Staring at the States

There are as many ways to define what is a nation-state as there are different point of views. One way to see this institution is through the ... statistics that it produces. This is more than just a cheap pun. A major activity of the state is actually to produce various kind of statistics: from your name to the inflation rate passing by the various activities of the census bureau. This bureau is less sexy and less famous than its FBI cousin, but is not less important for the government to assess its control over citizens. The State is this institution whose work is to transform objective reality into an idea — a number, a record, a set of words. From this perspective the computer, and digital technologies in general, appear to be the best allies of the nation-state institution. Computers and networks allow the collect and the analysis of data at a scale never imagined. It is in fact a more complicated story.

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.

Luke 2:1

(In)Stabilities

Stability is the "ability to remain in some condition or position in spite of influences.". Typically what a nation-state is trying to achieve. The fact that information moved slowly helped a lot in this regard. For instance to sell something both the seller and the buyer had to meet physically. For large transactions a document, typically a piece of paper with fancy stamps and other technological artifact to avoid forgery, recording the sale was produced. Fast forward to the XXI°, anyone with an access to internet can buy almost anything anywhere through the network. Of course for a house you still have to comply to local legislation because you can't move the house out of the reach of local government (police). But it is already largely no longer true for more virtual assets. Think crypto.

Now to get back to the original point of this paragraph: those new powers are making the stability problem harder to solve. So you have this paradox: computers and networks help the state to collect statistics on one hand, and on the other hand those same computers and networks make things less stable because they allow information to move around fast, faster than the state can keep track of.

This stability problem is not limited to nation-states. It is also becoming a very important in computer systems too.

But it is also a problem in the finance world. The return, with a vengeance, of the Gamestop short squeeze is clear enough. We already are in the billion $ area in terms of effect. The ironic part being that it is a repeat of Jan 2021 situation… Short squeezes are nothing new but their brutality and the fact that they can be orchestrated by quasi anon using social media to synchronize is new. This is acknowledged by science as they say — that it took 3 years to receive this seal of approval is a separate story that is in itself quite funny.

The ability to synchronize vast parts of the population across unlimited geographical areas using networks has led to this paradoxical state of affairs: swarms can be built very quickly and have a destabilizing influence that nation-states have a hard time to counter.

Demopoly

Changing reality into a recorded idea used to be the prerogative of the states, just like legitimate violence was. The fact that digital technologies allow the plebe to do the same is interfering with this monopoly. It has turned into a demopoly. Just like the move towards democracy shifted the legitimacy of raw power from warlords and their descendants to ordinary citizen, we are observing a similar move in how the objective world is turned into an actionable idea. This is the Worldcoin project. The adoption rate looks slow — around 5 millions users — but the idea is definitely there. I would not be surprised to see digital passports based on blockchain like technology to appear. There is no reason to think that nation-state will be leaders on that front. As it is the case with numerous other statistics, the establishment of the “official representation” of the world is anyone’s game now. More precisely, it can be anyone’s game. In reality we rather witness the birth of giant corporations that act as direct competitors with nation-states. There is something really new about the powers of GAFAMs: they are directly challenging a core activity of nation-state. Does it mean that they can replace them? No because they don’t have (yet?) the possibility to project power. Maybe it will come too: the SpaceX company might acquire nuclear like strike capabilities in a glimpse of an eye. E. Musk said he loved Heinlein’s books in which kinetic bombardment of the earth is a major theme...

We find ourselves in strange times: the old institutions are no longer working as they claim they should and new players are not yet ready to replace them. It announces two things: 1- there will be troubles (think French Revolution) in how societies organize. 2- the system will adjust through many oscillations, so expect a high volatility in terms of societal organization for some decades to come.