Exit vs. Transformation
What people do when the societies they belong to begin to fail them
It’s a conundrum nearly as old as humanity: what do people choose when their societies disappoint them? When so much of the surrounding system appears ossified, bound to inertia, and resistant to meaningful change?
Do they remain emotionally tethered enough to the society to commit to it, even at personal cost? Or does the realization dawn that the society is a sinking ship, leaving the individual to optimize for himself?
This is the crux of the Exit vs. Transformation question that has occupied both of us over the past several months.
And it’s a question that feels particularly germane in the contemporary context of Canada, which now finds itself at a genuine civilizational crossroads of a kind it has rarely been forced to confront in its sheltered history.
This piece is an exchange between Sciohn Fhanne and Parallel Citizen, mediated by a series of questions exploring the contours of Exit vs. Transformation and the lessons Canada might draw from this moment.
How would you frame the central dilemma facing individuals living in societies that disappoint them?
Sciohn Fhanne: The Exit vs. Transformation question begins, for me, with a hard reality: societies are stronger than individuals.
An exceptional individual can outperform his environment only up to a point. If the society to which he belongs is structurally incapable of cultivating, rewarding, and scaling human excellence, whether through sclerosis, inertia, managerialism, or deeply embedded risk aversion, then underperformance ceases to be incidental. It becomes systemic.
That, in essence, is the soil out of which my Laurentian vs. Polarian thesis emerged.
Because Canada’s problem is not merely that it sometimes produces timidity, drift, or wasted potential. Canada, at its base layer, is organized in such a way as to reproduce those outcomes.
It’s a society that was designed, at the outset, for managerial maintenance and colonial subservience rather than civilizational assertion or cultural self-definition.
Canada was never structured to be a polity that reliably elicits the highest exertions of individual ambition or collective will.
And once you see that clearly, the dilemma becomes much harsher.
Does one remain loyal to such a society and attempt the long, uncertain work of transforming it? Or does one conclude that the structure itself is too deeply set against excellence, and that one’s finite life is better spent elsewhere?
That’s the real question.
Parallel Citizen: I appreciate how you’ve framed this, and I want to build on it from a slightly different angle. One that I think broadens the aperture beyond the nation-state.
In 1970, Albert O. Hirschman published Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which gave us the foundational binary: when an organization declines, you either speak up or you leave. Loyalty is what delays exit and gives voice its power. It’s an elegant framework, but it’s incomplete. It treats human agency as binary. You either stay and speak, or go.
Real life is messier. People don’t just talk or walk. They build, buy, boycott, riot, relocate. They exercise agency in overlapping, sometimes contradictory ways, often all at once.
I’ve written about what I call the four votes: your ballot, your wallet, your hands, and your feet. Every act of change channels through one of these mechanisms. And in a society like Canada, where institutional trust is quietly fracturing along generational lines, where the ballot produces marginal differentiation at best, and where the wallet vote is constrained by oligopolistic markets, the question of whether to Exit or Transform is really a question of which combination of votes you cast, and in what sequence.
Your Laurentian vs. Polarian framing resonates with me. But I would add: the framing itself is becoming less binary because the tools available to dissatisfied citizens are multiplying. Network states, charter cities, digital diasporas, cryptographic governance. These are not merely Exit mechanisms. They are attempts to build entirely new systems alongside the old ones. Neither Exit, nor Transformation. Something closer to parallel construction.
What do you think ails Canada the most at the macro level?
Sciohn Fhanne: Canada is at its core, and I say this without contempt, a nation whose “Original Sin,” as it were, was being born without self-authorship.
We did not emerge through the long, often violent consolidation processes that forged most Old World states where competing polities, dynasties, or tribal orders were gradually unified under a central authority, and identity was hardened through conflict and necessity.
Nor did we revolutionize ourselves into existence, as the Americans did, through an explicit world-historical break that forced a people to consciously define, assert, and defend their sovereignty.
Power, sovereignty, nationhood, meaning, and even existence were instead delegated peacefully and amicably from Westminster.
And what many Canadians consider our “exceptionalism” is precisely the problem. Because it has kept us trapped in a colonial mindset long after we ceased to be a colony in law and administration.
The colonial covenant teaches that the highest cultural and civilizational meaning lies elsewhere. The places in the world that truly matter are elsewhere. Our highest purpose is to serve the interests of elsewhere.
I sometimes phrase it this way: Canada never went through the hard parts of becoming a nation.
As a result, we often appear not to understand even at a basic anthropological or sociological level, how successful civilizations actually function.
We don’t seem to grasp, for instance, that ethno-demographic “diversity” by itself, without unity of mission and purpose, doesn’t automatically produce strength. We don’t seem to grasp that living on geopolitical “easy mode,” sheltered by geography, protected by hegemonic allies, and insulated from intense global competition, is the exception in human history, not the rule. And we don’t fully appreciate that power, sovereignty, nationhood, meaning, and existence must ultimately be earned, not merely inherited.
The British Crown that still sits at the apex of our constitutional design is therefore not merely symbolic.
It is the central conditioning device around which the Canadian polity has been psychologically organized for more than a century and a half.
That conditioning has consequences.
Today we reassure ourselves that the Crown is a harmless relic that somehow “doesn’t affect us.” But that reassurance is itself the final stage of colonial conditioning: the point at which a society becomes so habituated to second-order existence that it never learns what genuinely self-asserting, self-directing, self-generating, and self-sustaining first-order nationhood actually looks like.
When one observes (and again, I say this without contempt) the pervasive Mediocracy that characterizes so much of Canadian life outside a few isolated pockets of brilliance that are often “tall-poppied” or quietly suppressed by the ambient equilibrium, what one is seeing is the lived expression of this colonial gravity.
Our persistent brain drain. Our sluggish, risk-averse, oligopolistic economy. Our uninspired architecture and urban design. Our timidity, our caution, our chronic lack of civilizational daring.
These are not isolated phenomena. They are artifacts of our colonial psyche.
This is understandably an uncomfortable subject for many Canadians. It touches the deepest sinews of who we are and who believe ourselves to be.
But any hope for Transformation begins with the ability to tell difficult truths about ourselves.
And the difficult truth is that Canada, in contrast to serious, self-authoring civilizations, is the kind of polity that flatters at a distance and disappoints upon closer inspection.
Those who express the greatest admiration for Canada often do so at the surface level, responding to atmosphere, vibes, presentation, and reputation.
But among those who study the country, its institutional structure, its political economy, and its cultural disposition more closely, one finds far less confidence in its deeper capacity for sustained excellence or achievement.
This stands in marked contrast to nations such as France or China, which command not merely surface admiration, but a kind of underlying confidence, because, over time, they have demonstrated the ability to assert, reproduce, and defend their civilizational weight.
And yet this diagnosis is not meant as condemnation.
If Canada is ever to transcend this Original Sin and meet its full potential in the coming centuries, it must first overcome its reluctance to confront questions that are supposedly too foundational to examine.
This is not about abolishing the monarchy as a matter of shallow constitutional cosmetics. Nor is it about replacing dependency with empty nationalist chest-thumping.
It’s about something far deeper: finally becoming our grown-up selves, without needing either Mother Britannia or Uncle Sam to anchor us.
Parallel Citizen: You’ve articulated the psycho-cultural diagnosis with surgical precision. Let me layer on the structural dimension, because I think the two reinforce each other in ways that make the problem feel intractable, even though it isn’t.
I wrote a piece last year about British Columbia’s land title crisis and the provincial government’s simultaneous move to ban new crypto mining and cap power for AI and data centers. These are not unrelated policy decisions. They are expressions of exactly the Laurentian gravity you describe: a system that reflexively restricts, manages, and outsources the future rather than building it.
Consider the structural facts. Canada’s grocery market is dominated by a duopoly. Loblaw and Empire control roughly 60% of market share. Our banking sector is an oligopoly. Our telecom sector is a cartel. In markets this concentrated, the wallet vote is barely meaningful. You technically “choose” between options, but the range is so narrow that the choice is cosmetic. Voting with your wallet presumes a competitive market. Monopoly and oligopoly undermine that premise entirely.
And then there’s the ballot. The level of government most likely to affect your daily life, municipal and local, is the one most Canadians engage with least. Most citizens can’t name their city councilor or school board representative. Federal elections absorb the lion’s share of emotional investment, yet their outcomes increasingly reflect organized lobbying blocs and party machinery rather than diffuse voter preferences. The mechanism designed to express popular will becomes the bottleneck that filters it.
So what you’re left with is a country where the ballot is structurally captured, the wallet is constrained by oligopoly, the hands are regulated into passivity by risk-averse bureaucracy, and the feet walk south or overseas. That is the full picture of Canadian stagnation, viewed through the four votes.
But here is where I push back, gently, on framing this as an “Original Sin” that requires a kind of national psychotherapy to resolve. The colonial conditioning is real. But the fastest path through it may not be introspection. It may be competition.
Countries that do not have the luxury of easy mode (Israel, Taiwan, and Singapore) did not transform through soul-searching. They transformed because external pressure made stagnation existentially unaffordable. The question for Canada is whether the current geopolitical moment, tariff wars, the fracturing of the Anglo-American security umbrella, AI-driven labor disruption, will finally impose enough felt consequence to force the kind of seriousness you’re calling for.
If it does, the builders who stayed, or who built parallel systems from abroad, will be the ones with the blueprints ready.
What do you make of the “brain drain” that has afflicted Canada for so long?
Sciohn Fhanne: When Canada’s most ambitious and capable individuals, the classic “brain-drainers” or Exiters, feel constrained by the Laurentian ceiling that binds the country together, and feel compelled to channel their highest ambitions south of the border or elsewhere, they are not merely reacting to lower salaries or colder weather.
They are experiencing the lived manifestation of a system that was deliberately structured to privilege stability and caution over dynamism and ambition.
Those who choose to Exit from an underperforming system often encounter far greater opportunities for personal prosperity and advancement elsewhere, the proverbial “greener pastures,” as it were.
But Exit carries a broader cost, especially when it involves a society’s most capable individuals, as has often been the case throughout history. The result is a vicious cycle: the society’s stagnant equilibrium becomes further entrenched.
One only needs to look at southern Italy or parts of the former Soviet world to see this dynamic at work. I increasingly suspect Canada may be drifting toward a milder version of the same pattern.
But is this really the fault of those who Exit?
In many cases, their calculation is entirely rational. Their lives are finite and precious. The timeline on which societies transform often stretches far beyond what any individual can reasonably expect to witness.
So they follow a deeply human instinct: optimizing for what they can control rather than sacrificing themselves for what they can’t.
And I can’t blame them for that.
Parallel Citizen: I can’t blame them either. And I say this as someone who has exercised the feet vote myself.
But I want to name something that rarely gets discussed in brain drain conversations: the cost of exit is not evenly distributed, and the people who can afford to leave are almost never the people who are suffering most from the system’s failures.
Leaving means severing, or at least stretching, ties to family, community, professional networks, cultural context, and often legal standing. It means navigating immigration bureaucracies that were not designed for a world of distributed work and fluid citizenship. Patriotism and national identity are deeply felt attachments forged through decades of shared experience and social bonding. Choosing to exit requires a kind of emotional renegotiation: Why would I sacrifice for a system that doesn’t serve me? That’s not a question people ask lightly. It usually comes only after the social contract has already been broken from the other side.
Hirschman saw this clearly. The easier exit becomes, the less likely voice is. Latin American dictators historically encouraged political opponents to self-exile, what Hirschman called a “conspiracy in restraint of voice.” The lesson cuts both ways. Exit can be liberating for the individual, but it also functions as a pressure release valve that allows broken systems to persist.
If everyone who might organize for reform simply leaves, who stays to fix things?
Canada’s brain drain is not just a labour market problem. It is a voice problem. The people with the most capacity to articulate what’s wrong and build what’s better are precisely the ones who are leaving.
So is “brain drain” simply one possible path, or is it almost inevitable?
Sciohn Fhanne: The alternative posture, of course, is Transformation, the decision to remain committed to one’s polity despite deep disappointment.
It resembles a kind of tough love. Like a parent confronting a perpetually disappointing child, the individual remains bound by an attachment that is difficult to sever, except in this case, the object of that begrudging loyalty is an entire country.
Let me say plainly: this posture is far more difficult in Canada than it is in most other polities.
The Laurentian identity, administrative rather than mission-binding, is so amorphous, and dare I say transactional, that Canadians who become disillusioned often struggle to remain committed in the way that Iranian, Ukrainian, or even Tibetan dissidents frequently do. In those societies, disappointment in the “regime of the day,” as it were, rarely erases the underlying conviction that their civilization’s continuity and ultimate success are non-negotiable.
Transformation is an extraordinarily slow-moving wheel anywhere, let alone Canada.
To choose it is to commit oneself to a trajectory whose outcome lies almost entirely beyond one’s personal control. One may very well never live to see the results.
But history reminds us that Transformation rarely begins with majority consensus. It begins with a critical minority unwilling to accept the prevailing equilibrium; think of the Meiji elites in Japan or the early Chinese republicans.
Those societies transformed because they believed themselves to be coherent civilizations capable of self-renewal, and because they felt compelled to do so in the face of a changing world.
Canada’s challenge is more vexing.
This country never fully developed a sovereign raison d’être independent of the managerial settler-colonial purpose initially imposed by its French and British imperial progenitors.
It must now undertake something more difficult: the conscious authorship of a sovereign civilizational identity.
That’s the heart of my Polarian thesis.
And if even a small critical mass of Canadians ultimately chooses Transformation over Exit, then the country’s long-term trajectory may yet become far more promising than the one it currently appears to be following.
That, in essence, is my argument.
Parallel Citizen: You make a compelling case for Transformation, and the Meiji parallel is apt. But I want to introduce a third possibility that I don’t think either Exit or Transformation fully captures, and it’s one that the network state movement is beginning to prototype in real time.
What if the most powerful form of Transformation is a kind of structured Exit?
Consider what’s happening globally right now. Over 100 network state projects are being tracked on NS Nodes, a project I’m a part of. At least 25 have transitioned from purely online communities to having physical, in-person living components. Pop-up cities like the Zuzalu-inspired hubs are turning into permanent enclaves. Legal wrapper experiments like Próspera, DUNA frameworks, and KaliDAO are creating templates to connect decentralized governance to land and real-world assets. These are not people fleeing. They are people building. Building new governance models, new economic coordination tools, new civic infrastructure, often while maintaining deep ties to their countries of origin.
This is what I call parallel construction. You do not wait for the Laurentian settlement to collapse or reform itself on its own geological timeline. You build a parallel system, cloud-first, land eventually, that demonstrates a better way. And the existence of that parallel system exerts competitive pressure on the legacy system to improve. Society as a service. Governance that must earn your loyalty daily through demonstrated quality of life, regulatory clarity, and economic opportunity. Exit is one click; voice is one pull request.
The crucial insight from my Exit Is Not Enough thesis is this: of the four votes, exit is the one that introduces the most systemic pressure, because it forces competition between governance systems. When talent, capital, and labour are mobile, governments must compete for them. But Exit alone is not a solution. It’s a catalyst.
The healthiest outcome is probably a dynamic equilibrium. Systems where exit is possible (preserving individual sovereignty), voice is effective (preserving collective agency), hands have room to build (preserving innovation), and the ballot produces actual accountability (preserving democratic legitimacy). No existing system achieves all four simultaneously. Network state experiments are, at best, attempting to prototype something that does.
For Canada specifically, this means the Polarian thesis and the network state thesis are not competitors. They may be complementary. A critical mass of Canadians building parallel institutions, digitally sovereign, economically productive, culturally coherent, could function as the in-house, Meiji-style vanguard pressures you’re describing, without requiring them to sacrifice their finite lives waiting for the Laurentian wheel to turn.
What do you think is necessary for Transformation to take place?
Sciohn Fhanne: Let me preface this by saying something uncomfortable.
The magnitude of change required to carry Canada onto a higher plane of national achievement is far greater than almost any of us are presently willing to admit.
Because as much as I admire the intentions of our emerging “builder” community, and I genuinely do, I’m afraid that the roots of Canadian malaise lie much deeper than most of our current conversations acknowledge.
They don’t exist primarily at the level of policy design. They can’t be resolved simply through better memos, legislative reforms, or clever incentive tweaks.
Because, and let me say something my fellow countrymen may not like hearing, the stagnation, drift, and quiet crisis of purpose in which Canada presently finds itself are not aberrations. They are not some mysterious deviation from our “normal” trajectory. They are, to a considerable extent, the natural culmination of the Laurentian system we inherited.
In other words, our polity is not malfunctioning. In many respects, it is operating precisely as it was structured to operate.
How, for instance, do you legislate away our peculiar cultural habit of celebrating entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators only after they have already made their mark elsewhere? How do you legislate away the reflexive fear of urban density and metropolitan scale that permeates so much of our civic politics? How do you legislate away Toronto’s persistent culture of architectural cheapness? How do you legislate away the fact that the Prime Minister’s residence, the literal home of our head of government, can sit in a state of prolonged disrepair for decades without provoking national embarrassment?
Governments can certainly attempt to intervene around the margins.
You can try dangling generous incentives to encourage ambitious Canadians to build companies in Toronto instead of San Francisco. You can attempt to open up our sclerotic corporate sectors to greater competition. You can establish urban design review panels with real authority. You can even launch dedicated funds to refurbish neglected national institutions such as 24 Sussex.
But unless the Canadian psyche itself begins to transform at the micro, almost molecular level, every effort to pull ourselves out of Mediocracy will remain counter-gravitational and ultimately Sisyphean.
Because our macro problems begin, fundamentally, at the micro level. They begin with what our culture chooses to admire. With what it rewards. With what it regards as honourable, worthy, and exemplary. And crucially, with how those values are transmitted to the next generation.
The Ancient Greeks had a word for this process: paideia.
Paideia referred to the formation of the young citizen, the shaping of character, discipline, and civic orientation necessary for the flourishing of the polis.
It’s a tragically neglected concept in Canadian thought. Because every society ultimately rises or falls according to how successfully it forms its youngest members. It’s no coincidence that many of the most serious and competitive civilizations of our time, particularly across East Asia, place extraordinary emphasis on early-life formation.
In other words: their own modern form of paideia.
The society that hands a primary-school pupil a participation ribbon for finishing fifth (something I personally experienced in the Ontario school system) and the society that tells that same pupil, “I expect more from you next time, because I know you are capable of it,” tend to produce very different kinds of adults.
And layered atop this cultural dimension is something else Canada has long lacked, which is an acute sense of felt consequence, a byproduct of “easy mode,” as it were, and a concept you touched on earlier.
This, in my view, may be the single most powerful engine sustaining our Mediocracy equilibrium.
Canada can concentrate wealth in unproductive sectors, leak enormous quantities of its most ambitious talent, chronically underinvest in its military, take decades to construct second-rate transit infrastructure, and still remain materially comfortable.
This is possible because we’ve spent nearly our entire history operating under conditions that absorb and mask this underperformance: geopolitical insulation, resource abundance, and the stabilizing umbrella of a wider Anglo-American system.
Those conditions have allowed the Laurentian system to persist for decades without meaningful correction. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for permanence.
If there’s one lesson to draw from the turbulence currently unfolding south of the border and in the Middle East, it’s that the global order that sheltered Canada for much of the post-war era is breaking apart at the seams.
The world is becoming more competitive, more fragmented, and more dangerous. And in such a world, it’s no longer safe to assume that Canada will forever enjoy the privileges of a comfortable “First World” existence simply by virtue of geography and inheritance. For perhaps the first time in its modern history, Canada will be forced to work actively for its continued success. And to be frank, I’m not entirely certain we’re prepared for that.
There’s an old observation in political history: societies rarely become dramatically better versions of themselves during crisis. More often, crisis simply reveals what they already are. Given how deeply Canada’s equilibrium of comfort has been ingrained over more than a century of relative geopolitical ease, and let me be blunt here, it’s entirely possible that we fail to rise to the moment.
But there’s also a more hopeful interpretation.
Because when an old equilibrium stops delivering results, societies can enter periods of profound reconsideration. What I’ve described elsewhere as Rupture is not a single dramatic event. It’s a gradual but unmistakable process through which the prevailing framework of legitimacy begins to erode.
The Laurentian settlement, the governing consensus of Canadian life, is already on shaky ground. It might eventually cease to deliver the stability and prosperity that once justified it altogether. When that happens, Canada will find itself navigating a genuine legitimacy crisis. And legitimacy crises, while dangerous, also create openings. They create the conditions under which new civilizational possibilities can emerge.
Success, of course, is by no means guaranteed. Rupture can lead to renewal, but it can also lead to deeper dysfunction. Yet it at least creates the possibility for a society to become something radically new.
Let me be clear: I’m not wishing misfortune upon this country.
I’m simply acknowledging that societies deeply habituated to comfort rarely transform themselves voluntarily. More often, Transformation begins when circumstances leave them no other choice.
Our task, therefore, is not to passively wait for Rupture. Nor is it to advocate for reckless revolutionary agitation or destabilization of the present order to “force Polaria into existence,” as it were. Such paths can lead to outcomes far darker than the stable (if uninspiring) equilibrium Canada presently inhabits.
Our task is something much more constructive. We must exercise agency. We must prepare ourselves seriously for the demands of tomorrow’s world. And we must begin articulating new horizons of national possibility.
I sometimes describe this as a glass-breaking moment.
Transformation requires a critical mass of people who are intellectually, culturally, and institutionally ready to move beyond the old equilibrium when it finally fractures.
How, then, does one articulate a post-Laurentian vision of Canadian civilization that is actually worth committing one’s life to? One capable of binding Anglo, Franco, indigenous, and diasporic Canadians into a shared mission?
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t yet have a complete answer. But that’s precisely what my Polarian project seeks to explore.
Because I know, deep in my bones, that the present equilibrium is far from the ceiling of what this country could become.
Not even close.
And that’s why, despite perhaps being one of the harshest critics of the Canadian status quo you’re likely to encounter, I remain an unwavering patriot of this underachieving, yet promising land.
Parallel Citizen: You ask: is Exit or Transformation the more rational move?
My honest answer: it depends entirely on your time horizon, your risk tolerance, and whether you believe the infrastructure for something genuinely new can be built within your lifetime.
I agree with you that the roots of Canadian malaise are sub-legislative. You cannot policy-memo your way out of a cultural operating system that rewards caution over ambition. Paideia matters. The micro shapes the macro. That diagnosis is correct.
But here is where I think the network state lens offers something that the purely nation-state-bound conversation misses: you don’t have to choose.
The old framing forces a binary. Stay and fight the Sisyphean battle of Transformation within a system designed to resist it. Or leave, and lose your voice entirely as the system absorbs your absence without consequence. That binary was accurate in the 20th century, when citizenship was geography and governance was monopoly.
It is less accurate now.
We are entering an era where the infrastructure for parallel construction (imperfect, incomplete, but real and accelerating) allows people to build outside the system while maintaining roots inside it. The global digital nomad population has roughly doubled in five years, from approximately 20 million pre-pandemic to an estimated 40-60 million. Over 70 countries now offer dedicated digital nomad visas, up from a handful in 2019. This is not lifestyle experimentation. It is a structural shift in how talent, capital, and labour relate to geography.
For a Canadian builder, the rational move may be neither pure Exit nor pure Transformation. It may be to build a network, cloud-first, land-eventually, that operates on principles your Polarian thesis describes: self-authoring, mission-driven, ambitious, serious. Build it with other Canadians, and with aligned people globally. Prove that a different Canadian paideia is possible by instantiating it, rather than arguing for it within institutions designed to suppress it.
The cosmo-local model is relevant here: design global, manufacture local. Open-source governance templates, shared globally and implemented by regional communities using local context and resources. The hands vote, scaled through networks. Building locally while coordinating globally, without requiring permission from centralized gatekeepers.
I want to close with something you said that I think is the most important sentence in this entire exchange: the present equilibrium is far from the ceiling of what this country could become.
I believe that too. But I believe the path to proving it runs through building parallel systems that demonstrate what Canadian ambition looks like when it is unshackled from Laurentian gravity, and then letting the results speak louder than any manifesto. We are living as if life still operates in Pax-Americana peacetime, where in fact we should take this emerging multipolar world more seriously. It is wartime and Canadians should start acting with urgency. Don’t argue, build.
We must necessarily leverage existing systems to bootstrap parallel systems. Non-violent, transparent, on-chain where possible. Not secession by siege engine, but seduction by better product. Not Exit-maximalism. Not Transformation-martyrdom. Something new.
The bridge between Exit and Transformation hasn’t been built yet. But the people reading this, the builders, the techno-realists, the politically unorthodox, the Canadians who refuse to accept that Mediocracy is destiny, are the ones who will build it.
The only question is whether we start now, or wait for the Rupture to make the choice for us.
I’d rather not wait.
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