https://exclaim.ca/music/article/anti-flag-american_fall
It got me to thinking about the powerful forces which appear to be driving us toward a true "fall of America" - the destruction of our country as we know it.
One of the important questions this led me to ask myself is "when the US does fall, what will replace it?" Here is one possibility - the net-state, which recently was discussed in WIRED by Alexis Wichowski:
“We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.” So declared MIT professor David D. Clark in 1992. Twenty-five years later, this sentiment mirrors the global zeitgeist more than ever. The American public distrusts government in record numbers. Other nation-states disdain the US to world-historical degrees. A non-nation-state, Facebook, just topped 2 billion users - more than a quarter of the world’s population, surpassing even China’s population by almost 40 percent. In short, nation-states are not the only game in town anymore.
It is time to name this new landscape. The world is no longer dominated by nation-states alone. We have moved into a non-state, net-state era.
Why “net-states”? Because the world is no longer neatly divided into states (countries like the US, France, and India) and non-states (terrorist organizations like ISIS and al Qaeda). Ever since Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2011 article “Coming to a Theater Near You: War Without Humans” described the “emergence of a new kind of enemy, so-called non-state actors,” the term transformed into a fancy way of saying “bad guy.” Now we need new language to describe the non-state, non-bad-guys. I propose “net-states.”
https://www.wired.com/story/net-states-rule-the-world-we-need-to-recognize-their-power/
I agree that we seem to be headed in that direction, but I do have issues with the author's perspective.
Anyone who claims that net-states such as Facebook and Google are "non-bad-guys" hasn't really been paying attention. These two net-states have caused at least as much misery and destruction as all the so-called "terrorist organizations" put together ... AND have made a ton of money for themselves in the process. It's true they employ non-violent means to achieve their goals, but they are disruptive and destructive nonetheless - and this is NOT a good thing for our society.
The emergence of net-states may be one reason why Philip Bobbitt's concept of the "market-state" never took hold. An analysis of net-state practices reveals there really is no "free market". Everyone and everything are now watched 24/7 and manipulated in ways that only the controllers of the net-states fully understand. Economics, politics, ideas, morality ... indeed every aspect of human life now can be influenced and/or controlled in ways that make Hitler's Nazi dictatorship seem amateurish in comparison.
Yes, we need to recognize the power of the net-states. But with that recognition should come an obligation to curtail that power before it overwhelms whatever is left of our minds and our free will.
There seem to be only four classes of people in a net-state:
- owners
- creators
- users
- useless eaters
There are far two few owners and far too many useless eaters. The owners-creators-users have no need for the useless eaters; it fact they seem to regard them as a threat to the continuation of life on our planet. Hitler and his minions were able to persuade the German people to exterminate those they labeled Untermenschen (their version of useless eaters); how much easier will it be for the owners of the net-state, using WAY superior tools, to do something similar to the perceived Untermenschen of today?
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