Following the recent call from Nick Ellison (In and outside the ‘Cathedral’: a challenge for social policy), for social policy analysts to take the challenge of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking more seriously - this talk examines the provocations of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in relation to contemporary, political and policy debates manifest in notions of ‘architectures of exit’.

It specifically focuses on Urbit, as an NRx digital architecture that captures how post-neoliberal politics imagines notions of freedom and sovereignty through a micro-fracturing of nation-states into ‘gov-corps’. It traces the development of NRx philosophy – and situates this within contemporary political and technological change, to theorize the significance of exit manifest within the notion of ‘dynamic geographies’.

While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, I argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were prefigured a quarter of a century ago in a book that Thiel claims most influenced him, The Sovereign Individual (1997, co-authored by Lord William Rees-Mogg).

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