(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The Netstate Project is the creation of a book describing the rise of an Internet-based world government. I am writing this book in installments on Docudharma and cross-posting the text to other blogs. All of the writings of the Netstate Project are in the public domain and may be copied and distributed freely.
1.2 You Can’t Get There From Here: The Argument of Discontinuity
“You can’t get there from here” is the punch-line of an old joke in which a lost traveler asks for directions only to be told that his journey is impossible. I will use it as a plain English simplification of my first argument for explaining why the Netstate will supplant geostates. There is no practical way that a set of territorial states can effectively manage the affairs of a global, electronically-linked society. There is no viable path of evolutionary continuity that will allow geographically organized states to properly manage global affairs on a collaborative basis. It may be argued that a sufficiently detailed and sophisticated set of multilateral agreements could be developed to seamlessly integrate the laws of all nations and enable friction-free global electronic communications and commerce. But how would this outcome differ from the political subordination of geostate law to that of a supervening Netstate? And how could such a cumbersome, multilateral process possibly keep pace with the rapid natural tempo of development of Internet-based phenomena? There is no practical path toward achieving the great benefits of utility of the Netstate that preserves the existing powers and prerogatives of the geostates. As geostates fail to generate the political structure necessary to sustain a networked world, the resultant political vacuum will contribute to the formation of the Netstate.
Let us examine some current global problems that illustrate the futility of geostate measures. There is an enormous “island” of floating plastic garbage that has formed in the Pacific Ocean. This mass of floating pollution is the size of Texas and no nation is equipped to deal with it physically, legally, or philosophically – because this vast area of pollution is a global problem that transcends geographic state boundaries. Huge clouds of atmospheric pollution from hundreds of coal-fired power plants in China now drift across the Pacific to the west coast of America. It is nonsense to demarcate this problem by Chinese or American territorial boundaries. Whose law governs? The problem of global warming resulting from human production of greenhouse gasses similarly defies geostate solution. As the global environment reaches dangerous limits of stress, the inability of geostates to enact effective responses to pressing global environmental problems becomes more apparent and alarming with each new crisis warning.
The fragmentary character of geostate governance of a global economy makes possible “regulatory arbitrage,” a game in which global corporations locate their operations so as to minimize their exposure to costly regulations governing pollution, product safety, and working conditions. One can be certain that these multinational corporations will vigorously resist the rise of the Netstate, because it will deprive them of profits derived from exploiting geostate regulatory weaknesses. Indeed it can be shown that a modern global multinational corporation has many of the attributes of a Netstate, with the attendant advantages of efficiency and power when competing with geostate governments.
The geostates have performed poorly in enacting efficient laws governing digital property and in securing personal privacy on the Internet. They have proven confused and impotent in dealing with crucial censorship and privacy issues. Why? Because no state has “jurisdiction” over the public Internet. There is no reason to believe that future coordination of geostates will converge toward an appropriate universal framework of law and administration promoting global networked commerce. At some point, a critical mass of interested parties, private and institutional, will seize the initiative and constitute a legal foundation for the Netstate. To the degree that these laws become universally binding, they will implicitly assert Netstate sovereignty.
A further problem of geostate govermental mechanisms is their relatively slow tempo of operation. Geostate regulatory and legislative machinery is designed to resist rapid change, not only because of the conservative bias of constitutional architects, but because established interests value the ability to halt proposals that would harm their power and profits. A cursory inspection of the parliamentary rules of a typical national legislative body, like the US Senate, reveals dozens of mechanisms for halting, delaying, revising, and killing proposed legislation. Even in situations of extreme urgency, it is often difficult to move legislation through a modern parliament. Such a governmental model is poorly suited to governing an expanding global digital economy in which new structures are evolving at an extraordinary rate. Where formal governmental guidance is lacking, defacto standards and protocols will arise, and as the volume of these informal arrangements greatly outpaces the trickle of legally sanctioned global rules, the balace of power will shift from the geostates to the Netstate.
But even if we were to assume miraculous advances in governmental organization and bureaucratic zeal that would allow perfectly harmonized actions among geostates in addressing global problems, a further objection would prove insuperable. The parliamentary machinery of advanced geostates is politically incapable of swift disinterested action that advances the public good. The reason for this incapacity can be expressed in one word: corruption. Parliamentary democracy, the most advanced form of geostate government has proven vulnerable to traditional illegal forms of corruption, such as bribery, blackmail, and fraud, but it may be argued that measures against these abuses can be made more effective. What cannot be countered is the highly refined forms of “legal corruption” that have emerged in advanced democracies in the last few decades. Just as the military technology of the modern era is dominated by stealthy weapons, the political corruption of the modern world has become so sophisticated as to be nearly undetectable, and thus incorrigible.
Modern political corruption operates through stealthy mechanisms that decouple corrupt actions and corresponding incentives in ways that render anti-corruption measures largely ineffective. For example, revolving-door career patterns have been established as a means of legally rewarding government appointees for making decisions that favor their future employers. The press, the “fourth estate” that was once somewhat effective in exposing corrupt government actions, has now been largely neutralized by its absorption into a small number of large, politically-connected corporations. These large purveyors of mass-media “news” coverage now act as government propaganda outlets in most advanced countries. Press personalities who behave “correctly” are rewarded with flourishing careers, while those who report inconvenient truths quickly fade into obscurity.
In summary, the geographically organized states of the world cannot evolve their governments in a manner that will allow them to match the efficiency and effectiveness of the Netstate. The obstacles of coordination, tempo, and corruption are insurmountable barriers preventing geostates from forming a collaborative world government that preserves their existing political mechanisms. This evolutionary break is a major discontinuity in political history equivalent in magnitude to the rise of nation states at the expense of feudal domains.
In the next Netstate segment – A More Perfect Union: The Argument of Utility