Exit strategies as collective surrender

Where would you go if everything falls apart? Portugal? New Zealand? A cabin in the mountains? I hear this question constantly, in conversations with friends, in client workshops, at dinner parties. It has become the default ice-breaker for the anxious professional class. And I’ve come to believe that the question itself is the problem.

The collapse consensus

We live in what feels like the age of expected breakdown. The climate is destabilizing. Authoritarian politics are gaining ground across democracies. AI is reshaping labor markets faster than institutions can respond. None of this is news. What’s relatively new is the degree to which collapse has become the default assumption about where things are headed. It’s the backdrop against which everything else gets discussed, no longer one scenario among many.

William Gibson gave this a name. In The Peripheral, he describes The Jackpot: not a single catastrophic event but a slow-motion pileup of crises, “multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event.” Gibson wrote fiction, but the concept has become a shorthand for how many people now experience the present.¹ We are doomscrolling the Jackpot in real time.

What makes this worth examining is not whether the crises are real. They are. The question is what happens when collapse stops being one possible future and becomes the future. When it congeals into the dominant future imaginary, it changes behavior in ways that make things worse.

The exit taxonomy

The responses to perceived collapse look different on the surface, but they share the same underlying move: this situation is beyond repair, so the rational response is to get out. They sort into four categories, all of them exit strategies, all of them variations on leaving rather than staying.

Geographic exit. Move somewhere safer. Portugal, New Zealand, rural Scandinavia. The calculus varies, but the logic is the same: this place is going down, so find a better lifeboat. For the ultra-wealthy, this has become an industry. Luxury bunkers in New Zealand, land purchases in Patagonia, citizenship-by-investment programs. For the rest, it’s a fantasy that absorbs energy that could go elsewhere.

Technological exit. Accelerate hard enough and technology will solve everything. The strongest version of this is the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) bet: once we build superintelligent AI, it will fix climate change and optimize human civilization. This is exit strategy dressed up as progress. It outsources agency to a machine that doesn’t exist yet.

Psychological exit. Disengage. Stop reading the news. Focus on your garden, your family, your immediate circle. This one is harder to criticize because it’s often a healthy response to information overload. But when it scales, when an entire educated class retreats into private life, the public sphere loses exactly the people who could shape it.

Ideological exit. This is the Dark Enlightenment variant. If democracy can’t handle the complexity, maybe we need something else. Techno-authoritarianism, seasteading, post-democratic governance by the competent few. Peter Thiel’s famous line, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” is the quiet part said loud. When capital and ideology exit together, they don’t just leave a gap. They fund the alternative.

Why exits are surrender

Albert Hirschman’s classic framework Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) describes two responses to decline in organizations and states: you either leave (exit) or you speak up (voice).² Hirschman’s key insight was that when exit becomes too easy, voice atrophies. Why invest in fixing something you can walk away from? The neoreactionary movement has made this explicit: exit over voice, by design. But the same logic operates quietly in every dinner party conversation about Portuguese real estate.

Kim Stanley Robinson has a blunter term for it: “preemptive capitulation.”³ Giving up before the fight has started. That’s what exit strategies amount to when the thing being exited is not a failing company but a shared civilization.

Hirschman and Robinson name the pattern. But the deeper problem is in the assumptions that make exit feel rational in the first place.

The trouble with exit strategies is not that they’re irrational. Given certain assumptions about how the future works, they make perfect sense. If collapse is inevitable and your influence on the outcome is negligible, optimizing for personal survival is the logical move.

But those assumptions deserve scrutiny.

The first assumption, that collapse is inevitable, treats a future imaginary as a forecast. No future is neutral. Every claim about what “will” happen carries interests, values, and power dynamics. When tech executives declare that AI will eliminate most jobs, they are not reporting a weather forecast. They are constructing a narrative that serves specific interests. As the Reactance and future narratives note explores, framing a future as inevitable is itself a power move: it puts enormous leverage in the hands of those building the thing declared inevitable.

The second assumption, that individual influence is negligible, confuses personal helplessness with political reality. No single person can stop climate change. But the history of every significant social transformation shows that collective action by ordinary people is exactly how systems change. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the environmental movement, none of these were driven by people with exit strategies.

And the third assumption, the unspoken one, is that “getting out” is even possible. The Jackpot, if Gibson’s model holds, is not something you can escape geographically. It’s systemic. Portugal gets hot too. New Zealand depends on global supply chains. The bunker needs a functioning civilization to be worth emerging from.

The self-fulfilling trap

Here’s where it gets circular. Collapse narratives produce exit behavior. Exit behavior, people disengaging, capital fleeing, talent emigrating, weakens the systems that could prevent collapse. Which confirms the collapse narrative. Which produces more exit behavior.

This is the mechanism that makes collapse narratives so dangerous. Not because the underlying problems aren’t real, but because the narrative response to those problems actively makes them harder to solve. When the most capable, most resourced, most educated people in a society all start planning their exits, they are withdrawing exactly the capacity that society needs to adapt. Consider what it means when ten thousand of a city’s best-connected, most engaged citizens are simultaneously researching visa requirements instead of running for school board, founding civic organizations, or showing up at town halls. The loss is not hypothetical. It is happening in real time, and it compounds. Each decision to leave is individually rational. Taken together, they produce exactly the outcome everyone was trying to escape.

Florence Gaub’s argument about fear and the future is relevant here. Fear of the future, she argues, loses its grip once people believe they have the capability to meet it.⁴ Exit strategies do the opposite: they reinforce the belief that the situation is beyond anyone’s capability, which makes the fear self-sustaining.

This connects to what I explore in Reactance and future narratives: the spectrum from active resistance to apathy. Exit strategies sit squarely on the apathy end. The collapse narrative has become so naturalized that people skip past resistance entirely and go straight to accommodation.

Building without blueprints

So what’s the alternative? Not optimism. The problems are real and anyone selling “everything will be fine” is either deluded or selling something. The alternative is a different relationship to uncertainty.

Isabella Hermann’s Anti-Dystopia framework captures this well. Anti-dystopia doesn’t pretend the crises aren’t happening. It starts from catastrophe. But it decouples catastrophe from surrender. The question shifts from “how do I escape this?” to “what can I build here, now, with what’s available?”

This matters because of the mechanism described above. If collapse narratives become self-fulfilling through the withdrawal of capable people, then every person who stays and builds makes the narrative a little less true. Not through optimism, but through the brute fact of continued engagement. When others see people investing in local institutions rather than exit plans, it becomes harder to sustain the belief that everything is beyond repair. The signal changes.

This is not about individual heroism. It’s about staying in the game. Participating in local politics. Building institutions that can absorb shocks. Working on problems that matter even if you can’t solve them completely. Kim Stanley Robinson put it well: “There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. Instead there are thousands of answers, at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”⁵

The hardest part of this is not the work itself. It’s the psychological shift. Exit strategies offer clarity: identify the threat, make a plan, execute. Building in uncertainty offers no such comfort. You invest effort into outcomes you can’t guarantee. You work on systems that might fail. You stay in a place that might get worse before it gets better.

But this is what agency actually looks like. Not the false agency of choosing which lifeboat to board, but the real agency of shaping conditions for everyone, including yourself.

The question behind the question

When someone asks “where would you go if everything falls apart?”, what they’re really asking is: do you still believe this is worth fighting for? The exit question is a test of faith, not in any mystical sense, but faith in collective capacity. Faith that staying and building is not naive.

I think it is worth fighting for. Not because I’m confident things will work out, but because the alternative, a world where everyone with the means to leave does, is guaranteed to be worse. The darkest futures are not the ones where things fall apart. They are the ones where everyone decided in advance that falling apart was inevitable, and acted accordingly.

Which raises a question I don’t have a clean answer to: how do you make staying feel like a strategy, not a sacrifice? What that looks like is still an open problem.