Twitter Will Destroy The Nation-State, Argues Marketer

October 8, 2014 8:05 AM

In an essay for the Wharton School of Business' blog, confessed 'social media evangelist' and marketer Curtis Houghland argues that the advent of twitter and other social media heralds the destruction of the nation state over the coming century. Literally.

Formal nationhood as the basis for a social contract with its citizens dates only to the 17th century. It is a relatively new phenomenon. As Pankaj Mishra points out in Bloomberg View, 'Few people in 1900 expected centuries-old empires — Qing, Hapsburg, Ottoman — to collapse by 1918.' The belief in the centralized nation as the default political organization is grossly misplaced. And we are seeing the de-evolution of nationhood before our eyes in our daily newsfeeds....As there are now more than 30 brands of Mountain Dew, there will be more nations in Europe.

posted by Diablevert (59 comments total)

Hogwash.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 8:09 AM on October 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

As there are now more than 30 brands of Mountain Dew, there will be more nations in Europe.

I'm not saying this is the worst analogy I've ever seen, I'm just saying I really don't like Mountain Dew.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:10 AM on October 8, 2014 [41 favorites]

Paging @ProfJeffJarvis
posted by Joe Chip at 8:14 AM on October 8, 2014 [9 favorites]

We are at war with Coke Zero. We have always been at war with Coke Zero.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 8:16 AM on October 8, 2014 [44 favorites]

i do six-month extensions, so my tax return is due 10/15. get back to me when i don't have to file.
posted by bruce at 8:16 AM on October 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

I'm not saying this is the worst analogy I've ever seen

My condolences. You have seen some terrible things, and I hope that you will have the strength to get over them.

*hug*

Stay strong.
posted by aramaic at 8:18 AM on October 8, 2014 [41 favorites]

As there are now more than 30 brands of Mountain Dew

Huxley's Brave New World had Soma, we have the Dew.
posted by any major dude at 8:19 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

This extra-nation of social media smacks of the fall of Roman Empire, in which affinity toward Christianity superseded loyalty to the Empire.

Nope.

Overall, I think social media generally reflects society, not vice versa, as the writer wants to claim. It's a facilitating tool that allows like minds to meet, but if the five Basque who live on five different continents don't live in the same space, it doesn't matter if they want a Basque nation-state or not. (I'm aware there are more than five Basque)

He also hurts himself by making serious allusions to the extremely fringe secession movements for parts of California, Texas and so on. No, Facebook is not going to propel to success the independence of Texas tomorrow or twenty years from now. Balkanization has been happening for decades and is a natural force, but only allowed to happen when major powers allow it to happen, and those powers have been either fine with it or weakened to a point where they could do nothing to truly prevent it.

The article also just heightens the perception that we live in a binary world. You're either A or B, and there's no crossover or mix between people of different minds and thoughts. He's looking at the Red/Blue State America and ignoring the wonderfully encompassing Purple America, for example.

Quick, someone find the 16th Century article by a super fan of the Guttenberg press and how it's going to destroy nation states! (Who knew the Spanish Empire was going to collapse?!)
posted by Atreides at 8:23 AM on October 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

Few people in 1900 expected [the Ottoman Empire] to collapse by 1918.

What? If anything they were expecting it to collapse by 1901.
posted by aw_yiss at 8:26 AM on October 8, 2014 [30 favorites]

#NotHappening
posted by Wordshore at 8:26 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

I will say, the reason I posted this article is that I find it balances on a knife edge between "hysterical bosh which it is highly satisfying to skewer" and "oddly plausible conspiracy theory". The Scottish referendum, the Ukrainian war, the ongoing and varied crisis in the Mid East --- boundary lines are a-waggle all over the map of the world, and there may be something to the idea that the fact that aligned interest groups can organise themselves into ideologically coherent blocks much more efficiently is part of what's driving it.
posted by Diablevert at 8:26 AM on October 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

My own pet theory about the current political upheaval and subdivision of various countries around the globe is that the internet is not so much uniting people with ideological affinities (although it certainly is doing that), but rather that it is exposing everyone to aspirational marketing that is creating greater and greater dissatisfaction with the status quo. In other words, I think with the spread of global media more people have access to ideas and imagery which supports the idea that one can "have it all." In the short term, this seems to be a rather destructive process, but in the long term I think it could have benefits as more and more people are becoming aware of the realities of inequalities, even just inequalities within their city or region. Obviously local (read: non-mass-marketing-derived) inequalities matter quite a bit, such as the fact that the rising costs of basic goods, like bread, was a contributing factor to the Syrian Civil War.
posted by Slothrop at 8:35 AM on October 8, 2014 [14 favorites]

Who's going to make the trains run on time if the nation state collapses?
posted by njohnson23 at 8:35 AM on October 8, 2014

This wonderfully encompassing Purple America of which you speak, can I get a papers to become a citizen there? Is Prince the King of it?
posted by blucevalo at 8:36 AM on October 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

Who's going to make the trains run on time if the nation state collapses?

Not sure if Godwin?
posted by eriko at 8:39 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

This extra-nation of social media smacks of the fall of Roman Empire, in which affinity toward Christianity superseded loyalty to the Empire.

Let's not tell this guy about the Byzantines.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:43 AM on October 8, 2014 [10 favorites]

I wish everyone who proclaimed the death of the nation state would just fuck off and live somewhere else
posted by fullerine at 8:43 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Again, anyone wishing to join my Diamond Age-style geographically non-contiguous pseudo-state modeled on late-1950s Italy (and based almost entirely on Roman Holiday and this photograph of Fausto Coppi), should apply by telegram to "il Teschio Bianco, Milano 6 20048, Italy". You will receive notice of approval within two weeks, and your steel-frame road bike and/or Piaggio scooter soon after.

Note, I am also considering forming a community based on the imaginary mid-60s Paris depicted in Jaques Tati's Playtime. Applicant's must provide proof of training and at least three years' experience in mime, dance, or circus performance.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:43 AM on October 8, 2014 [15 favorites]

As there are now more than 30 brands of Mountain Dew, there will be more nations in Europe.

Hang on. This guy needs to read Wikipedia more carefully. Thirty brands of Mountain Dew were ever created (including limited-time promotional flavors), but only 14 remain. If you're going to use that figure to make a comparison to European nations, you're going to need to throw in all the old German duchies, Italian city-states, etc...
posted by mhum at 8:44 AM on October 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

Hmm, a provocative political science thesis from a marketer. Let's see what we got:

The list of people beheaded by followers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) keeps growing. The filming of these acts on video and distribution via social media platforms such as Twitter represent a geopolitical trend in which social media has become the new frontline for proxy wars across the globe.

Well, no. This is not incorrect, but rather incoherent. I think he means to say that social media potentiate "proxy wars" in the figurative sense, which is confusing because he's also talking about actual warfare. Unless he's arguing that various distinct conflicts around the world are actually proxy wars between other, hidden forces or interests, but I don't think he means to make that argument.

That social media benefits mankind is irrefutable.

Not so much irrefutable as unproven, but I guess either way is good

Some 96% of content emanates from individuals, not brands, media or governments — a volume that far exceeds participation in democratic elections.

What the what, now? "Content" produced on social media is not obviously comparable in any meaningful way with participation in democratic elections.

Extra-national communities destabilize the state by providing avenues for establishing loyalty that are stronger than those provided by the state.

Finally, something resembling a coherent empirical claim. However, while the state generally wants to promote solidarity, to encourage its citizens to be loyal and not actively work against its own interests, the state's primary macro-level goals don't include "providing avenues for establishing loyalty," so it's not evident what the writer thinks he's arguing against here.

This extra-nation of social media smacks of the fall of Roman Empire,

Gibberish

in which affinity toward Christianity superseded loyalty to the Empire.

Historically inaccurate

Social media is Federalism 2.0.

Annoying gibberish

If it were a nation, Facebook would be the world’s second largest with 1.31 billion citizens — soon to eclipse China.

And if China were a company, it would be the biggest company in the world! If-then statements are fun!

In short, the world is behaving more and more like social media.

Not shown, not demonstrated, not proven, not true, not even coherent

This is about 95% nonsense with 5% mildly interesting but unproven and unsupported claims. It's not aimed at people who are interested in thinking clearly about what is factually accurate, however, but at people who want to sell things, including ideas. The whole thing is a sales pitch.
posted by clockzero at 8:44 AM on October 8, 2014 [9 favorites]

I donno about the nation state but they're making an effort to weaken the police state :

The most important national-security secrets case you've never heard of
Twitter is suing the government for banning the company from publishing the number of National Security Letters and court orders it receives from the FBI and the US justice department.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:47 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Who's going to make the trains run on time if the nation state collapses?

Silicon Valley Techno-Libertarian billionaire sociopaths, obviously. They'll "disrupt" railways altogether with drones and a smartphone app and make billions! Bonus, the rest of us will be allowed to camp out in the abandoned train stations.
posted by Naberius at 8:48 AM on October 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

Also, the one thing about these [new thing] will lead to [death of old thing] arguments is the pathetic depths that they now sink for attention.

We've gone from Gutenberg, Television, Radio, The Internet and now it's fucking Twitter which is going to change everything? Twitter?
posted by fullerine at 8:48 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Quick! Somebody tell Tom Friedman!
posted by Existential Dread at 8:48 AM on October 8, 2014

Bleach + ammonia = chlorine gas.

Seth Godin + Tom Friedman = whatever this shit is.
posted by TrialByMedia at 8:51 AM on October 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Silicon Valley Techno-Libertarian billionaire sociopaths, obviously. They'll "disrupt" railways altogether with drones and a smartphone app and make billions! Bonus, the rest of us will be allowed to camp out in the abandoned train stations.

My roommate gets really, REALLY angry if you claim that Mussolini made the trains run on time so this is a topic that comes up a lot in my home because he is funny when he gets mad. This means I've thought about this idea more than I would have expected and realized that the thing about fascism is that, in fact, it means you CAN make the trains run on time because you can declare that whatever time the train does arrive is the time it was supposed to be there. You can be like "Today's 9:03 train is exactly on time, arriving here at 9:03. Yesterday's train arrived at 10:26 which is perfect because it was the 10:26 train yesterday. We're anticipating that tomorrow's train will be the 9:12 but we will keep you updated and let you know what train it was after it arrives on time."

I don't know how exactly, but somehow this feels like what I expect techno-libertarian billionaire sociopaths to do, to give up all attempts to make anything work in a way that's actually more useful and then claim a 100% success rate for their disruptive train scheduling app.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:56 AM on October 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

We are at war with Coke Zero Pepsi Blue. We have always been at war with Coke Zero Pepsi Blue.

FTFY.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:00 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

At this rate, one day there will be nine billion nations inhabited by exactly 1 person!
posted by Renoroc at 9:01 AM on October 8, 2014

Mrs. P I am totally in agreement with your roomate! I know it's a trivial detail for most people but common sayings like that shape people's perceptions and as I've said before it just isn't historically accurate. Yet I keep hearing people talk about how dictatorships could be able to response to problems more efficiently than democracies. I remain unconvinced.
posted by Wretch729 at 9:04 AM on October 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Empires, by definition, are not nation-states. All the examples involving empires are like comparing apples and oranges.

Balkanization is not a natural or inevitable process; it happens because the factors favoring it outweigh those favoring unification. At other times, the opposite happens. Consider the wave of unifications that created Italy and Germany in the late 1800s. Balkanization is a disorder of economic decline. As things are on the way down, groups that were fine with unity when the picture was rosy suddenly want to look out for themselves.
posted by graymouser at 9:15 AM on October 8, 2014

Article misses the giant point, written at 100GB speed across the sky:

THE INTERNET DESTROYS SECRECY.

First, it broke little secrets: what hours a coffee shop was open (known only to people at the door, or who called), and what houses are on the market in your city right now.

Then it broke bigger secrets: one bookseller has a dogeared copy for 1/10th the cost of a new copy, and Europeans think different (but rational) things than Midwestern Americans.

It moved on to declassifying papers on a level previously only achieved by the revealers of the Pentagon Papers, and (through proxies) bringing world news and world views into areas like North Korea and China, not to mention bringing eyewitness, live reports from disasters and violent political clashes across the globe.

Incidentally, it regularly destroys the secrecy of the pictures your fave celeb took of herself naked, and your credit card number (whoops) (it's an amoral destroyer).

But we all already mostly know this, so maybe it's not as interesting for an article topic. Governments of the future will almost certainly find it much, much harder to keep sensitive information out of the public's hands. Individuals of the future will find it necessary to adjust their concepts of privacy - perhaps akin to putting up curtains for the first time on that side of the house when a neighbor builds a house next-door.

Destruction of the state? Only when that state relies foremost on secrecy. All the knowledge in the world isn't going to free Hong Kong's elections.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:20 AM on October 8, 2014 [13 favorites]

Shorter clockzero: "Not Even Wrong."
 
posted by Herodios at 9:23 AM on October 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Who's going to make the trains run on time if the nation state collapses?

@musolini
posted by Omon Ra at 9:24 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Who's going to make the trains run on time if the nation state collapses?

Coke Zero+
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:24 AM on October 8, 2014

This article is hilariously terrible techno-boosterism.

“Few people in 1900 expected centuries-old empires — Qing, Hapsburg, Ottoman — to collapse by 1918.”

As pointed out above, the Ottomans at the time were known as "The Sick Man of Europe." The Qing, meanwhile, had been expected to fall in the 1840s when the Taiping and Nian rebellions by all means ought to have knocked them out, and by 1900 no one could quite figure it why they was still there, which they barely were. Yale historian Jonathan Spence writes that:

"Logic was entirely on Marx's side when he wrote in the late 1850's that the Qing dynasty must surely soon fall. What is surprising is that the dynasty did not collapse right away, but managed to survive for the whole of the nineteenth century and on until 1912" (The Search for Modern China, p. 194).
posted by the thing about it at 9:24 AM on October 8, 2014 [7 favorites]

Shorter clockzero: "Not Even Wrong."

Yes, it is "irrefutable" not in the sense that it is so evident that it cannot be denied, but rather in the sense that there is no way it could ever be tested and thus falsified.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:26 AM on October 8, 2014

Meh, this is pretty trite, even though I do think that part of the general thesis — that the Westphalian nation-state is in trouble and may not last much longer — does have some merit.

E.g. the idea is given serious treatment in The Shield of Achilles, which is recommended reading if you're interested in such things... although it is fairly heavy sledding and not something you want to pick up after a few glasses of wine (it really hurts to have it hit you in the face when you nod off).

The central thesis of TSoA is that the nation-state basically died sometime around the end of the 20th century — the author picks the Paris Conference of 1990 — and has been replaced by the "market state".

The LRB review sums it up:

The nation-state had been forged (most notably by Bismarck in Germany) to place the state in the service of the nation, and was at root a welfare state, in the sense that its legitimacy depended on its ability to better the welfare of its citizens. [...] [After 1990 and the fall of Communism,] It was now ready to abandon as self-defeating the attempt to provide for the welfare of all its citizens, and instead sought to found its legitimacy on its ability to maximise their opportunities, and to offer them the basic security within which to make those opportunities count. It was becoming, in other words, a ‘market-state’, possessed of similar, or even in some cases greater, political and military power than its predecessor, but much more limited in the range of its activities.

In short, in the nation-state the apparatus of state serves the 'nation', an abstract geo-social-political entity consisting of people residing in a well-defined area; in the market-state the state serves the market, which at one point were mapped basically 1:1 with nations but have increasingly diverged from them.

Twitter et al are actors within the market-state framework. Their power transcends national boundaries but stops basically at the edges of the market. (There is a clear market-state border between the US/European Anglosphere and the Asian-mainland one dominated by China. The power of US corporations like Twitter does not extend very far there.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:26 AM on October 8, 2014 [12 favorites]

My main beef with Bobbitt is that even his (in my opinion) extremely overly-rosy depiction of the market-state does not sound like someplace I want to live. I think he paints an altogether too Pollyanna-tinted picture.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:29 AM on October 8, 2014

Canada's neo-liberal governments opened the door wide for "temporary foreign workers", aka cheap labour, in support of the "free market", instead of supporting unemployed/underemployed Canadians in their job searches.

Anyhoo, this idea of opening one's labour needs to the global market pretty much moots nationality, IMO. I figure neo-liberal policies will destroy the nation-state loooong before social media has an effect.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:37 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, in reading Bobbitt you need to keep in mind that he was a Clinton aide, and therefore by his own framework a post-Westphalian market-state guy. (And more specifically, when he breaks down the multiple approaches to market-statedom he in doing so puts himself in the 'Washington Model' camp.) I was left with the feeling that he thinks the new world order is just ducky, and while I tend to agree that it is the situation on the ground and the foreseeable future, that doesn't mean I am really a fan of it.

That may be an uncharitable reading of him, and I really do think the market-state model is fairly accurate (time will tell if it is predictive, though; that's the acid test), but there were moments when I questioned whether Bobbitt was planning on living on the same planet that he was describing.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:42 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Social media does not create nation-states. The elements that require a nation-state to be formed and, more importantly, survive are more mundane. Here's a recent, far from exhaustive write-up of the "little" things that will have to change if Scotland votes for independence. I put "little" in quotes, because getting a new prefix for international calls doesn't mean picking some available digits, but there need to be changes in the computer system that connects phone calls around the world. New postage to create and certify, and new ways to identify the routing of physical goods, new currency, new ID cards, new license plates, etc., etc., etc.

Scotland's failure in their vote to end the union with England is a prime example of this being more complex than mentioned in the article. You can't simply say "look at all these potential national fissions, but ignore Scotland," because Scotland is proof that even splitting off challenging, even when you have a near majority in support of the efforts. And this is precious:

Counties in California, Colorado and Oregon are organizing legitimate secession movements through social media, not to mention Texas’ long-term ambitions of independence cited recently by its governor Rick Perry.

These counties have been trying to secede for decades, if not longer. Social media has made all this more visible, but no more viable than before. Having "followers" or "likes" means simply that someone pushed a button, which was the same sort of button they pushed to indicate they watch The Real Housewives of Whatever, or they remember that thing from the 1990s.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:56 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, Twitter will indeed destroy the nation state, but because it is a supra-national corporation, not because what it does happens to be a social media platform. Monsanto and ExxonMobil and Roche will destroy the nation state just as effectively and completely without getting anywhere near social media.

There is a growing sense that the Westphalian system is falling apart. That's because what technology does - and in particular what the Internet and by extension Twitter does - is "disrupt" geography. Upthread, someone talked about the five Basques living on five continents and that it doesn't matter if they want a nation state. The point is that they don't really need a nation-state, as in a piece of land that belongs to them because they are Basques and to other Basques like them. They are able to create a defining identity for themselves that doesn't rely on their connection to a Basque homeland. By creating dispersed yet cohesive communities online and allowing them to define who we see ourselves to be in some pretty fundamental ways, we have basically moved to the next level of abstraction beyond the nation state. The French were people with a shared culture that took root and developed in a shared physical environment. Bronies are people with a shared culture created online without regard to the physical environment at all.

Supra-national corporations are perfectly adapted to this kind of world. They're less like nations than they are like clans. They exist in a virtual environment that ignores borders and physical geography. They can thrive and adapt in the new world in ways that make old Westphalian nation states with their borders and their infrastructure (and their non-elite people) look incredibly, dinosaurishly clumsy. (That's a word, right?)

Of course the problem is that someone still has to provide the physical infrastructure that underlies all this abstraction. Even in The Matrix, someone had to maintain all those pods and keep the nutrient tanks refilled so the plugged in bodies would keep working and the Matrix could function.

Someone still has to build and maintain the roads and the bridges and the airports. Someone needs to keep all those less-than-elite people occupied and stop them from burning shit down. And that's difficult and expensive work. So that gets left to the nation-states. It's yet another example of how you get rich and powerful in this world: find a way to skim the cream off the top while leaving someone else to deal with the cost and the waste and the difficulty of milking the cows.

To a certain extent, nation-states themselves figured this out. The U.S. learned from the Europeans that maintaining an empire was nasty and expensive. England flew the Union Jack all across the world. We didn't take ownership of other countries. We didn't plant the flag and claim a bunch of really expensive, burdensome colonies. We just moved in and took the good stuff and left the rest alone.
posted by Naberius at 9:58 AM on October 8, 2014 [6 favorites]

Again, re: market-state.

The new talking point I have seen come up with increasing frequency is, "An equal society guarantees equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome," said in a way that always implies, "which is what we have already, so no need to change anything". Kudos to whatever conservative think tank came up with that one.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 10:01 AM on October 8, 2014

the Ottomans at the time were known as "The Sick Man of Europe".

No, that was Cheap Trick.
 
posted by Herodios at 10:09 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

This guy is all over the map in this article. I mean, gerrymandering equals balkanization equals social-media secession movements? Clearly someone does not understand at least two of those three things.

That said, I do wonder how many folks around here would be more loyal to, and feel more kinship with, the other members of Metafilter than they do with their fellow countrymen, or even their fellow townsfolk. So I do think there's the seed of an interesting idea there.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:24 AM on October 8, 2014

Utter twaddle.

The next hundred years will be dominated first by resource wars (water, energy, minerals), then by whatever you want to call it when hundreds of millions of people whose lands have been rendered uninhabitable by global warming storm the borders of the places that haven't been.
posted by jamjam at 10:26 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

Let's not tell this guy about the Byzantines.

Or, y'know, the Egyptians.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:27 AM on October 8, 2014

What if #nationstate4eva starts trending though? What then?
posted by srboisvert at 10:40 AM on October 8, 2014

Humanity: red in tooth and tweet.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:48 AM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

We didn't plant the flag and claim a bunch of expensive, burdensome colonies.

We definitely did that; specifically, we nicked 'em off Spain in the Spanish American war and ran them for 50 years. The Philippines and Cuba, principally, a bunch of other islands. I mean, there's some unique historical circumstances around US expansion and there is certainly a strong, countervailing isolationist strain in the American character. But what we learned about colonies was they're great to have and help make you Great, as well.
posted by Diablevert at 11:00 AM on October 8, 2014

Social media will not destroy nation states, because humans are tribal apes.

That said, social media can brand nation states and make them cool.

The US isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. And Singapore. Singapore is cool.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:09 AM on October 8, 2014

GOOGLE ALVIN TOFFLER!

Seriously, those books of his, FutureShock and PowerShift, look rather prescient even if they were synthesizing and extrapolating some obvious trends.

Also, another shoutout for clades, burbclaves, and the Diamond Age.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:10 AM on October 8, 2014

At this rate, one day there will be nine billion nations inhabited by exactly 1 person!

Everyone In Middle East Given Own Country In 317,000,000-State Solution
posted by Rhaomi at 11:23 AM on October 8, 2014 [3 favorites]

Someone still has to build and maintain the roads and the bridges and the airports. Someone needs to keep all those less-than-elite people occupied and stop them from burning shit down. And that's difficult and expensive work. So that gets left to the nation-states.

Well, I'm 100% with you right up to the last word. It requires a state, that is to say, the bureaucratic apparatus of government. Whether that is a nation-state, or the state wed to something else (market-state, in some predictions; in the past you had territorial states focused on the land itself, and before that you had kingly and princely states built around an individual or a dynasty) is the really ... interesting part.

Even today, it is possible that the nation-state that technically 'governs' an area might not actually be the one who ends up providing for the physical infrastructure and doing other typical "governance" stuff. And when the nation-states either fail at or abdicate governance, the responsibilities either devolve downward, or get pushed upward to the supra-national level.

E.g.: the roads, sewage systems, etc. in some parts of Africa are being funded and built by China. But China doesn't, or hasn't, claimed to actually conquer these territories. They are not 'China' and it is not a classical territorial expansion. This is a pretty weird situation under the nation-state model, almost counterproductive. But in the market-state model, they're part of the Chinese market-state, and therefore the market-state provides services (in exchange for resource extraction or trade, probably), which makes perfect sense. Somewhere nearby, maybe in the same country so far as lines-on-a-map are concerned, there might be a city that is being built and maintained by Anglosphere institutions and apparatus, for the benefit of that market-state. And gradually it matters less and less what Westphalian "country" you live in, but which market-state you're participating in, because the day-to-day apparatus of state — infrastructural, military, regulatory, etc. — isn't loyal to the territory or even the nation but instead to nebulous, trans-national organizations.

That is the model, anyway. Right now you see that taken to its logical conclusion only in areas we typically term "failed states", with most self-consciously "functional" nation-states holding on pretty firmly to stuff like police powers. But whenever a government throws its hands up and tosses a previously nation-state responsibility onto a transnational NGO, or — more common here in the West — outsources it to a corporation, it gets a little closer.

The huge downside is that the market-state doesn't, to put it bluntly, square very well with democracy. Democracy is one possible way of organizing the nation-state, and it assumes a well-defined nation over which to claim legitimacy. You can't very well have legitimate democracy without a well-defined electorate, and market-states don't even have well-defined borders. In a market-state, you vote with your dollars (or Euros, or yuan), and perhaps to a lesser extent your attention (but only insofar as your attention is valuable and monetizable). The currency of the market state is just that: currency. Not votes.

Either pushing back the growth of market-states at the expense of nation-states (which would mean, in some cases, rolling back the legitimate good that transnational institutions have done) in order to preserve democracy, or squaring democracy and democratic ideals with a world increasingly governed by market-driven supra-state actors, is going to be one of the major challenges of the 21st century.

Twitter is a sideshow in a very small tent.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:30 AM on October 8, 2014 [8 favorites]

-Estonia First Country to Offer E-Residency Digital Citizenship
-Deconstructing Governments: Is Estonia the first Full Stack Government Startup?

-Disrupting the nation state
-End of nations: Is there an alternative to countries?
-The Rise of Cities as Global Actors: What Consequences for Policy?
-How Decentralized Power, Not Democracy, Will Shape the 21st Century

also btw:
-OpenGov
-Urban Engines
-Code for America[*]
-Attendance.gov.in[*]
-The Geography of NFL Fandom
-'Um' vs 'Uh' prevalence in USA
-Life expectancy: EU vs US regions
-The Next Big Thing? (Techonomy Detroit)[*]
-Ten Principles for Recapitalizing Capitalism[*]
-OECD Regional Well-Being: A Closer Measure of Life
-Labor Day: Right to an API Key (Algorithmic Organizing)
-Reprogramming Government: A Conversation With Mikey Dickerson: "The former Google engineer who helped solve the HealthCare.gov crisis is back in Washington, tasked with remaking the way the government uses computers and how citizens engage with it online."

and last but not least...
The Coming Information Age (Possible Book Outline)

3. Industrial Age Breaking Down

— substituting machines for labor, so wages declining and eventually going away and with them the demand for more stuff

— initially counteracted this challenge through consumer debt

— already producing more stuff than we need to meet our material needs (hence the rise advertising)

— research shows that stuff doesn’t make us happy, experiences do, biggest growth need is spiritual (not material)

— facing species threats including environment, asteroids, disease that need to be addressed at global (not national) level

[...]

8. Fundamental Change 4: Moving Past the Nation State

— the fall of artificial boundaries

— the rise of cities

— from big government to information standards

for me, i'm interested in identifying modes of cooperation in an information age/network era vs. the modalities *ahem* of competition/tribalism/feudalism (+institutions -- monetary and political -- for resolving such) re: game theory: prisoners' dilemma, in/finite games (transition to abundance from scarcity; first from info, then from knowledge application to 'programmable planet', turning to wisdom? or maybe the crowd/eigendemocracy) and the institutional evolution to allow central bank adaptation...

which brings me to sovereignty and taxation! (and back to fukuyama) whereby: "The upshot of his argument is that functioning democracy is impossible wherever an effective modern state is lacking." anyway, i was just reading a little about napoleon for some reason (which got me on to cromwell and bismark ;) and there was this question on yahoo! answers about 'the correlation between Robespierre and Napoleon' with this response, which i think bears repeating:

The "revolutionary purity" of Robespierre's Convention government led to France tolerating his overthrow and replacement by the corrupt bourgeois government of the Directory, and then tolerating the overthrow of the Directory by the military dictatorship of Bonaparte. ORDER was preferable to the excesses of the Terror.

Robespierre's government expropriated the Church, proclaimed the Feast of the Supreme Being as a substitute for liturgical holidays, and abolished slavery in the French colonies. Bonaparte restored slavery, concluded a Concordat with the Church, and created a new nobility and court based on himself and his marshals.

One might regard Robespierre, roughly, as the archetypal leftist revolutionary Maximum Leader, and Bonaparte as the prototype for the fascist military strongman. Bonaparte's secret police were probably more efficient, but Robespierre "purged" or "liquidated" more of his "party" and "class" enemies.

Bonaparte's power base was of course the army, but also the peasantry who didn't want to return the Church lands they had been distributed and the merchant class who benefited from the captive markets and favorable trade terms his conquests created. Robespierre's support came from the Paris mob, "to the Max".

worth keeping in mind at least :P
posted by kliuless at 12:21 PM on October 8, 2014 [5 favorites]

Kadin2048 >

The central thesis of TSoA is that the nation-state basically died sometime around the end of the 20th century — the author picks the Paris Conference of 1990 — and has been replaced by the "market state".

This is a very interesting idea; on one hand, it seems like a more assiduously institutionalist way of talking about the transformations of the state in the neoliberal era, but on the other hand, it seems to perhaps run into theoretical problems when reasoning like this emerges:

In short, in the nation-state the apparatus of state serves the 'nation', an abstract geo-social-political entity consisting of people residing in a well-defined area; in the market-state the state serves the market, which at one point were mapped basically 1:1 with nations but have increasingly diverged from them.

Again, this sounds plausible on its face, but you have to sort of ignore the fact that states create markets, which are and always have been political creations. "The market" cannot be something that stands above and outside of the state, although that implication is central to neoliberalism's mythology about itself. Instead, states and markets have a complex interplay which is always mutually constitutive: the state creates the market even as the market creates the state, which is a dynamic at least as old as European colonialism.

Or, in other words, the nation-state and the market-state have always been coeval, have always existed simultaneously, but have been instrumentally deployed as organizing principles to different groups for different reasons. If there is a real break-down, I don't think it's in the state's orientation to either the market or the nation, but the waning ability to effectively define social organization in terms of the nation-state itself. Inner and outer, public and private; those are the sites of the state's loss of definitional power, which is arguably the most important kind.
posted by clockzero at 3:04 PM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Again, this sounds plausible on its face, but you have to sort of ignore the fact that states create markets, which are and always have been political creations. "The market" cannot be something that stands above and outside of the state

Well, sort of. I think Bobbitt's argument is that in the late 20th century, as a sort of byproduct of the struggle between nation-states over the dominant system of governance, nation-states inadvertently (or sometimes knowingly, but perhaps without a grasp of the consequences) created institutions that are actually bigger than themselves. Or at least so big that they seem to exist outside their effective control. This is analogous to the kingly and dynastic states of earlier centuries inadvertently laying the groundwork for the rise of nation-states which would eventually displace them. (Bobbitt has a pretty complex thesis about each form of state being created out of the 'epochal' conflict between various forms of the previous type of state, which is pretty Eurocentric and I'm not sure holds water as a generalizable theory. It's as good as most other explanations for political evolution, though.)

And I think it's pretty clear at this point that "the market", as reified by various supranational organizations, really does stand above the nation-state, at least in some cases. Whether it should is a separate question. (We could, and I personally do, agree that it probably shouldn't be the case, while still acknowledging the reality that is apparent.) In the case of a country like Greece, the nation-state government gave up control of a number of traditional economic levers (e.g. sovereign currency) to various supranational organizations. Those organizations, and the European Common Market in general, is dominated by a number of nation-states (principally, France and Germany) but as a whole is larger than them, and exerts control that can be felt directly 'on the ground', sometimes against the desires of the local nation-state government. Could the constituent nation-states, if they wanted to, destroy the market? Probably, via coordinated action (which risks creating yet another supra-national entity) but I think you'd ignore the very real 'soft power' that institutions operating at the supranational/market level have, to dissuade that sort of action before it could be effective.

Whether supranational organizations can actually inspire loyalty and a sense of identity in the way that Bismarckian nation-states do, is sort of an open question. They seem a little...indistinct, at least to my taste, to inspire particularly strong feelings. But I suspect that to someone from the age of kingly states, the idea of loyalty to the "nation" as an abstract concept, separate from the 'government personified' or even the 'homeland' itself, would seem crazy.

There's nothing intrinsically more abstract about the idea of "markets" than of "nations". Both are concepts, which gain meaning because they are either attached to things in the real world (territory), or because things are attached to them (civil/military governmental apparatus, i.e. the "state"). The market-state starts to form when you start peeling off bits of the state from the national level and somehow attaching it to the transnational one. The 'market' is created, in other words, just like a nation: when enough people believe that it does to grant it power, at which point it can perpetuate itself.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:42 AM on October 9, 2014

Whether supranational organizations can actually inspire loyalty and a sense of identity in the way that Bismarckian nation-states do, is sort of an open question. They seem a little...indistinct, at least to my taste, to inspire particularly strong feelings.

Perhaps self-interest, that seemingly strongest of feelings after fear, will fill in the gap. Paul Reiser's "company man" in Aliens comes to mind. Certainly "fuck you, got mine" seems to be the animating principle of our age.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 1:08 PM on October 9, 2014

The author's presentations of tensions ("While social media does indeed advance connectivity and wealth among people, its proliferation at the same time results in a markedly less stable world.") and crises ("Yet, rather than instigate today’s unrest, social media is reflective of pre-existing attitudes of unrest across societies. It’s a petri dish, but the bacteria are already present.") attempts to convince the reader to changer their opinion of (what?) by making technology a Boogeyman of twitter ("One of the principal drivers of this Balkanization is social media Twitter.") . The resolution to this crisis suggests a trade--invert our belief in technology (twitter) by recognizing civil war (Balkanization) ("The solution to rising instability is to embrace the principles of Balkanization in a manner that preserves and even strengthens nationhood.") as the answer.

A bonkers polemic, but on what exactly?

The only thing I find interesting about the article is it's technology category from a University with a renowned Business School (Wikipedia) promotes Balkanization, which I equate to civil war--or the ultimate form of transnational competition.

Go Wharton!
posted by xtian at 3:02 PM on October 9, 2014