A Cyberspace Independence Refutation

[jamesd at echeque.com]

At 12:54 PM 2/11/96 PST, strata at virtual.net wrote:
>Oh, let's start right off pretending that 
>a) the net is an independently funded entity with no government
>infrastructure 

No pretence.  It is, and it has been for some time.

Your other arguments casually dismiss the very real power that large numbers 
of able people with good communications can exercise, have just exercised
very recently.

Nation states are a new creation.  In the past many different 
kings ruled many different bits of one nation, and one king often 
ruled parts of more than one nation.

Today nation states are almost universal, and people can no longer 
imagine what a nation is, other than a nation state.  But the net 
is a nation, and is not a state, and nationalism is a force that 
governments usually cannot withstand.

What makes a government strong is its cohesion, but the state cannot
create its own cohesion.  When states attempted to confront nationalism, 
they often lost cohesion and vanished altogether, like a string of sand. 

The "Nation state" is in essence a tactic for avoiding this hazard.
 
Governments are acutely aware of this problem, and act very cautiously 
in the face of such threats.  Many people seem to imagine that a 
government innately and naturally has cohesion, that it is naturally 
one thing, naturaly capable of acting coherently and cohesively as 
an individual can.  On the contrary, governments maintain their 
cohesion with difficulty, and continually act, or refrain from acting,
in fear that they might lose it.

In an all out knock down battle between a particular government and the
internet, in a state where a substantial proportion of the middle class
was on the internet, the government would be in serious danger of evaporating 
like a jellyfish in the sunshine.

The government can get away with a substantial amount of harassment and 
restraint, but has only limited power to act without itself being acted 
on, to change the world without itself suffering change.
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