Stateless in a digital world

Electronic money: Units of tokens of monetary value that take digital form and are transmitted over electronic networks.

Digital value units (DVUs): Basic units of denomination of electronic money; they may or may not correspond to units of national money.

Smart cards: A plastic card, similar to a creditcard, containing a microchip that can be used to retrieve, store, process and transmit digital data like electronic cash.

The name of the game, built around these and similar key concepts, is electronic commerce (e-commerce). The dichotomy that pops out of this world order is: Geographic Space Vs Cyberspace. Expressed in more accessible terms, it means the asymmetry between economics and politics. And expanded — we are still following Kobrin — this is "the asymmetry between an electronically integrated world economy and territorial nation-states". Since this crossover economy gets to work heedless of national borders (for DVUs can be transferred to any computer anyplace in the world with a few keystrokes), politically it could be a noodle ball of several entwined jurisdictions. What meaning our concept of jurisdiction could possibly schlep in a vagabond digital world order?

Trying to figure out its tax implications, the US Treasury came up with this truckload: E-commerce is likely to dissolve the linkbetween an income-generating activity and its specific graphic location ("Read my lips…"), and leading edge communication technology has already removed all national signposts on the information superhighway. "Electronic commerce does not seem to occur in any physical location but, instead, takes place in the nebulous world of cyberspace." The spirits of Marx and Engels are invoked, but only to be exorcised in a final dismissal. The state will wither away after all, in a sense, but private property is to survive the state, owing to what Kobrin describes as the "disconnect between electronic markets and political topography."

This is precisely where our stripteaser cuts a dash. She won’t strip, because it would mean vanishing into thin air. That is, when we get down to the bottomlines, by way of connecting the parable to the context, what basically is the state? Suppose we argue that, stripped off all stately definitions, starting from that of Plato onwards, the nation-state is a mere tax territory afterall. Now, try scanning for faultlines in the argument. Doing this will be the harshest challenge plus a survival kit for our sanity, as we move on to the next millennium, stateless in a digital world….

Incidentally, the situation presents a sticky problem to the ethologist. The state is a human invention with no biological precedence. Territoriality is evolutionary material. As for private property, it is not the same as animal territory, though there are conceptual links between the two.

Anyway, all of a sudden, any day looks like Friday 13 to the dear dead, and Plato has every reason to turn in his grave — with a chuckle on the sly. Since he is the most `stately’ of all philosophers, the Internet is expected to bust his ghost. But I have always suspected that, with all his whacky caves and shadows, Plato has a truly heraldic message for the techno-savvy — which turned out to be the truth. At the moment, computer theoreticians are equating his world-view with the virtual reality they delve into.Corroboration is perhaps only a few more keystrokes away.

In the meantime, our stripteaser has to strip and collapse. Nobody, not even Plato, could be her white knight. Poor state!