We Should Have The Right To Exit Bad Systems

A book review of Max Borders' amazing book THE SOCIAL SINGULARITY: How decentralization will allow us to transcend politics, create global prosperity, and avoid the robot apocalypse

“Technology that changes incentives, can change institutions” - Max Borders.

Here at the Society of Problem Solvers, we felt a genuine jolt of excitement when we came across the work of Max Borders. There was a sense of both deep new learning and existing recognition as the book THE SOCIAL SINGULARITY unfolded.

As many of our readers know, for more than five years we have been actively searching for serious systems thinkers, philosophers, and builders who understand the promise of decentralized, “power with” approaches to coordination and problem solving. That search has often led to finding people interested in the ideas, but very few who were already deeply invested in exploring them (with the exception of the authors and thinkers we list in the resource portion of the Swarm Academy website found HERE).

Then we came across Borders, who has been engaged in this line of thinking for years, developing a coherent, zoomed-out, and rigorous perspective on how better thinking and better systems can address some of the world’s most persistent challenges. His work reflects this maturity. It is imaginative, precise, both intro- and outro-spective, and filled with brilliant insight.

Astonishingly, it was published in 2018 - before the pandemic - which shows incredible foresight regarding the blatant corruption problems that have surfaced in our systems since then. This book offers real solutions to nearly all of them.

Max’s ideas paint an optimistic future for humanity - if we get it right. Despite the generally tempered attitude of society after yet another round of disappointment with our current systems and political rhetoric, Max is here to remind us that we should indeed remain optimistic. His view helps us reimagine new systems that make our old corrupted ones obsolete.

In Max’s own words, which he was kind enough to provide for this review, he describes The Social Singularity as, “an organizational phase transition in which humans go from operating mostly in hierarchies to collaborating mostly in networks. Central authority gives way to decentralized power, and - once this occurs - it cannot be undone.”

The most powerful idea running through this book is simple and unsettling in the best way. If a system stops serving you, you should be able to leave it. Not protest it. Not spend years trying to reform it from the inside. Leave it. Exit. Max Borders builds a case that we are entering a world where exit becomes increasingly possible.

Technology is lowering the cost of coordination, and that changes everything. When people can organize, transact, and solve problems without centralized institutions or authorities, those institutions begin to lose their grip. You can already see it happening in real time. People are drifting away from legacy media toward decentralized information networks. They are dropping centralized education for homeschooling. They are experimenting with peer-to-peer finance. They are forming communities around shared values rather than geography. The common thread is not rebellion; it’s optionality.

What replaces the old model? It is competition at the level of systems themselves. Governance, finance, education, and even community begin to behave more like markets than mandates. You’re no longer assigned to them by where you happen to be born. You choose them. And if they fail you, you leave. That shift introduces a kind of accountability that traditional institutions have rarely faced. When coordination becomes cheap, Max shows us that forced participation becomes fragile. And we can evolve past this if we build new systems that are antifragile, decentralized, and that rapidly evolve to benefit us all.

Running alongside this is an idea that feels increasingly important: Intelligence is no longer just an individual trait. It is something we can build into systems, and connect people to create. Borders points toward a future where groups, when structured correctly, consistently outperform centralized authorities. We are already seeing early versions of this in open-source communities, decentralized organizations, swarm intelligence groups, and network-driven problem solving. When friction is reduced and incentives are aligned, groups begin to behave less like collections of people and more like unified, adaptive organisms - what we call “swarms.” With the right systems in place, these swarms can sense, decide, and respond in ways that no single individual could replicate alone.

With new tools (like this ONE), new rules, and new values - we can make both better societies and better individual people.

As Max points out in the book:

“We shape our tools and our tools shape us…
We shape our rules and our rules shape us…
We shape our values and our values shape us”

We shape our systems, and our systems shape us.

This is where the book becomes especially useful for us all. Most people are still focused on fixing broken systems. Max Borders points us in a different direction. He suggests that the more important question is not how to repair these systems, but how to replace them with something better.

Underneath all of this is also a deeper idea about freedom that deserves some love too. Freedom is not just the right to speak or vote. It is the right to leave. It is the ability to withdraw your time, your attention, your energy, and your trust from systems that no longer deserve them, and build new ones that do.

The Social Singularity does not offer a step-by-step plan, and that is part of its strength. It gives us a lens that makes the present moment easier to understand - especially now that we clearly see how filthy, corrupted, and fragile our current systems are. We begin to comprehend why so many institutions feel repulsive, why new decentralized and transparent models keep emerging at the edges, and why networks continue to outperform hierarchies in the places where they are applied (so let's intentionally apply them more).

Most importantly, Max helps us see our own position differently. Not as someone trapped inside a bad system, but as a participant with agency and freedom. Someone who can choose where to invest their time and trust. Someone who can stay… or exit and help build.

Here at the Society of Problem Solvers, we are just a group of writers and thinkers looking to build such a place - or places - with as many of us as possible. And we are stoked to have Max’s ideas fuel the movement toward these new possibilities.

5 out of 5 stars.

We highly recommend this book.

Best yet, you can find Max Borders and his podcast here on Substack.

Thanks for reading!

---

Become a Problem Solver! Join the growing movement of builders. It is free!

Join the discussion on the old school forum at SwarmAcademy.ai - this is the way social media should be, back to structered forums with purpose.

Stay optimistic! Why? Because..

”All problems that do not defy the laws of physics are solvable with the right knowledge” - David Deutsch

and….

“Humans solve problems better in high-trust groups.”

and…
…… solving problems is happiness!

#CollectiveIntelligence #SwarmIntelligence

For over 3 billion years on this planet there were only single-celled organisms. Then one day they somehow learned to work together and make complex multi-celled creatures . Right now we are like those single-celled organisms. Our next evolution is finding how to work together, better… (like we wrote about here).

#SwarmAcademy #NetworkState #LEADERLESS #ResultsMatterMost #DecentralizeEverything #DemandTransparency

COMMENTS ARE FOR EVERYONE AS A PLACE TO THINK-TANK SOLUTIONS. They will never be for paid-only subscribers and we will never charge a subscription.

This is how we change the world. We build genies - systems of people like this: