Last weekend at FooCamp, I co-hosted a session titled “The End of the World: Will the Internet Destroy the State, or Will the State Destroy the Internet?” What follows are the ideas I opened with during my intro to the session and some additional thoughts I’ve had and that others shared during the conversation. To avoid some confusion, I’d also like to clarify a) I don’t claim that these questions have never been raised before, I mostly hope that this framing can generate useful thought and debate; and b) that I don’t believe these are the only two or three possible outcomes; it was just a interesting way of framing some poles so as to generate good conversation.
Introduction
A while back, I thought I saw a tweet from Evgeny Morozov that said something to the effect: “You don’t just go from printing press to Renaissance to iPad; there are revolutions and wars in between you can’t ignore.” Since I can’t find the tweet, maybe he didn’t say it or I imagined it… but it sparked a line of thinking.
Technology and Change
Most often, when people think of the printing press, they think of its impact on the Catholic Church – about how it enabled Martin Luther’s complaints to go viral and how the localization of the Bible cut out the need of the middle man the priest to connect and engage with God. But if the printing press undermined the Catholic Church, it had the opposite impact on the state. To be fair, heads of state took a beating (see French Revolution et al.), but the state itself was nimbler and made good use of the technology. Indeed, it is worth noting that the modern notion of the nation state was not conceivable without the printing press. The press transformed the state – scaling up its capacity to demand control over loyalty from citizens and mobilize resources which, in turn, had an impact on how states related (and fought) with one another.
In his seminal book Imagined Communities
imagined history, language and discourse. Do not underestimate the impact this had on people’s identity. As this wonderful quote from the book states: “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.” In other words, states could now fully dispense with feudal middle managers and harness the power of larger swaths of population directly – a population that might never actually meet, but could nonetheless feel connected to one another. The printing press thus helped create the modern nation state by providing a form of tribalism at scale: what we now call nationalism. This was, in turn, an important ingredient for the wars that dominated the late 19th and early 20th century – think World War I and World War II. This isn’t to say without the printing press, you don’t get war – we know that isn’t true – but the type of total war between 20th century nation states does have a direct line to the printing press.
So yes, the techno-utopian world of: printing press -> Renaissance -> iPad is not particularly accurate.
What you do get is: printing press -> Renaissance -> state evolution -> destabilization of international order -> significant bloodshed -> re-stabilization of international system -> iPad.
I raise all this because if this is the impact the printing press had on the state, it begs a new question: What will be the impact of the internet on the state? Will the internet be a technology the state can harness to extract more loyalty from its citizens… or will the internet destroy the imagined communities that make the state possible, replaced by a more nimble, disruptive organization better able to survive the internet era?
Some Scenarios
Note: again, these scenarios aren’t absolutes or the only possibilities, they are designed to raise questions and provoke thinking.
The State Destroys the Internet
One possibility is that the state is as adaptive as capitalism. I’m always amazed at how capitalism has evolved over the centuries. From mercantilism to free market to social market to state capitalism, as a meme it readily adapts to new environments. One possibility is that the state is the same – sufficiently flexible to adapt to new conditions. Consequently, one can imagine that the state grabs sufficient control of the internet to turn it into a tool that at best enhances – and at worst, doesn’t threaten – citizens’ connection to it. Iran, with its attempt to build a state-managed internal network that will allow it to closely monitor its citizens’ every move, is a scary example of the former. China – with its great firewall – may be an example of the latter. But one not need pick on non-western states.
And a networked world will provide states – especially democratic ones – with lots of reasons to seize greater control of their citizens’ lives. From organized crime, to terrorism, to identity theft, governments find lots of reasons to monitor their citizens. This is to say nothing of advanced persistent threats which create a state of continual online warfare – or sort of modern day phoney phishy war – between China, the United States, Iran and others. This may be the ultimate justification.
Indeed, as a result of these threats, the United States already has an extensive system for using the internet to monitor its own citizens and even my own country – Canada – tried to pass a law last year to significantly ramp up the monitoring of citizens online. The UK, of course, has just proposed a law whose monitoring provisions would make any authoritarian government squeal with glee. And just last week we found out that the UK government is preparing to cut a blank check for internet service providers to pay for installing the monitoring systems to record what its citizens do online.
Have no doubts, this is about the state trying to ensure the internet serves – or at least doesn’t threaten – its interests.
This is sadly, the easiest future to imagine since it conforms with the world we already know – one where states are ascendant. However, this future represents, in many ways, a linear projection of the future – and our world, especially our networked world, rarely behaves in a linear fashion. So we should be careful about confusing familiarity with probability.
The Internet Destroys the State
Another possibility is that the internet undermines our connection with the state. Online we become increasingly engaged with epistemic communities – be it social, like someone’s World of Warcraft guild, or professional, such as an association with a scientific community. Meanwhile, in the physical world, local communities – possibly at the regional level – become ascendant. In both cases, regulations and rules created by the state feel increasingly like an impediment to conducting our day to day lives, commerce and broader goals. Frustration flares, and increasingly someone in Florida feels less and less connection with someone in Washington state – and the common sense of identity, the imagined community, created by the state begins to erode.
This is, of course, hard for many people to imagine – especially Americans. But for many people in the world – including Canadians – the unity of the state is not a carefree assumption. There have been three referenda on breaking up Canada in my lifetime. More to the point, this process probably wouldn’t start in places where the state is strongest (such as in North America); rather, it would start in places where it is weakest. Think Somalia, Egypt (at the moment) or Belgium (which has basically functioned for two years without a government and no one seemed to really notice). Maybe this isn’t a world with no state – but lots of little states (which I think breaks with our mold of what we imagine the state to be to a certain degree) or maybe some new organizing mechanism, one which leverages local community identities, but can co-exist with a network of diffused but important transnational identities. Or maybe the organizing unit gets bigger, so that greater resources can be called upon to manage ne,w network-based threats.
I, like most people find this world harder to imagine. This is because so many of our assumptions suddenly disappear. If not the state, then what? Who or what protects and manages the internet infrastructure? What about other types of threats – corporate interests, organized and cyber-crime, etc.? This is true paradigm-shifting stuff (apologies for use of the word,) and frankly, I still find myself too stuck in my Newtonian world and the rules make it hard to imagine or even know what quantum mechanics will be like. Again, I want to separate imagining the future with its probability. The two are not always connected, and this is why thinking about this future, as uncomfortable and alienating as it may be, is probably an important exercise.
McWorld – The Internet Rewards the Corporation
One of the big assumptions I often find about people who write/talk about the internet is that it almost always assumes that the individual is the fundamental unit of analysis. There are good reasons for this – using social media, an individual’s capacity to be disruptive has generally increased. And, as Clay Shirky has outlined, the need for coordinating institutions and managers has greatly diminished. Indeed, Shirky’s blog post on the collapse of complex business models is (in addition to being a wonderful piece) a fantastic description of how a disruptive technology can undermine the capacity of larger complex players in a system and benefit smaller, simpler stakeholders. Of course, the smaller stakeholder in our system may not be the individual – it may be an actor that is smaller, nimbler than the state, that can foster an imagined community, and can adopt various forms of marshaling resources for self-organization to hierarchical management. Maybe it is the corporation.
During the conversation at FooCamp, Tim O’Reilly pressed this point with great effect. It could be that the corporation is actually the entity best positioned to adapt to the internet age. Small enough to leverage networks, big enough to generate a community that is actually loyal and engaged.
Indeed, it is easy to imagine a feedback loop that accelerates the ascendance of the corporation. If our imagined communities of nation states cannot withstand a world of multiple narratives and so become weaker, corporations would benefit not just from a greater capacity to adapt, but the great counterbalance to their power – state regulation and borders – might simultaneously erode. A world where more and more power – through information, money and human capital – gets concentrated in corporations is not hard to imagine. Indeed there are many who believe this is already our world. Of course, if the places (generally government bodies) where corporate conflicts – particularly those across sectors – cannot be mediated peacefully then corporations may turn much more aggressive. The need to be bigger, to marshal more resources, to have a security division to defend corporate interests, could lead to a growth in corporations as entities we barely imagine today. It’s a scary future, but not one that hasn’t been imagined several times in SciFi novels, and not one I would put beyond the realm of imagination.
The End of the World
The larger point of all this is that new technologies do change the way we imagine our communities. A second and third order impact of the printing press was its critical role in creating the modern nation-state. The bigger question is, what will be the second and third order impacts of the internet – on our communities (real and imagined), our identity and where power gets concentrated?
As different as the outcomes above are, they share one important thing in common. None represent the status quo. In each case, the nature of the state, and its relationship with citizens, shifts. Consequently, I find it hard to imagine a future where the internet does not continue to put a real strain on how we organize ourselves, and in turn the systems we have built to manage this organization. Consequently, it is not hard to imagine that as more and more of those institutions – including potentially the state itself – come under strain, it could very likely push systems – like the international state system – that are presently stable into a place of instability. It is worth noting that after the printing press, one of the first real nation states – France – wreaked havoc on Europe for almost a half century, using its enhanced resources to conquer pretty much everyone in its path.
While I am fascinated by technology and believe it can be harnessed to do good, I like to think that I am not – as Evgeny labels them – a techno-utopian. We need to remember that, looking back on our history, the second and third order effects of some technologies can be highly destabilizing, which carries with it real risks of generating significant bloodshed and conflict. Hence the title of this blog post and the FooCamp session: The End of the World.
This is not a call for a renewed Luddite manifesto. Quite the opposite – we are on a treadmill we cannot get off. Our technologies have improved our lives, but they also create new problems that, very often social innovations and other technologies will be needed to solve. Rather, I want to raise this because I believe it to be important that still more people – particularly those in the valley and other technology hubs (and not just military strategists) – be thinking critically about what the potential second and third order effects of the internet, the web and the tools they are creating, so that they can contribute to the thinking around potential technological, social and institutional responses that could hopefully mitigate against the worst outcomes.
I hope this helps prompt further thinking and discussion.
eaves.ca 
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This is a superb essay, from someone who seemingly is encountering these ideas for the first time and who is taking them seriously instead of reflexively rejecting them, which is what normally happens when someone suggests that the State could be made redundant without harm to everyone.
You must take a look at Hans-Hermann Hoppe, whose academic works refute any argument that the State is needed to produce security and secure rights.
Hans Hoppe takes on the most difficult subject in economic and political theory: the provision of security. He argues that the service is better provided by free markets than government, while addressing a hundred counter-arguments. Here we have an important updating of an argument rarely made even in the libertarian tradition.
“Without the erroneous public perception and judgment of the state as just and necessary and without the public’s voluntary cooperation, even the seemingly most powerful government would implode and its powers evaporate. Thus liberated, we would regain our right to self-defense and be able to turn to freed and unregulated insurance agencies for efficient professional assistance in all matters of protection and conflict resolution.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe
http://mises.org/document/1893/The-Private-Production-of-Defense
The question is not wether or not a Stateless society would be better or could work. It would be better, infinitely better, and would work very well. The question is how do we get there without a fight.
Eniki,
Thank you for the comment. I don’t think anyone (self-included) is trying to compare the state to the printing press, rather I’m trying to talk about the longer term impact technologies that allow people to share information on the nature of the state.
I also agree that the state will likely not disappear quietly, indeed one of my points in the conclusion is that this process (if that is the trend) could be exceptionally violent.
Eniki,
Thank you for the comment – love the links, insights and suggested readings. Definitely will check them out!
In the “The Internet Destroys the State” section you write “Maybe this isn’t a world with no state – but lots of little state…”. I think neither of these is the most likely result in this scenario. More likely is that there is a state, in most cases of the same size, but marginalized.
The printing press didn’t do away with the Catholic Church and replace it with the State. The Catholic Church is still around. However, it doesn’t dominate international politics the way it did. It does not necessarily hold the first loyalty of its adherents. Its influence on daily lives for many (not all) is diminished.
Similarly, in most cases the nation states will likely persist. But more and more of what we look to our states for, we will find elsewhere.
Personally, I’m beginning to think that the “McWorld” scenario of corporate ascendance is most likely, if not preferred, and will require conscious action to avoid.
The problem with this idea is that it compares two unlike things to make its assertion.
The State is not like the printing press, an inert, mute object that turns paper into books when its operated by an apprentice. The State is an active, vicious, violent organization of hierarchical predators, that actively suck the life essence out of man. Quite a difference isn’t it?
The State and its aparatchicks will not go quietly into the night. They will attempt to use their monopoly on the use of force to ensure that they are never marginalized or outflanked. This is precisely why they are attacking the internet right now; left unchecked, the unregulated internet represents an existential threat to them.
There is no reason to assume that the Nation State will not cease to exist, just as every single currency ever printed by a Nation State has collapsed, so to will the idea of the State disappear from the face of the earth.
As we speak, there are moves afoot to create a one world government that will replace all of the individual nations of the world. Clearly, one way or the other, either the people through their own bespoke arrangements or a small group of bureaucrats are going to replace the State. It is now inevitable that it is going to happen; the only question is what shape it will take.
I don’t believe I compared the State to the Printing Press. The comparison I made was printing press:church::internet:state.
Yes, Luke Closs reminded me of a great term around this – one way the state could decline is if gets hollowed out. There may actually be a fine line between being highly networked and hollowed out which may also make this hard to see happening.
Interesting BUT. First, Mercantilism has not gone away. It’s just what we call regulated capitalism. At least in theory, regulated capitalism is controlled by the regulators, but when you consider how much money they can influence, money tries to influence them. One hand cannot clap without the other.
Second, there is not and never has been a free market. There are always more free and less free markets, never a market completely free of state regulation. And that which we call a “free” market is never free anyway — it is always regulated by what the customer is willing to buy. You can WANT to sell postpaid cellphones but if the market demands prepaid cellphones, that is what you will sell.
Taking the long view of things, there have always been two poles of organization of society — voluntary organization by markets, and coercive organization by states. As a pacifist, I cannot ever support the latter. I would not support the latter EVEN IF it have better outcomes. Fortunately, I don’t have to face that problem because coercion turns out to be expensive, and voluntary turns out to be cheap. I’d rather have multiple corporations competing for my coin than one government demanding it, anyway.
A couple of points I want to inject into the online discussion (as I injected them into the real-world discussion at Foo Camp):
1. We can already see signs of the corporation as an actor of stature to match the nation-state in the fact that companies like Google and Facebook effectively have a “foreign policy” with regard to China. Google had a foreign policy with regard to the Egyptian revolution. I know at least some people in government who have remarked on this.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s useful to frame the current financial disorder as a kind of “war” between corporations (particularly hedge funds) and nation states. George Soros vs. the British pound was only a foretaste; since 2008, the destabilization of the Euro is a struggle between financial firms and nation states, with nation states trying to preserve their currency and banking system against those who would profit from destabilizing them.
And you can certainly see the recent JP Morgan losses as a cyber war between JP Morgan and an array of hedge funds.
And for that matter, it is useful to see the current state of the world economy as collateral damage from those financial cyberwars.
2. In this regard it is very useful to keep in mind the distinction that Bill Janeway makes in his upcoming book _Doing Capitalism_: we tend to think of the world economy as a two-player game between the market and the state. Bill notes that it is actually a three-player game between the market of firms providing real goods and services to individuals, the state, and financial capital, which is often confused with the market, but is actually a third force with goals distinct from either of the others, often as inimical to the real market as to the state.
3. The question then might be framed as “is the internet a fourth force, a new way of organizing individuals that will replace nation states and corporations, or will it be a tool that gives more power to corporations in their wars with each other and with nation states?” And “will the power of internet-aggregated individuals be a force for good standing up to corporations that do ill?” And “will the internet better enable corporations providing real goods and services to individuals, including returning financial capital to its supportive role in the real market, or will it be harnessed by the vampire squids of the world in their war on both the true market and the state?”
A couple of points I want to inject into the online discussion (as I injected them into the real-world discussion at Foo Camp):
1. We can already see signs of the corporation as an actor of stature to match the nation-state in the fact that companies like Google and Facebook effectively have a “foreign policy” with regard to China. Google had a foreign policy with regard to the Egyptian revolution. I know at least some people in government who have remarked on this.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s useful to frame the current financial disorder as a kind of “war” between corporations (particularly hedge funds) and nation states. George Soros vs. the British pound was only a foretaste; since 2008, the destabilization of the Euro is a struggle between financial firms and nation states, with nation states trying to preserve their currency and banking system against those who would profit from destabilizing them.
And you can certainly see the recent JP Morgan losses as a cyber war between JP Morgan and an array of hedge funds.
And for that matter, it is useful to see the current state of the world economy as collateral damage from those financial cyberwars.
2. In this regard it is very useful to keep in mind the distinction that Bill Janeway makes in his upcoming book _Doing Capitalism_: we tend to think of the world economy as a two-player game between the market and the state. Bill notes that it is actually a three-player game between the market of firms providing real goods and services to individuals, the state, and financial capital, which is often confused with the market, but is actually a third force with goals distinct from either of the others, often as inimical to the real market as to the state.
3. The question then might be framed as “is the internet a fourth force, a new way of organizing individuals that will replace nation states and corporations, or will it be a tool that gives more power to corporations in their wars with each other and with nation states?” And “will the power of internet-aggregated individuals be a force for good standing up to corporations that do ill?” And “will the internet better enable corporations providing real goods and services to individuals, including returning financial capital to its supportive role in the real market, or will it be harnessed by the vampire squids of the world in their war on both the true market and the state?”
its good am now enlightened, i like your views on the subject matter
There are so many scenarios. If the internet is used from the beginning as primarily a military tool? Would it not be the case that the most powerful Nation State would never allow it to be a loose canon in respect of any type of development which could adversely affect the Nations power structure.
In other words the internet must be controlled to the point where it serves one particular power rather than another. Is this a possibility and to what extent is computing going to manage our national and world systems. though it may sound crazy, is there a possibility that such powerful collective intelligence could in itself become the power structure that evaluates, controls and directs every aspect of human governance?
I totally agree with this line of thought. A revolution of the State as we know, because of the work and pace of Progress (aka the Internet), IS bound to happen.
You can’t stumble on the printed press and expect that nothing will change within the Roman Church or that nationalism won’t exist beyond village-level or city-level.
By the same line of thought, you can’t stumble on the Internet and expect that forms of auto-organization (which remind me of reminiscent forms of anarchism, actually) at a global scale won’t happen — and open-source and crowd-sourcing is just the beginning –.
Centralization of the State was the statemen leitmotiv of the post-printed-press era in France (Paris). Referenda and universal sufrage were the new tools used in this Industrial age to legitimate the State rulers. State won power from printed press compared to Roman Church, who lost power (mainly because Knowledge was now commoditized).
I say de-centralization of the State (and de-hierarchization of the State) should be the natural leitmotive of the Internet era in Earth. I mean, an url is an url; there’s really no bigger hierarchy than the Page-rank, the followers, the re-tweets the +es and likes. Do we really need more than that to auto-organize ourselves and legitimate a future nimbler State new rulers (and it’s a heck of a lot more than a vote on a ballot, don’t you think)?As for point 3 from mr. Tim O’Reilly: Corporations will use the internet as a tool to gain more power; they will gain more power than the current State will. But so will individuals; and because of the anarchycal neutrality nature of the links that make the internet, I bet that auto-organized individuals power should out-power corporations power … Finally, somewhere between Julian Assange, soccer-coach José Mourinho and pop singers, I expect some kind of popular political Leader to rise and lead the way, instead of being brood inside political parties.
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Too much of this discussion is powered by hair splitting of language meanings. Well, here are a few more: “Corporation” is built from corpus, meaning Body, and “State” can also refer to phase or condition. Neither State nor Corporation needs to be considered as something other than as products of Us, yet so much of the discussion is built on the coceit that these are not Us, but some kind of Them.
Furthermore, if we are going to talk about how things evolve, we should also reconsider Darwin’s take on the word -as adaptation based on need within an environment. The answer to all of these future questions will emanate (as always) from how we react to, and adapt to, our future needs. I find it very troubling that too much discourse in the world today ignores what we need and concentrates on what we think we want. Evolution follows the path of need.
What we will NEED in the future is a mechanism that allows us to freely share and aggregate our disparate thoughts and experiences. Because of the sheer size of the problem, we may end up stratifying ourselves into bodies of shared interests (a la Google+’s current model). These bodies (corporate) will be focused and will generate streams of memes that will blow into other bodies and cause movement. What we will also NEED then are mechanisms or operators to help bridge (and/or interpret) the disparate meme streams so that useful ones can be shared through the various strata and promoted, while less useful ones can be left behind. In the larger incorporation of the various bodies, we will NEED a non-trivial understanding of the overall direction the larger body is heading in and whether that direction is beneficial to the health of the overall body. If the larger body becomes too isolated in its stratified members, it will, naturally, fail. We can never deny we are stronger together than as individuals.
Will the unit of measure remain the individual? Of course. The brain, for example, needs its neural cells to function, although gaining a few, losing a few, doesn’t alter significantly its overall growth and functioning. I see a future model more along the lines of a Global Mind to oversee the various corporate Bodies stratified according to interest, purpose, and/or function. The Internet will have to act more than ever as the neural network connecting and delivering all the messages from all the firing individual synapses, but it will not and should not be the regulator of the body. That specialized function will still be needed to determine the State of the body.
Forgive the biomimetic view, but it has always informed my own understanding of the world at its simplest level. We have models of self-organization throughout the natural world from the sub-microscopic to the cosmic scale. With a dose of perspective that leads to some real humility, perhaps discussions of our own NEEDs can be a dash clearer along these lines. Individuals can help guide the processes that lead to our future state, even when motivated strictly by their own personal needs and desires, but the needs of the greater body cannot be dismissed nor ignored simply to satisfy the needs and desires of a subset of the larger body.
I neglected to mention what motivated that previous posting: the sequence of printing press -> Renaissance, etc. I’ve always felt that the printing press is the first significant innovation in modern times but it didn’t cause the Renaissance. It came along as a response to a great need motivated by a significant Malthusian event – the Black Plague of Europe. Because the population of Europe was decimated by the Plague during the 14th Century, it meant that an unprecedented need had to be filled. Too many people with specific knowledge and skills were lost during the plague years and that knowledge needed to be found and shared. The largest repository of knowledge at the time, and the only certain means of communication since th fall of Rome was the Church, but they kept the knowledge behind closed doors, both literal (monastic rules) and symbolic (widespread illiteracy). the printing press in general was the answer, but before Gutenburg, it was almost as inefficient as hand copying because needed to carve a plate. Nevertheless, the need to know things lost to the Plague and to distance and to a fallen central aggregation and dissemination mechanism spurred innovation and literacy. The Black Death caused it, and the technology and reshaping of society helped to form a new epoch of growth and reach we call Renaissance.
Thank you for a wonderful essay.
but I do not think state or internet is really important dichotomy.
Internet gets outdated fast, mobile platform makes it a niche.
Many new startups do not even consider having web sites restricting access to mobile (instagram is a good example, even google reports that more users access their google plus profiles from mobile platform using Google plus app rather then web site)
Most probably in 3-4 years internet as we get used to it – a set of web sites consisting of web pages access by http protocol will become a media of hobbyist interest, with no important, so dichotomy state vs internet will be resolved by new technologies (mobile, first) which will replace internet.
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