Book of the Week (2): which postnational identities in the network era?

* Book: From Nations to Networks. by David de Ugarte, Pere Quintana, Enrique Gomez, and Arnau Fuentes.

As we indicated last Monday, this is very important and foundational book, that I strongly urge the P2P community to read!!

In our second and last presentation, we focus on post-national identities and why they can’t be based neither on a revived nation-state nor on universalist cosmopolitanism.

From failed segregationism to failed micro-states

Part two of the book has a fascinating history of 19th cy. Segregationist attempts, i.e. refusals of the nation-state such as Mormonism and alternative Zionisms, and of 20th cy. Libertarian and other microstates. Their common mistake is to want to ground alternative socialities in derivatives of imaginary nation-states. But early attempts at internet ‘societies’ like Freedonia are also failures, because they lack a viable shared economy, which coincides with the human network.

Then, after this vital and interesting history of post-national attempts, comes a very interesting passage:

David de Ugarte et al.:

“The Freedonia story represents the transition and continuity between the Randian segregationism and the new world of trans-national communities. The segregationist temptation appeared repeatedly in virtual networks in the second half of the nineties. It was the easiest option. When network life occupies the identitarian space and explains more about who we are and who we speak to than the nation, the immediate temptation is to replicate the national model, seeking a territory and building a customised micro-state. Segregationism was always there, underlying, inviting us to occupy a distant island or build a floating city where the real community can be accommodated and new forms of social organisation can be tried. And the myth of Mormon success is still powerful.

But the 20th-century groups were no longer like 19th-century ones. Randian attempts are unlike those of the Mormons, a presential and real community. With their form of shareholders’ society, Randian experiments resemble more the failed colonisation societies than John Smith’s persecuted and cohesive religious parishes, where, despite their being more people, everyone knew each other, worked alongside each other, and personally trusted each other, generating, in so doing, an economic basis and emotional tries which were strong enough to support the gigantic efforts and sacrifices which proved to be necessary. Actually, when we think about it, Sealand, once the mythical layer of Cryptonomicon and Wired is stripped, is nothing but the adventure of a family of British squatters who kept some bad company.

Freedonia, the first internet-era community that sought its own territoriality, was, in its naivety, both a forerunner and a frontier. Its scarcely 300 members led a real and intense political life. They built a conversation that provided them with an explanation and a meaning. They shared their daily lives and built a common identity which bound them together more than their respective national contexts. Briefly put, they constituted a trans-national community. But they never had an economic basis, a map, a common space between the conversation flows and their own way of making a living.

It is true that a community can be based on collective conversation and the consequent political play. In an extended and interesting experiment51, Dutch ethologist Frans de Waal showed how a group of chimpanzees all whose members enjoyed unrestricted access to food not only preserved power structures, but experienced them more intensely than ever. Politics does not arise in politics as a result of scarcity: it is not only an organised struggle for the surplus, as Marx thought. It is there before and after abundance.

But maintaining a conversation and social game does not equal supporting a human community. Beyond conversation, nothing generated the need or the possibility of a headquarters territory in Freedonia. There was no persecution forcing them to do so, not a prior economic activity among its members which justified their settling in a specific place. Randians likewise lacked both. That’s why Freedonians and Randians sought their destiny from the settler’s logic. Believing that the territory would generate its own economic structure, an economy hardly sketched out from libertarian principles which would ground a community which would not longer be trans-national or virtual but territorial. This is a mistake.

Segregationism fails. Without a shared economy, there is no human community which will endure in time. That’s why unfaithfulness, transitoriness, and temporary alliances are, as Juan Urrutia points out52, common to all network conversational identities.

After Freedonia, trans-national conversational communities evolved dramatically, both in number and in form. Some of them, like Second Life, included as an extra attraction a small parallel economy – which artificially produced scarcity – and a certain political space. But, for the time being at least, they are merely a game and a representation, a pastime and a simulation of a world which can already be intuited but which must come from elsewhere.

New identities will only emerge when trans-national conversational spaces are superimposed onto economic spaces within a similar domain and they interact.

On different scales, from the networks constituted by tens of thousands of Neonomadic individualists to the great corporate Venices, this is exactly what we are starting to see this decade, and what prefigures the forms of the great future postnational map.”

The increasing unfreedom of states vs. the experienced freedom of networks

David de Ugarte et al.:

“By the end of the eighties, the relationship between economic freedom and political freedoms seemed unquestionable. Who could deny that, from the point of view of Eastern Europe, democracy, development, and capitalism went hand in hand?

The Tiananmen Massacre, far from contradicting the general framework, seemed rather to confirm it. Reforming currents and democratic demands – it was said – emerged from the emerging prosperity which could already be felt in the experimental poles of the free market.

Outside the communist world, the Taiwanese and Korean transitions seemed to reaffirm this idea: economic freedoms and free trade where the doorway to development and the matrix for strong democratic reform movements which, in turn, generated institutional frameworks generating more capitalism and more development.

Democracy, development and capitalism seemed to be as inseparable as they were evident. It was the time when Francis Fukuyama published his book The End of History.

But let us examine what remains nowadays of the “dragons”. Singapore, the enterprise-cum-authoritarian State, not Havel’s Czech Republic, seems to be the new beacon for the developing world, a beacon very well-liked by totalitarian states in the midst of economic reform.

Today Vietnam and China have the highest growth rates, while the world pampers China after symbolically recognising it as an equal in the Beijing Olympics. The “Russian model” fits naturally into this map, and is spreading throughout the once Second World like a plague: limited pluralism, plebiscitary populism, the cult of providential leadership, a war-like language, the development of the authoritarian patronage of an increasingly autonomous State.

In parallel, in the countries once known as free, the trend, encouraged from the United States and the European Union, seems to be towards the establishment of control societies53 fed by the fear to the consequences of globalisation, articulated by an increasingly disciplinarian State, and identified once more with a Neo-Puritan political culture.

This global political framework contrasts with the social experience of a new kind of identities born in the new distributed and de-territorialised social networks — identities which therefore arose from a certain experience of abundance and pluriarchy.The clash would result in a revaluation of the new de-territorialised lives, a certain awareness that from this kind of life one can not only experience but consolidate a space of personal and political freedom which surpasses in a tangible and specific way the space offered by States.”

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