Effective Use of Social Tech to Check Embedded Power Structures
Connect to Check | 6
Checking the State of Things
So far in this series we have followed the rise of technology-driven global virtual communities throughout our sociosphere, defining social technology (s.tech) and framing its impact through the concept of interconnection and the subsequent downstream effects of hyper-connectivity and hyper-sociability.
After establishing a base of structural and offensive realism, we constructed a global landscape of state-based anarchy, encapsulated by the global non-unified state system (GNUSS for short). Next, we framed our thinking about geopolitical and societal dynamics within another overlapping model: the SLM Panarchy - taken from Daniel Smachtenburger’s take on anthropological cultural materialism, is designed to give us both a lens and a filter by which to observe and place into context various sociological, political, technological and economic dynamics within a given space in the GNUSS.
From studying the layers of the SLM Panarchy within the setting of the GNUSS, we noticed that both stateness and s.tech sit at a crucial crossroads between citizen and governance. We left off with the addition of sovereignty into the dynamic mix - reduced for clarity’s sake to a freedom of choice and action, which can be scaled across individual to organisation to institution. Because the people of Earth - the everyday citizens, the 99% - deserve sovereignty (as long as it isn’t opposing or imposing on others) and especially the ability to choose or act in terms of their governance, arguably more so than the institutions governing them (because of the inherent asymmetry of power), if we take our observations all the way back to the foundation of stateness, we can see James Scott’s notion of manipulative grain-based stateness as a framework to think about how states can both maximise for their citizen sovereignty whilst simultaneously serving as sovereignty sink for many citizens across the world. Using two case studies: the EU and the UN, we concluded that for sovereignty to flow unobstructed in future governance, the current world system would need to transition from the non-unified GNUSS to a global unified state system (a GUSS). (Whether we need to remove the “state” from the system is another question for another day.)
To claw back sovereignty - our birthright - it appears many historic thinkers, from Rousseau to Locke (including many of the influential anarchists that have come and gone1) see our only option as forcing the state to align itself to our collective needs. War, game-theoretic nuclear brinkmanship, energy and resource coercion, economic manipulation, unfettered Big Pharma, multi-polar traps based on decentralised (somewhat exponential) weaponised technology like drones and AI - all of this grimness is a clear-shot sign that most of our global states are misaligned to their citizen base. As we shall see shortly, one way citizens can and do (albeit only temporarily) successfully shift this alignment back in their favour is through collective action. Such collective action, through the effective wielding of s.tech, may be a new hope for checking the power of a corrupt or dysfunctional localised state system.
Let’s now begin the last part of this series, and in doing so see if s.tech can prove to be a sovereignty-maximiser and, for all intents and purposes, become a tool for checking the absolute power of the state.
Collective Action
Warfare, beyond the obvious, is not something to be taken lightly. In War and Peace and War (2006) and then later in Ultrasociety (2015) Peter Turchin, founder of Cliodynamics (a method of modelling theoretical historical social science) laid out a framework by which he argues that cooperation is an evolutionary response to the pressures of intergroup conflict, suggesting that humanity’s most impressive social and political advancements have been forged through the brutality of war.
Stateness and warfare, as we have seen in the previous sections, go hand-in-hand. From military industrial complexes to territorial expansion and resource acquisition, stateness, because of its powerful apparatus, is a great mechanism for waging war.
Turchin also argues that elite overproduction (when too many elites compete for power) leads to internal instability and eventual state collapse. Elite Theory in political science discusses similar mechanisms, but they are almost all intrinsically linked to some form of stateness; stateness is the defining tool for high-level elite capture because what do the elites even capture? Well, at the highest level, the state apparatus.
James Scott’s theory surrounding the s.tech of grain extraction (covered in Part 5)2 provides a mechanism for Turchin’s cycles of agrarian collapse - namely that states over-expand their ability to extract surplus, leading to peasant revolts, elite fragmentation, and ecological breakdown. In such a scenario, the corrupt subset of the ruling class (or the entire governing body in the case of kleptocratic states) are either directly a part of, or adjacent to, the state-apparatus, and appear to continuously expand their power until the system becomes unsustainable.3 Corruption, at any level of the system, is not great. Corruption at the top of the hierarchy, and throughout the powerful arms, ones holding onto nukes, or at least an army, is far from ideal. Synthesising Scott and Turchin’s work provides us with some more substance for the state-based anarchy we have been calling the GNUSS throughout this series.
So stateness expands, because spheres of influence wish to expand influence, gain control and maintain or grow power in the process of ruling and competing. Influence can be expanded outwards, with multiple spheres of influence encroaching upon one another, leading to the game theoretic geopolitics we see within the GNUSS.4 Influence can also expand inwards, where the sphere of control focuses on tightening up that already contained within its given territory, leading to instances of localised state-overreach, loss of citizen sovereignty and general state stagnation.5 Either way, in a GNUSS, large scale state expansion is more often than not net-bad.6 One downstream effect of an over-expansion of state influence globally and locally is a misalignment within the principal-agent relationship.
Historically, collective action has been the go-to tool for principals trying to realign the agents of their governing system to their best interests, values and shared beliefs. A political amalgam of the Nietzchian will-to-power perhaps applies here. When the plebeians took issue with the patricians we saw the common citizens rise against the ruling elite and in 494 BCE the First Roman Secession was staged. Essentially a mass strike, the plebeians left the city and refused to work or fight in the military - they refused to work for the state apparatus.
Using the SLM Panarchy, significant changes to the infrastructure and socialstructure of the Roman governing space came with the instating of the Tribune of the Plebs, which gave plebeians some representation, a seat at the table, and veto power over legislation. Whilst not completely balanced, the First Secession demonstrates how organised collective action can indeed force systemic changes in a hierarchical society. It also serves as a reminder that citizens are, or atleast, have been, expected to fight for what they think is right.
Mob warfare, like all warfare, is brutal; from the French Revolutions of 1789–1799, to the Russian Revolution in 1917, even the Civil Rights movement that swept across North America during the 1950s–1960s, and the Arab Spring between 2010-2012, each time it becomes evident that the mob - the citizenry - if bound within the tightly woven fabric of collective organisation and action, can affect real structural change to the hierarchical structure - the state - they belong to. Most often the need for such change comes from the top-down from the superstructure - the misalignment of the state - but such change can be actioned from the ground-up, working its way through the infrastructure (literally citizenry given the space and freedom to act) to the socialstructure (literally the citizenry able to form a collective within their given sociosphere). The agents are not always required for the principals to affect change.
The ability to communicate, organise, mobilise and act (surreptitiously labelled COMA) sits behind such collective action. If we frame COMA within our previous definition of s.tech,7 as well as within the phenomenological context of hyper-connectivity8 and hyper-sociability9, we can see that, at least in theory, s.tech provides a means for maximising collective action. S.tech becomes a new means of actioning such change.
Early Warnings
With that being said, the ability to sway and corrupt a mob to carry out a malign actor’s bidding is something as old as time itself. Weaponisation of the mob is a tactic used by all sides of the political arena.
Julius Caesar later manipulated the plebeians to carry out his imperial takeover. From the Spanish Inquisition under the guidance of the Catholic Church between 1478–1834, to modern genocides like Rwanda in 1994 and 1930-40 Nazi-era Germany, to even the weaponisation of mass paranoia under Stalin’s USSR, mobs - large groups of people - have been shown that they are easily shaped, manipulated and put to work by influential individuals with their own agenda, using the state apparatus to do so.
A look at modern day Myanmar in 2017 shows the manner in which s.tech has become integrated into this malignant process. Facebook was used by Junta military leaders to incite mob violence against the Rohingya muslim minority, encouraging mob attacks, forced displacement, and even killings. With over 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh, and over 10,000 men, women and children needlessly losing their lives, the military state turned to social media to justify further violent crackdowns.
A checking mechanism becomes not only a method in which citizens (or principals) have the capacity to recognise when the state in which they belong to has been misaligned or corrupted, but more than an early warning system it becomes their capacity for organising collectively, to incite change via action. In other words, to check the state is to both be able to realise when the state requires checking, and, if necessary, have the capacity to physically stand up to the state.
Not wanting to get political (if that even remains a possibility), this belief is one reason why the controversial Second Amendment of the United States Declaration of Independence was put into, and is still kept in, place. In theory, citizens need the Second Amendment to defend themselves, their loved ones and their property when the state fails, or if the state becomes taken-over. (If you want an example of modern-day state-takeovers, look at kleptocracies, like Mubarak’s military-kleptocracy in Egypt, or the technocratic takeover that played into the Arab Spring in Tunisia, or the resource-kleptocracy of oil-rich Nigeria, or the entrenched nepotistic network of the U.K or U.S. political systems.)
I am not saying the world would have been better off if the citizens of those kleptocratic states had guns. That would be absurd. What I am pointing to is the clear cut example of just how much emphasis was placed on the founding of the United States of America for their citizens to have the collective capacity to check the state, so much so they allowed them all to bear arms. Politics and guns aside (because, as it turns out, s.tech may prove to be the new and effective weapon of choice), it is imperative to the formation of a healthy state system that a state can be checked by its citizenry if necessary. When scaled, this healthy system becomes the foundation for the hypothetical GUSS.
Another reason that a global state system based on anarchy is dangerous is when we notice most of the world is organised into an interconnected global supply chain, where an action in one section has downstream effects on another, completely non-localised section of the supply-chain (for example, we live in a world where a fire in a Japanese toner factory forces a teacher the following day in London to completely change their lesson plan because the worksheets could no longer be printed - that teacher being me).
This interconnected supply-chain is also superimposed onto the GNUSS. Running through and relying on multiple disparate, competing, and in many cases, conflicting states, the interconnectedness of the global supply is even weaponised for their own game theoretic, geopolitical purposes: when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it disrupted global grain exports since Ukraine and Russia together supply around 30% of the world's wheat exports. Countries in the Middle East and Africa, highly dependent on wheat imports, faced food shortages, causing inflation and political unrest (e.g. protests in Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia). With Ukrainian infrastructure under siege, who was the biggest supplier of grain to these states? Russia.
In Yemen in late 2023 and early 2024, Houthi rebels trained by Iranian forces began attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea, a critical maritime trade route through which 12% of global trade passes (via the Suez Canal). Shipping companies rerouted around South Africa, increasing shipping costs, delays, and inflation for goods worldwide. China, perhaps unwittingly or not, has been funding the Houthi rebels by purchasing Iranian oil. China, through its Belt and Road Initiative, also hold the Suez Canal as a vital component of the long-term cumulative plan. However, the rerouting of ships, especially around the Cape of Good Hope, conveniently increases value to the infrastructure projects - especially ports - that China has been funding along the South African coastline. Something smells geopolitically fishy, and it’s not the cargo.
Within constellations of power public facing figureheads are the visibly bright stars but the real faces of power lie in the dark voids between. Whilst the future of sovereignty is uncertain, an interconnected global supply chain that falls victim to multipolarity, game theory and fragmentation, suggests it will likely exist in varied domains beyond and between state borders. What also lies beyond those borders? S.tech, for one.
How can s.tech utilise interconnection for net-positivity?
Can s.tech check the power of the state?
S.tech as a Tool for Checking the State
To answer these questions, first we have to look back at historical examples of how states have been checked. Efforts were largely focussed on meeting the monopoly of force in a given territory head on in two methods: first, a measure of force so quick and intense that it catches the state defence systems off-guard, using speed and surprise as an advantage (e.g. The Fall of the Bastille during the French Revolution in 1789, or the The October Revolution in Russia in 1917) or second, the citizenry uses sheer numbers, grit and will-power to overwhelm and cripple the state force (e.g. The Indian Independence Movement of the 1940s, The People Power Revolution in the Philippines in 1986, or the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989). Changes to the local state system that come about through means like this can be classified as “hard changes”.
Traditionally, however, hard change is often accompanied by a paradox. Using force to remove force means that, even if the citizenry successfully checks the state they are not in a position - not holding the knowledge or experience to scale administrative duties, and lacking proper leadership in state-level management - to maintain what they have achieved. Inadequate time to implement proper changes leads to corruptive regression.
Both the French and Russian Revolutions are prime examples in which the revolutionaries succeeded in dismantling the monarchy but lacked the administrative expertise to establish a stable government. France experienced the Reign of Terror and regressed into authoritarian rule under Napoleon, and Russia went through a civil war, famine, and calamitous purges.
The second and third order effects of hard changes can prove counterproductive; force vs force is a strange paradox that must be factored into any mechanism wishing to check the power of the state, because if force replaces force, another force is likely to replace it, and the cycle continues.
We can also witness this paradox in modern examples of when s.tech has contributed to hard change. Sudanese protests in 2019, organised through WhatsApp and Facebook, ended in a violent revolution. The Arab Spring (2010-2012) saw protesters in Tunisia and Egypt leverage social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to share videos, organise protests, and mobilise semi-globally. Widespread outrage, amplified by s.tech, led to the downfall of leaders like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia.
However, how better off are these states now since hard change was enacted? Inflation rates in Sudan have soared, reaching 382.8% in 2021, and in April 2023 intense fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, resulting in over 150,000 deaths and displacing more than 11 million people internally. As of 2024, Sudan is also ranked the world’s most corrupt country.
In Tunisia the story is slightly better (although this is not saying much because the bar is clearly pretty low). President Kais Saied, elected in 2019, has been criticized for consolidating power and undermining democratic institutions. In 2021, he suspended parliament and assumed executive authority, actions viewed by many as a regression from the democratic gains achieved post-Arab Spring. Slightly better, yet far from ideal.
Egypt has fared the best, yet still scores a sloppy 130 out of 180 countries in a global corruption ranking (scoring 30/100 in the Corruption Perception Index10).
Do not get me wrong, history has shown hard change can certainly enact immediate near-to-mid-term change, but the data also suggests it is limited in a long term capacity to maintain effective change, and can prove to be net-negative in some cases.
But some things are hard and some things are soft. Low and behold, this intersection is where s.tech comes out to play: s.tech affords citizens the ability to enact both hard and soft change in ways unheard of until now.
In order to understand how, let us return to the three characteristics of s.tech.
Ability to share a range of media to other people, locally or globally:
Whereas before individual state citizens thought they had no choice but to endure state-level corruption through acquiescence, now the ability to share moments and events real-time, connects, reconnects or interconnects those who are affected or outraged by such events. Spreading throughout a social network, these “outrage nodes” continue to propagate and connect with one another.
Outrage nodes directly “voice” their concerns. A prerequisite of a healthy state system is to allow citizenry to voice their concerns without fear of prosecution. Due to the real-time nature of s.tech, depending on the infrastructure in use within a given state's territory, this propagation can occur very quickly. Individual voices that would seldom be heard before now conjoin into an echoing boom, felt not only locally, but more importantly, heard and felt globally. From the widespread outcry that is generated by these outrage nodes, states are pressured now, more than ever, by other states in the GNUSS (the UN being an experimental alignment maximiser) to be more aligned to their citizenry.
Far from congregating on the doorsteps of the town hall, for the 70% of tech-integrated Gen Z’s who are involved in social and political activism, platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram are now serving as hubs for information and mobilization.11 A 2020 survey revealed that 80% of Americans believe social media platforms are effective for raising public awareness about political or social issues, and 77% see them as effective for creating sustained social movements. S.tech, through its ability to share media, is becoming a tool for change.
For example, protesters in Hong Kong (2019-2020) used messaging apps like Telegram and online platforms like Reddit to organise decentralised movements, share live updates and supporting media, and avoid detection by state surveillance. Echos of outrage continue to ring out. Through such integration, citizens can use the s.tech to inform new legislations and sanctions, alignment helping to enable the socialstructure layer to re-bind, and re-link to the superstructure. Reintegration of the structural layers within a given territory can be achieved, at least in part, through s.tech.
Connecting two or more people who can share ideas and abstractions:
The ability to share ideas, abstractions and media via digital space means that it is not just those atop the hierarchical position in the state system who can theorise over governance. Sharing of information, as well as information technology, has put the scope for self-education back into the hands of the people who need it - the citizens - the principals.
With just a simple personal tech-stack developing in the infrastructure layer, citizens can share their thoughts and opinions on both the socialstructure and superstructure levels. Sharing not just existing concepts but also connecting otherwise disparate people has enabled groups to work through completely novel concepts (like my theoretical work in progress: the DAO Educational System - see below).
Decentralising state understanding can increase symmetry of information diffusion. Global climate activism groups like Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future use digital platforms to share ideas, propose policies, and organise protests across continents. Bitcoin and blockchain technology demonstrates how decentralised information-sharing fosters new governance concepts outside traditional state control.
El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender reflects a state-level experiment influenced by decentralised citizen-driven innovations. More citizens find themselves in a position to make more and more optimal sensemaking. From this more and more citizens will either become aware of when and how best to organise collective action to check the power of the state and voice their concerns, or they will stay “loyal” to their state system and resist any proposed changes.
Increases capacity to be present with other individuals - be that digitally or physically:
This last point about allowing for more physical and digital presence may act as the glue which binds the other two points to a larger state-checking mechanism. It has to do with the citizens ability to safely and easily voice their concerns by ultimately choosing to “exit” the state territory and relocate to a new, more agreeable one.12
If citizenry could easily exit their state as a form of protest, then that state would eventually fall to a “state of one”.13 What this envisions is less open borders (mainly because the idea of hard borders could theoretically be assumed to be eroded through the juxtaposing yet synergistic processes of future interconnection and decentralisation) and more a freedom of choice - where to place your trust and loyalty, especially if you think that trust and loyalty is not being upheld by the agents (state) operating the sphere of influence over the socialstructure and superstructure layers of your territory.
One major reason such exit strategies do not work when scaled up is the cost of immigration. Physically, emotionally, economically, socially, culturally, it simply is not a viable option for many disillusioned members of failing states around the world, or the states that hold a potential space for them. That being said, considering that “individual-level social and spatial behaviours influence emergent network structure”, spatial-movement - epitomised through hyper-sociability - especially if resource-based, creates strong emergent network-properties and increases information flow across the network as a whole. Future protopian scenarios in which digital interconnection has spanned physical connection might prove net-positive in this context.
Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) or blockchain-based governance, for example, might offer a form of virtual "exit" for citizens unable to relocate physically, levelling the playing field between the principal-agent relationship by allowing the principals to effectively choose agents not simply local to them, offering principals a plethora across the global stage of potential agents.
Thus, in answer to the original question, the one posed through the very name of this article series, namely: can s.tech become an effective tool to check the power of the state - yes - it seems s.tech does have the capacity to do just that. In theory, at least.
Yet, as of now, however, the technology within the ecosystem of social networks remains in its infancy. Definitive change will be inherently slow. Most of the world's population are caught up in simply trying to survive. Checking their own misaligned state would, by and large, be out of their personal resource capacity.
But as s.tech and other areas of technology continue to expand, from AI to global virtual communities, the possibility that groups of well-informed, well-intentioned citizenry find a way to band together and use the technology at their fingertips to check the power of their state is, by and large, getting more and more likely to become geopolitical fact rather sci-fiction.
Towards a Network-Governance?
The trajectory of human civilisation has been one of increasing complexity and centralisation. From the scattered tribal units of the hunter-gatherer era to the settled agricultural societies and then into the behemoth industrial machine, the pattern has been clear: as infrastructure improves, societies tend to centralise.
Yet, as we stand on the precipice of the new digital frontier, an unexpected reversal is unfolding. Artificial interconnectivity, powered by technology like blockchain, AI, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things, is pushing civilisation back toward a highly decentralised, personalised, and network-driven structure - one that we have seen will challenge the state’s traditional mechanisms of control.
Before Balaji Srinivasan coined the Network State in 2022, Jan van Dijk had coined the Nework Society in 1999, and, in 2005, Manuel Castelles and Gustavo Cardoso ran with it. Returning back to 2022, Xiao Sun and her colleagues further reimagined these notions as "A Deeply Interconnected “Primitive Society”". This latter work in particular highlights a clear shift taking place across four major fronts:
First, the decentralisation of production and life is becoming increasingly feasible. Industrialisation forced populations into megacities. Mega factories popped up alongside centralised corporate hubs, concentrating both economic and political power. But network governance may make these urban clusters redundant. With remote work, decentralised production, and digital nomadism on the rise, individuals and businesses are breaking free from reliance on state-controlled urban infrastructure.
As interconnection expands, people are dispersing, choosing to live in regions with better ecological conditions rather than staying bound to industrial-era economic centers. The result? A slow but steady erosion of state control over both labor and capital flows.
Second, enterprises are shrinking. Whereas the industrial economy rewarded mass production and corporate gigantism, today, interconnectivity has flipped that logic on its head. Historically, high transaction costs meant that large enterprises had the upper hand, however digital networks eliminate these inefficiencies, allowing small and mid-sized businesses to thrive without state-backed monopolies.
Transaction costs plummet as peer-to-peer contracting, decentralised supply chains, and smart contracts replace the need for bureaucratic corporate structures. From Sun and her team’s research surrounding China, where the interconnection level has risen from 0.55 in 2020 to a projected 0.91 by 2040, the inflection point is clear: large corporations are losing their grip; fragmented, self-organising economic systems are taking shape. A shrinking enterprise sector means fewer corporate-government alliances, reducing the state’s ability to exert economic influence through regulation and taxation.
Third, personalisation is displacing standardisation. Industrial economies were built on the premise that large-scale production necessitated uniformity - mass-produced goods, centralised infrastructure, and a one-size-fits-all model of economic organisation. But the rise of AI-driven personalisation, decentralised manufacturing, and 3D printing is tearing that model apart. When digital infrastructure allows for hyper-localised, on-demand production, the traditional mechanisms of state oversight (e.g. import/export controls, tariffs, and regulatory bottlenecks) become obsolete.
Finally, the emergence of the sharing economy is further weakening state control over economic life. As resources become more expensive and production tools increasingly sophisticated, ownership is giving way to access-based models. Blockchain-backed distributed ledgers and tokenised economies enable people to share everything from housing to manufacturing equipment without reliance on centralized authorities.
A sharing model further undermines traditional capitalist and statist structures alike because if people no longer need to buy cars, houses, or expensive machinery, the taxable economic footprint of citizens diminishes, limiting the state’s ability to extract wealth and enforce property-based regulation. The more interconnection rises, the more peer-to-peer access replaces top-down ownership models.
The conclusion is unavoidable: the networked information society could honestly prove to be a systemic check on state power, redistributing economic and technological leverage away from centralised institutions and into the hands of self-organising citizen networks.
Careful of Sharp Edges
Having said all this, I am not ignorant to the fact that s.tech sits as a double-edged sword, and one that not all those wielding it are trained in using.
Just like a hammer, it can be used for skilled carpentry, or it can be misused and accidentally breaks the carpenter's fingers. Worse still, the same tool can also be used for acts of a nefarious nature: blunt force trauma.
States can wield s.tech much like the citizenry can - often with greater scope and capacity for influence, given their position embedded within the superstructure of a given territory. The NSA (U.S.) and GCHQ (UK) used Big Tech to conduct mass surveillance through the PRISM Program, where Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook secretly provided user data to U.S. intelligence, and allowed a backdoor access where the NSA bypass encryption to collect emails, messages, and metadata. The Cloud Act (2018) further allowed U.S. authorities gained power to access data stored by Big Tech regardless of user location. It is clear governments weaponise s.tech’s data infrastructure for mass surveillance.
Interconnection, enabling decentralisation, also strengthens state surveillance. The ability to track financial transactions, digital footprints, and social behaviors expands in tandem with network density. China’s case study exemplifies this paradox: while increased interconnection fosters decentralised economic models, it also provides the infrastructure for hyper-surveillance.
Maximising control and coercion - two essential ingredients of a state's existence - from China to Russia and the United States, s.tech is, by all means, well and truly in the power of the beholder. Once large companies with a monopoly over the s.tech industry become captured by the state, setting up special interest and lobby groups to ensure their own synergistic influence on the state level, well, at that point, it becomes very hard for the citizens wielding s.tech to make much of a difference at all. Especially if they wish to enact “soft” change instead of the paradoxically “hard” alternative.
That is why the hope rests with new and disruptive social technology. That is why many are all in for decentralisation.
Social technology, for all the good and the bad it does, completely depends on those who put it to use, but more importantly still, those who control it. That is why it is such a pressing issue: it can make us, or it can break us; it can organise the citizenry, or it can dissolve them; it can make the state, or it can break it.
See: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Murray Rothbard, Noam Chomsky & David Graeber to name a few.
Namely that states were started as a means of controlling and coercing agricultural settlements.
See Sara Chayes work on kleptocratic states.
Outward expansion loosely related to Francis Fukuyama’s description of state “scope” and how this tends to lead to over-expansion, resource depletion or being out-competed on the global stage.
Inward expansion loosely related to Fukuyama’s description of state “capacity” and how this tends to erode freedoms and create an inward-focussed rather than outward-focussed state-apparatus.
Unless it is integrative - yet even then I have my doubts.
Ability to directly share a range of media, locally or globally.
Connecting two or more people who can share ideas and abstractions.
Increases capacity to be present with other individuals - be that digitally or physically.
Increased Density of Interconnected Nodes.
Complex Cause-and-Effect Chains.
Acceleration of Information Flow and Influence.
Global and Virtual Expansion of Social Interactions.
Increased Frequency and Accessibility of Social Engagements.
Replacement of Physical Spaces with Digital Forums.
100 being a shining beacon of state virtue, probably in some Scandinavian-based Utopian dream, 0 being if FIFA and the Cartel’s banded together and started running their own country.
“Easily” in quotations here as there is clearly nothing easy for many migrants who flee their states in today’s current climate - from stories of crossing the Darien, to crossing the English Channel, all serve as dark reminders. The clincher is, in the future, such “forced” migration should be easy and risk-free for every citizen of Earth. Otherwise, how can we uphold sovereignty as a species?
An ability to “exit” is one of the major appeals of Balaji Srinivasan’s “Network State” framework, which envisions a state system structured like a social union, organised around a smart contract, where citizens are free to check the state simply by “opting-out” of one state and “opting-in” to another. While this is not yet feasible considering we still organise ourselves into nation-states, future forms of governance (we hope) will have such an in-built checking mechanism in place.