The Network Citizen
A few years ago I was backcountry skiing in the Austrian Alps. It was springtime, and the remaining snowpack was giving way to blossoming high alpine meadow terrain where each year farmers pushed their plows, with the help of the scarce summer window, to reach the furthest fertile fields that were just shy of those mountain headwalls.
Along the meandering ridge valleys, I could see ancient DIY property lines emerging from the snow, made of wooden posts nailed into the ground, strewn cable and wire, and the names of the families that farmed there for millennia claiming their valley territories with a warning on both sides of the fence to the other family, lest a farmer from the other side push their borders over the mountain ridges into the next valley below. The result was borders being pushed up to the highest regions of otherwise inhospitable terrain being driven by the equal pressure of needing land to survive from both sides. I understood war at that moment. If my crops had had a bad year and we were starving, I could see how a decision to breach those mountain ridges to steal the high country wheat from my neighbor’s farm could be my family’s only source of survival.
It was there that the squiggly lines of countries on a map made perfect sense to me. How farmers, being limited by geography, would band with other farmers for better economic benefit. Ultimately, these would form the city-states and regions that make up the countries we see strewn on a map today. And their treaties that could inevitably pull every ally into a world war over every little squabble.
Maps aren’t just hypothetical lines on paper, but the collective pressures of peoples and cultures pushing their rights to the very geographic limits of what is possible.
But what exactly is a country? and why do countries exist?
There is a theory called Dunbar’s Number, which states we as human beings only can care about 150 people before we simply lose all empathy and care for anyone more. Throughout nearly all of anthropological history, this theory proved true. Human tribes stopped cooperating, disbanded, and then went to war against each other when their tribes surpassed about 150 people. Over and over again, across the world, and for millennia. Every war forever probably involves someone having to kill their 3rd cousin.
Even in our modern era, Dunbar’s number proves true. Despite having thousands of “friends” or “followers” in our social networks, we each can only care for about 150 people before we just don’t give a shit. Think through your family, friends, the friends on social media you ‘actually’ follow, and the colleagues you know at work. That number will be less than 150. You know tens of thousands of things, but you only know <150 people.
Our capacity as a society to extend beyond being warring tribes that would constantly fragment forever and finally work together comes from another step in our evolution: the ability to speak hypothetically… in other words, to speak in mythology.
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that nearly all species on planet Earth have a robust language capable of speaking in complex terms with each other. There is proof that a certain monkey cry tells monkeys to “duck because an eagle is coming” (and all monkeys subsequently hide under a rock). And another saying “Quick a tiger is lurking in the bushes” (and all monkeys subsequently climb to the highest tree). This informs us that monkeys have a complex language that makes them highly sentient of themselves and each other.
What makes humans unique from other animals is our capacity to say things like “Hey don’t go down to the river, because I was just there and there is a lion down there and you may get mauled.” But this is hypothetical, and just a myth, when communicated anyway but objectively at that same river at that exact moment. Because the lion may have moved on… or the person telling you may be lying.
Our capacity to speak in story, myth, or hypothetical conditions allowed for our species to evolve past the perpetual warring of tribes once our clans reached 150 people because we could tell stories to engage a larger audience into having a purpose to work with each other. Because even if I don’t care for more than 150 people, I can work with 5,000 people at my job because we all believe in the company’s corporate mission and can agree to the story being told. This breakthrough would give way for us to work together in larger settings to accomplish more monumental tasks. 90,000 people decide every day to not kill each other and go work together at Audi Group because they all collectively believe in the car manufacturer’s mission “Vorsprung durch Technik” or progress through technology. They don’t all need to care specifically for each other to make the mission of Audi possible to make great cars.
When we look at what makes a country, it is in this same nature that a country is formed. Despite proof there is a president, a military, millions of US passports, a pledge of allegiance, a capital building, laws in the Library of Congress, and steel border walls along the southern border, the United States of America is simply a non-tangible construct. By itself, and not through the hypothetical collection of all the things that make it, it simply doesn’t exist beyond being a story in our hearts and minds.
But how this mythology took shape and self-perpetuates itself lies in the same powers of those high mountain peaks and family farmers that push our current reality into existence. For one, the cooperative nature of as many farmers, producers, and merchants collectively agreeing to work together as a country gives it more purchase power, economic benefit, and better military defense the larger it can collectively grow. On the other hand, once too large, it will fracture as people on the political spectrum lose empathy and begin to believe someone else within their country has it better than them or is treating them unfairly. These two forces push and pull at each other, working in opposites to pressure test societies into where the border walls need to be built.
There are cases throughout history of cooperative states forming together to build larger countries, and the opposite, of them collapsing. 13 colonies would (barely) agree to cooperate to form the existing United States and welcome 37 more to make up what exists today. Yugoslavia would lose its capacity to cooperate and fragment into 7 sovereign countries.
Despite this perpetual push and pull of willingness to cooperate, versus, agree to disagree and disband, geography has been the ultimate platform on which these terms of engagement could exist. Any and every geographic-gnostic attempt in human history has been a failure (or is held together by constant force): The UK lost its colonies across the ocean, and any remaining imperial reach of non-self-independent territories is only held together by military might: Taiwan, Guam, Puerto Rico, et al.
Geography, specifically great physical distances, is too great a power for the psychological mythology required to keep people cooperating.
What happens when geography is no longer a hurdle?
In the modern age, we are quickly accelerating to a physical and digital point of singularity. With ease and comfort, anyone on the planet can be transported to the opposite side of the world in less than half a day. But even more powerful and emerging, the metaverses being built on top of our internet networks will allow us to be face-to-face at the speed of light, to anyone anywhere on the planet, having as immersive a conversation as two people physically face-to-face.
Emerging blockchains take this one step further. They set the foundation that allows metaverses to be associated with public and transparent ledgers that allow for the seamless blend of what is digital and physical.. aka the phygital. Geography, in our lifetimes, will no longer be a hindrance to the push and pull of how societies negotiate their cooperation with one another.
As these emerging blockchains take root, the fundamental systems of society are being built into the very frameworks of these chains. How money is minted, whether it inflates or deflates, and the reason why, is written transparently into these chains. How financial tools for economic growth are deployed like small business lending are then built on top of that. How laws govern these associations and political structures comes after that. And finally, how social networks and decision-making are graphed and cryptographically tied back to real biological beings. All of this transparently, but immutably, baked into the bylaws of each of these blockchains. The very mechanisms of society that were hindered by geography are no longer factors, and the push and pull of how societies are built is done so by the network anywhere on planet Earth. And not by the geographically limited negotiating power of neighboring farms.
What does that future look like?
Imagine choosing your citizenship based not on where you were born, but on what governing laws, monetary policy, and political structures of a network best represented your values. And then you would make that autonomous decision to officially onboard as a citizen of that network under your own will. And adhere to its laws, principles, and economic benefits the way citizens of a geographic country do now. You would have immutable proof tied to your biological self that this was the network state you were a citizen of no matter where in the world you were. All the while benefitting from its collective bargaining power, or hindered by its poor governing decisions in the face of change, the way we as citizens around the world deal with today.
Despite winning or losing, you as a human knew you made that decision of what network you were a citizen of and not because of the conditions of where you were born.
In this ever-interconnected world, the innovation of these tools and technologies will only accelerate to a singular point. They may challenge mythologies that at present draw country lines on a map that create the geographically limited citizens of today. Which may prove to be not as concrete as we once thought, as we onboard into our respective network citizenships.