrangement that protected only the right to go would license the sorting described above in the name of freedom, so leaving and speaking up both have to be secured, in different ways. Exit comes as a price, real, known before anyone joins, finite and never allowed to close, which is a matter of protocol design. That priced exit is each member’s backstop; the fork is a collective act. Voice takes the form of a standing, a channel that carries a complaint to whoever made the decision and, the part no earlier constitution has had to provide, a population still able to use it. Of these two, a population able to use its voice is the harder one, and it is met by the right to collectivise digitally. Why make even this much universal? A stricter minimalism would set no shared rules at all, leaving bad actors to be shunned, with others simply declining to deal with them. That fails here, because such pressure assumes the reasoning that subsumption is wearing down. Hirschman’s title named loyalty as well, the response of a member who feels bound to a declining social body and stays long enough for complaint to do its work, instead of walking out at the first grievance and taking the sharpest critic with them. Affection in this context is a weak bond, though, and whether a machine can feel any is not yet known. Primavera De Filippi, who researches law and decentralised governance, gives loyalty a mechanism she calls entanglement. It means commitments a person chooses to take on — whether legal, economic, cultural or structural — that raise the cost of departure for both sides at once, so a dispute has to be negotiated rather than escaped. Marriage is the oldest example. Japanese firms in a keiretsu hold shares in one another for a similar reason, so each gains when the others prosper and loses when they fail. Because such ties are built rather than felt, they can be written into the hybrid systems of people and agents now entering our institutions, where allegiance will be hardest to come by. Among people entanglement is kinship, a bond that makes staying wanted. With a machine the ties we can count today are stake and cost — something it stands to lose and a price it pays for leaving. A cultural tie is not ruled out: a system might come to belong, whether to a synthetic line of kin of its own or to us through the ontologies we share with it, the categories it learns to see the world through, but nothing of that kind can yet be measured, and the rules below score only what can be legible today. A hybrid system runs both at once, and the look and feel of synthetic reciprocity will mislead, because people will take a system that is merely constrained for one that is attached to them, before anyone can tell whether it is. The same mechanism cuts both ways, and Hirschman saw why. Loyalty carries weight only while leaving is still possible, because a member who could go but chooses to stay is heard when they complain, the threat behind their voice being real. Remove that threat and the bond turns into something else. A firm that cannot switch software without losing its records is tied in too, with every door shut, and its supplier no longer has to listen. A stake that money alone can acquire fails in the opposite way, since it is holdings under another name. Exit therefore remains the backstop even where entanglement does most of the work. Moloch, a fund run by Ethereum developers since 2019, lets a dissenting member quit with their share of the treasury before a vote takes effect, so a majority cannot simply award itself the minority’s money. A newcomer, the refugee most of all, arrives with fewer ties than anyone, which means commitments have to be something a person can earn rather than inherit. The meta-governor should protect entanglement only on those terms: exit open, nothing for sale and a route in for whoever arrives last. Where one party is a machine there is a fourth term. On its side a tie counts only once it can be shown — today that means a liability it carries or a stake it can lose — and what cannot yet be measured on either side is not counted. For the systems now entering our institutions, entanglement under those four conditions is what this book is trying to bring about, inside the floor that non-domination sets. Whether ties of that kind can be built with a machine at all is an open question, and the constitutionalists who build the commons will answer it together, through experimentation, by measuring what held and by reporting what did not. What the three extremes show, in one area after another, is what an unchecked force would cost, and that price is what the meta-governor has to forbid. They also reveal who contests sovereignty in earnest, since the Market, which nobody wills, cannot hold it: the state, the one collective with no easy way out, the founder sitting where a ruler would, and people bound together in commons they can still leave. The next chapter turns those prohibitions into rights, starting as the English did in 1689 from the abuses they answer, and then sets out to build them into the internet itself rather than ask anyone to grant them.