Superposition State
One of my personal thesis is that nation-states are failing and cannot continue to operate in a digital era. The question of what is coming next remains largely unclear. What is manifest is that the usual course of event has been altered *a lot*. And slowly, as time unfolds, forms begin to appear.
The global temptation
There is now a clear distinction between swords and words today. Information moves much faster than armies. The speech is no longer local and it has global consequences. There are no ways to prevent the information from spreading around. Iranian regime has tried to cut the internet and has restricted the use of cryptographically secured applications but so far without slowing down unrest. As the war in Ukraine has shown it is impossible to stop the flow of videos, tweets etc. even from areas in which military fight is ongoing.
This state of facts cannot be more in opposition with the very notion of nation-state. Indeed the underlying idea of nation-state is that there is sovereignty on a specific area. Political power is perceived as being linked to a precise piece of land: the one that you control militarily at the end of the day. The topological revolution has shattered this concept. Just like drones have made walls much less relevant from a security perspective: with an off the shelf technology it is possible to pass over walls and create threats that would have been impossible to realize 15 years ago.
As countries become less and less relevant in face of global technologies, the elite in charge are trying to retain some of their power by all means. A direct strategy is the following: if you can't prevent people from escaping local regulations then just make the regulations global. Before crypto currencies it was hard to move large amounts of money between countries. You ever had to go full drug lord style or to submit to bank regulations. The screws have constantly been tightened on the financial front during the last two decades under various justifications (anti terrorism, anti drugs etc.). Lately the move to global regulations is gaining momentum. From the idea of a global minimum corporate tax to the ESG global offensive the shift is clear. I am not talking here about how they are funded or what is their agenda. What interests me here is the fact that it is a worldwide campaign: from China to Chile passing by all the western area. It is done via what is called "governance". The wikipedia definition, or rather the modern acception of this term, is clear:
Governance is the process of interactions through the laws, norms, power or language of an organized society over a social system
The idea is not so much to have formal power but to obtain social results by any means. Actually the means used are a mix of media control, political control (have you noticed how much the political lexicon has converged over the last decade, eg "Build Back Better"), and financial control. Basically banks will no longer fund corporations that are not in line with the party etc. Formal institutions like parliaments are less and less relevant. The real power is no longer there.
What the fuck forum
It is therefore not surprising that environmental themes and informal institutions like the WEF flourishes. The agenda is set for global challenges supposedly requiring global solutions. On top of that the horizon of the threat (not too close but not too far) is ideal to bypass standard political institutions: this is an issue for the next generations blah blah. By that rhetorical trick, the voices and votes of the future are stolen by today's elite and discussion is dodged. Not only "they know better" but "they know better than future generations what they are going to want". Every political solution is a trade-off, but future generations have no say in the trade offs decided in their name. So shut up and believe in, settled, Science...
The network state
The proposition of Balaji Srinivasan, The network state, has the merit to address the right question upfront. The localized institutions that are nation states no longer work. Is it possible to start from the other part of the spectrum, the digital space, in order to set up a fitter political organization ? The question may appear very abstract and utopian today. The link with this essay is that the society it would produce would necessarily been everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Meaning that any network state has to be borderless (so everywhere on earth) but has to be able to live together with *other* network states. How could a society formed of citizens living in superposition work ? This is a hard question for which there is no clear answer yet. But note that due to the fact that it is very easy to travel this is more and more the case. Indeed last year I have spent 3 months in Argentina. I was like living in a parallel reality from locals. Themselves live largely in parallel universes : private neighborhood are next to "villas" (slum villages). Just crossing a street brings you to a totally different universe. Can this be generalized and even pushed further ? The problem of the stability of the entire society remains unanswered, as well as how the different fibers interact with one another. In Argentina there are physical walls and guards to materialize the difference. But how can it worked when everything is meshed ? This is one of the numerous questions to be answered in order to make the utopia real. There is work, and experiences, to be done.