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Influence without force: the law of the Internet The past year has seen increasing backlash and fear towards the Internet and its constituents. Calls for government-mandated regulation are coming from all sides while Silicon Valley wonders how influence campaigns have managed to sway an election. It is tempting, especially for the affected parties, to see Russian influence campaigns and lack of internet regulation as the culprit for the general sense of malaise in the Western World and its descent into populism but that would miss two much bigger phenomena: worsening living conditions and incorrect conceptualization of the internet. Worsening living conditions The rapid growth of China and emerging markets as well as the rise of “non-material” capitalism caused capital to move up and out. It moved up, with the “rich getting richer’, because non-material capitalism (eg. finance, tech) scales better than traditional capitalism and it moved out towards emerging markets owing to globalization. The displacement of capital from middle-class Western world has led to progressively better living conditions for the world as a whole but worse living conditions at the individual level in Europe and the United States. This new world order is the culprit for the nationalism seen across these regions. Conceptualizing the Internet In “The True Believer” Eric Hoffer remarks “For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute. [...] They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future”, in other words for people to champion change they need to be unhappy yet sufficiently hopeful. The Internet has been the very enabler and carrier of this hope, as evidenced in the Arab Spring and Trump alike. For an industry to be able to shape minds and spread hopes of such a diverse and dispersed group of people is extraordinary. This realization enables us to posit that unlike any other booming industry, technology is unique. No other industry in the past has had the ability to create a new world, a domain in military lingo, where people have a virtual life, an identity and participate in their own unique flavor of “res publica”; where people are citizens as much as they are consumers. It is therefore useful to look at the Internet as the natural evolution of a Nation State, an entity in which there are myriads of co-existing tribes yet this State is not concerned with most of its traditional functions such as public defense, welfare and so forth. Looking at the Internet as a New Nation State is not merely an exercise in theoretical metaphors and awe for human ingenuity; it provides a practical mental model to address the problem of nationalism and worsening living conditions. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031743