the digital state

This page considers the nature and fate of the state in digital environments.

It covers -

• introduction
• international relations
• politics
• the Californian Ideology
• civic engagement
• government
• secession and 'virtual states'

     introduction

Bart Kosko, in Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Science & Society in the Digital Age (New York: Three Rivers Press 2000) declared that "we'll have governments as long as we have atoms to protect", something that he considers will last until 'mind' is uploaded to a chip. In the interim, don't hold your breath.

As other pages of this guide - and the consideration in the Economy and Governance guides - suggest, the disappearance of government and the state won't happen in our lifetimes.

     international relations

[under development]

     politics

Politics in Wired Nations: Selected Writings of Ithiel de Sola Pool (New Brunswick: Transaction 1998) is essential reading for those seeking insights into how digital technologies will affect politics, the economy and community.  

We recommend his Technologies Without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990): somewhat starry-eyed at times but with an intellectual bite sadly lacking among many e-nthusiasiasts. Steven Miller's Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power & the Information Superhighway (New York: ACM Press 1996) is provoking. Australia's Brian Martin, an influential writer about whistleblowing and intellectual property, suggests that we can abolish state crime by abolishing the state.

Digital Democracy: Discourse & Decision Making In The Digital Age (London: Routledge 1999) edited by Barry Hague & Brian Loader is a succinct overview. 

It is more substantial than Darin Barney's faddish Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (Sydney: UNSW Press 2000), which pays more attention to Derrida and Heidegger than to the wires or the people, Chris Gray's Cyborg Citizen (London: Routledge 2001) and Class Warfare in the Information Age (New York: Palgrave 2000) by Michael Perelman.

Tim Jordan's Cyberpower: The Culture & Politics of Cyberspace & the Internet (London: Routledge 1999) asserts that cyberpower in the new millennium

is the form of power that structures culture and politics in Cyberspace and on the Internet. It consists of three interrelated regions: the individual, the social and the imaginary. Cyberpower of the individual consists of avatars, virtual hierarchies and informational space and results in cyberpolitics. Power here appears as a possession of individuals. Cyberpower of the social is structured by the technopower spiral and the informational space of flows and results in the virtual elite. Power here appears in the form of domination. Cyberpower of the imaginary consists of the utopia and dystopia that make up the virtual imaginary. Power here appears as the constituent of social order. All three regions are needed to map Cyberpower in total and no region is dominant over any other.

One response might be that that there are few convincing indications that 'cyberpower' has structured culture and politics in the 'real world', ie in the sphere apart from "Cyberspace and on the Internet". Much of the theoretical writing about cyberpower might indeed be considered as the latest trahison des clercs, something that has the attention of the academy (and the associated conference and publishing sectors) at the expense of meaningful civic engagement.

Jordan co-edited the quirky Storming the Millennium: The New Politics of Change (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1999), with an unjustifiably upbeat appraisal of the EFF, located in one of the better spots on the "technopower spiral".

This site offers a separate guide to how digital media are affecting political processes and institutions. Among offline overviews you may enjoy Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism In the Age of the Internet (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 1998), intelligent essays edited by Kevin Hill & John Hughes, and The Web of Politics: The Internet's Impact on the American Political System (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1999) by Richard Davis. 

Wayne Rash's Politics On The Nets: Wiring The Political Process (New York: Freeman 1997), Tim Jordan's Activism! - Direct Activism, Hacktivism & the Future of Society (London: Reaktion 2002) and The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy Is Changing The Political Landscape (Merriefield: e-Advocates Press 1999) by lobbyists Daniel Bennett & Pam Fielding are more superficial. 

We preferred White House To Your House: Media & Politics In Virtual America (Cambridge: MIT Press 1995) by Robert Silverman & Edwin Diamond. The latter's The Spot: The Rise Of Political Advertising on Television (Cambridge: MIT Press 1992) remains suggestive.

We've highlighted particular aspects of wired political processes in our e-politics guide.

     the Californian Ideology

In discussing myths about the governance of cyberspace we've highlighted  cyberlibertarian claims that the web neither can nor should be regulated. Proponents argue that the state is dead and that government per se is neither necessary nor useful.

There's a succinct analysis of such claims in Richard Barbrook's incisive paper The Californian Ideology.

While the cyberlibertarian ethos is broad, a key feature is the notion that Government needs to be kept not only out of the Internet but out of society as a whole. Personal conduct should not be regulated. Nor should commerce. Government should not impose content restrictions, ie should abandon attempts to manage offensive content or protect intellectual property. It also should not require consumers and businesses to pay taxes for public education, social welfare, infrastructure and information equity measures such as subsidised internet access.

Lou Rosetto, co-founder of Wired, for example said that

the idea that we need to worry about anybody being 'left out' is entirely atavistic to me, a product of that old economics of scarcity .... mass communication, mass production, mass poverty, mass markets, mass society, mass media, mass democracy - that's history. Ford and Marx are well and truly dead.

There is an analysis in Millennial Capitalism & the Culture of NeoLiberalism (Durham: Duke Uni Press 2000) edited by Jean & John Comaroff and in Florian Roetzer's snappy paper on Outer Space or Virtual Space? Space Utopias of the Digital Age, complemented by Rob Kling & Roberta Lamb's 1996 paper Bits of Cities: Utopian Visions & Social Power in Placed-Based & Electronic Communities.

Barbrook comments that the new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley," something that "promiscuously combines the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies." It has been achieved through

a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich

and presumably watch Michael Moore via VOD.

     civic engagement

[under development]

     government

[under development]

John Rapley argued in 2006 for a "new medievalism", with power devolving from national governments to either local communities or global corporations through globalisation of the economy, the portability of knowledge work over the internet, erosion of taxation power and increasing concentration of wealth.

He claimed

The shift towards knowledge-intensive products, reductions in the transport costs of both goods and labor and the rapid acceleration of technological change have loosened the state's hold on its traditional resource base. At the end of the Middle Ages, states assumed the role of intermediaries between the local and world economies. But today's postmodern economy comprises not centralized national economies operating under state guidance, but small, fragmented and increasingly autonomous economic units capable of evading state control. What is emerging is a global economy more and more centred on what some theorists have called "global cities" - major urban centers that are connected less to their hinterlands and more to their counterparts elsewhere.

     secession and 'virtual states'

One of the manifestations of cyberselfishness - or mere silliness - is the emergence of 'virtual states', often decorated with a garish coat of arms and more rarely with an 'ambassador' or 'passport' ... whose legitimacy is unsurprisingly not recognised by the UN or any country.

Those states are echoes of the European 'pirate states' of the 1960s - with enthusiasts claiming sovereignty over abandoned offshore drilling platforms or artificial islands - and the longer history of European, Australian and North American householders establishing 'principalities' that were supposedly beyond the reach of the national tax office (or merely local government).

The basis and appeal of 'virtual states' - such as Freedonia, Sealand and the various Talossas - is explored in a more detailed note elsewhere on this site.

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