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.