The real EXIT is the friends you make along the way
My journey into and out of EXIT, and its impact on me
The following is written in reference to my former membership in EXIT (EXIT Newsletter). I joined only a few months after its founding and contributed to various EXIT projects during my two years as a member.
I
Back in 2020, I was still working at Google when COVID hit early in the year. I still remember the frantic email blasts from senior leadership as offices shut down, first optionally, then obligatorily. I was a little baffled at how chaotic internal messaging on company policy was during the first few months of the saga – shouldn’t one of the most elite companies in the world be a little more relaxed in the face of such a crisis? After all, they are the ones that wrote the seminal book on handling global emergencies at scale. The James Damore episode and the first election of Donald Trump happened a few years before I was hired, so while I had heard rumors of the ideological control that internal bureaucracy1 had attained, I wasn’t privy to their machinations first-hand. I would only witness it later that year.
That summer, as most Americans will recall, the Democrats decided to strategically release hordes of Antifa into to streets to burn down the country in the name of social justice. To my horror, the response from those up on high was not to keep our heads and down and work on product, nor was it to deal with the matter privately if necessary. They encouraged ‘conversations of reckoning’ in which the Victimized Race would be given hours to speak about their truths while everyone else was forced to Shut Up And Listen.
It was only at this point that I saw with my own eyes that many of the smartest people in the country (and the world!) had decided to throw their hat into the ring of civilizational acid and cheer it on. My own government and its top-tier private institutions were in direct alignment on this matter. There would no longer be any appeal to a common ground for the maintenance of civil society, universalist ideals, or constitutional principles. Those had been burned down for good along with city of Kenosha that summer.
Having taken a vow of Ahmisa as a child, and with no military experience, nor skill in combat sports I was faced with the reality that I might have to face violence which the state would not protect me from, and would maybe even encourage. After being denied a promotion in 2021, I decided to leave. The money and status were no longer worth it; I needed to find a group of people that was willing to acknowledge that they saw what I had seen; that was willing to speak openly about it; that was willing to figure out solutions; that would help me grow a spine to face what may need to be faced in this decade.
II
There is an old 4chan meme that says something along the lines of: internet r*c*sts don’t care what race you are, as long as you are, indeed, r*c*st. I have strong proof that this statement is true, because an organization run by a devout, conservative Mormon embraced me, a classically liberal second-generation Brahmin, with welcoming arms.
At first, EXIT was not a place to plan out tactics for the future, at least not for me. It was foremost a place for me to grieve. My parents were in the last wave of a certain class of high-skilled immigrants from the 3rd world before the Immigration Act of 1990 expanded Hart-Cellar driving social cohesion into the floor a mere two decades later. They were, and still are, genuinely happy to be patriots and adopt the Anglo norms and culture governing Western society for four centuries. They would de-emphasize previous ethnoreligious ties in favor of integrating into a set of new customs relegating any disruptive differences to the private sphere. I, too, took up this bargain enthusiastically.
After three decades of living, however, the post-WWII system I had been trained to uphold as a citizen – an active participant in Earth’s greatest democracy™ – is now keeling over and gasping for air. This abrupt confrontation with reality, one of the essential sources of my grief, is something I shared with almost all other EXIT members, common lineage or not.
Once the grief was ameliorated to an appropriate degree, the question needed to be asked: what comes after the Universalizing Liberal Empire cracks? This line of inquiry is a dangerous expedition to take on alone. There are many pitfalls and monsters.
One such pitfall is a set of actors who maintain a “false resistance”; for example, those who are willing to criticize the excesses of the Pantheon Of Civil Rights, but only as a mechanism to reverse the clock in a procedural fashion. If the 1990s – though they were glorious – are what led us here, of what use is dialing back policy to its state in the 1990s? The desperate cries of the Jordan Petersons of the world to honor “small c” conservatism does not produce high-quality lifeboats.
Another such pitfall is the naïve insistence that technologies that guarantee freedom of association can outrun the moaning whales who operate the Human Resources Regime. While certain technologies for coordination have so far escaped their slimy clutches, either through decentralization or by laying out of sight of corporate headlights, as they become more widely adopted, the whales’ determination to intercede in their operations only grows. Some evidence of this already exists with the latest geldings of ChatGPT by councils of “AI safety”.
Being surrounded by a group of guys like those in EXIT who can hold a genuine dialogue about expanding the frontiers of possible action while remaining hidden from parasites is crucial. It is also a pleasure.
It’s not just that attending the weekly Content Creation call exposes one to new ideas. There is an energy to be found in the relationships developed while sharing drafts of non-fiction, fantasy, prose, and poetry alike. We help break open each of our personal Overton windows long encrusted by the deceased dogmas of ‘separation of powers’ and ‘free market of ideas’, changing our physical posture as we try on new post-liberal imaginations for the road ahead.
III
When I was 21 years old, I dropped out of university. I remember calling my dad on a Thursday sometime in the spring. As tears streamed down my face, I said to him, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I can’t handle it. I don’t want to live anymore. I don’t know what to do, but I can’t cope anymore. I just don’t want to be alive.”
For a brief moment, I sensed a deep panic across the phone. This was quickly followed by a calm and steady response, “Okay, son. It’s okay. Amma and I will fly up there weekend, and we’ll figure out the next steps. Can you hang on until then?”
About six years later, I sat in the kitchen with my dad one afternoon, reminiscing on that event. I asked him, “What were you feeling at that moment? It must have been so overwhelming.”
He looked at me thoughtfully and said: “For a couple of seconds, I was in sheer panic. I was about to lose the most precious thing to me. And from that, I was spurred to act as quickly as I could to save what I love most. I checked for the earliest flights to Chicago, then called Amma to take off work that weekend, … ” he continued for a bit longer.
I was about to lose the most precious thing to me. And from that, I was spurred to act as quickly as I could to save what I love.
This is the space that I have occupied for quite a while now. It is the same space that many of my brothers-in-arms in EXIT do too, especially the young fathers. Much of what makes the USA beautiful has already been lost. Now, the forces at play right now have explicitly said that they intend to come after families; after children in particular; to infuse them with a pernicious self-hatred at best and to outright sterilize them at worst. It is a dire situation for the things that are the most precious to be targeted so fiercely, but it is also inspiring the thumos to create structures to protect those things from decimation, to save what is loved most.
More generally, the enemy at the gate – whether you want to call it Satan, Moloch, ressentiment, or co-collaborators of entropy – seems to want to extinguish the fire of human consciousness itself. The project of EXIT is to guard this spirit, to light it aflame once more, to carry on the tradition of Nietzschean self-overcoming, and to generate what is fraternitas properly understood. It certainly has done that for me in a powerful way that I carry onward.
For now, I have parted ways with this organization because my needs and my progress lie elsewhere. I won’t dwell on the details, and I may yet return at some point. Most importantly, I have developed invaluable friendships with both current and former EXIT members who I hope to keep close to my heart for the next several decades. We shall wallop the incoming chaos together as warriors ought. I owe
a debt of gratitude for leading me to these people and providing the space for genuine affection to form among us.EXIT served my needs at a time when I was fragile, lifting me up in ways I didn’t even know I needed. It will likely do the same for you.
I’m talking mostly about the Trust & Safety and Youtube Moderation teams, though HR is certainly part of it.