
Unlearning The 'Nation State' - softwaredoug
https://softwaredoug.com/unlearning/2020/09/05/unlearning-the-nation-state.html
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smkellat
The ideas of the World Federalist Movement from the 1930s are being
rediscovered!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Federalist_Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Federalist_Movement)

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anm89
This comes off as painfully naive to me. The nation state does not exist
because we learned it.

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softwaredoug
As I wrote in the article, there’s increasingly not a shared identity or
values between people in the same nation state. I think the burden of the
proof needs to be on “why should nation states exist?” in that kind of
environment. Especially considering how new the idea of a nation state is in
history.

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rapsey
You are extrapolating something out of an extreme situation that only exists
where you live. The US is in the early stages of disintegration/civil
war/collapse. Who knows what is going to happen, but it is not going to be
pretty.

Plenty of peaceful countries do have a "a shared identity or values" even
across the conservative/liberal spectrum.

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softwaredoug
Also Poland, Turkey, the UK, Germany, and every other country having issues
with a radical right.

Even Canada

[https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/canada-
political-c...](https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/canada-political-
compass-veering-190421204243047.html)

The US w/ Trump may have its extremes, but this pattern is playing out in a
lot of places.

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minimuffins
The nation state concept is not going to just wither away tomorrow, leaving us
freer to move about the world unimpeded by borders.

But it does seem to be on the wane somehow. The standard issue modern nation
state is an imperfect fit with the global economic order that has evolved in
the last few decades. Something will have to change. It's not necessarily good
news though.

If the nation state dissolves, what kind of power and institutions will
replace it? A cyberpunk corporate state? Green anarchist collectives? This is
worth thinking about rather than just passively "unlearning" (adapting to the
new conditions).

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bitwize
This is like Jaron Lanier railing against files. "We need to move past the
supremacy of files in order to more deeply understand computing", blardy blar.
Files exist because we need to organize our bits, and a great way to do that
is to group like bits together and give them easy-to-remember names; then when
we move them around, especially from machine to machine, we can reasonably
assume that a given name refers to particular stuff.

Nation-states exist because we humans are monkeys who need to organize
_ourselves_ , and are hardwired to do so with familial and tribal
affiliations, etc. The demands of modern, global civilization mean we must
scale beyond the tribal level, so we create abstract, virtual tribes
consisting of everyone within a certain geographical area administered by the
same government. Like the file, it's only a convention we adopt for
convenience, and yet that convenience adds up to so much friction we don't
have to deal with that, for now, we daren't switch to anything else.

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skitout
In a way this post is saying that a new nation is emerging ("culturally
aligned knowledge workers") and that that would make sense to create a new
Nation State for this new nation ?

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nimbius
Paul Vixie once said that the definition of a nation was once its borders,
then its airspace, and now its data. With each nation increasingly becoming
hostile to the free flow of information, its hard not to conclude the nation
state is still alive and well.

A lot of this article is also the elucidation of 'The Davos Man' and their
supreme desire to usurp the borders of nations in the pursuit of capital

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rayiner
> The hinterlands deeply resent the emerging, educated, cosmopolitan one-
> global-city. Certainty, this had a lot to do with Trump being elected. Fear
> that a multicultural knowledge economy might trump nation state protected
> privileges runs deep. This fear underpins much of the anti-intellectualism
> and anti-immigration extremism in these groups.

As someone who identifies increasingly with the hinterland, we’re not mad that
the educated cosmopolitans exist. We’re mad that they keep trying to rule over
us. If you would keep to yourselves, that would be fine. People want to govern
themselves. It’s called the right to self-determination. People in Iowa don’t
really care about the cosmopolitan elite in DC or New York. But they’re forced
to care when the media is entirely run by people in New York, and cosmopolitan
bureaucrats living in DC are trying to nationalize the education system, etc.
When cosmopolitan elites start demanding we “rename, relocate, or
contextualize” the few shared things we have left, like monuments to the
founders, they’re forced to care.

Also, if we’re evolving toward a borderless “multicultural knowledge economy”
why do the cosmopolitan elites care so much about enabling immigration?

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CalChris
This sounds very states rightsy. But people in Iowa really do care about the
cosmopolitan elite in DC and New York. Their entertainment on Fox News
(broadcast from NYC) and Laura Ingraham (broadcast from DC) is very much about
the cosmopolitan elite in DC and New York and very little about their local
infrastructure and institutions. Electing Trump was about sticking it to libs
and not, decidedly not, about governing.

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bhupy
"States rights" is a phrase that carries a lot of historical baggage, but not
only is there nothing inherently wrong with the concept, there's a lot of
merit to decentralization/subsidiarity. It's a core principle of the European
Union. Switzerland, one of the most prosperous nations on the planet, runs on
decentralization, or "states rights".

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rayiner
Federalism is also huge in Canada (where 80% of government spending goes
through the provinces) and Germany (where 50% goes through the states).

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bassman9000
Litmus test for honesty: replace the US or whatever EU country an article like
this is targeted against, replace it with China or Russia. Check how likely is
the author would still stand behind it.

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smitty1e
> If we unlearn this increasingly fallacious idea, we might open ourselves up
> to something new.

I submit that Dunbar's Number[1] is a real thing, and that it informs the
cognitive limitations of the human mind that inform nation-states.

This limitation also informs the popularity of Agile methodologies, if not
their success.

And so perhaps the road to Lennon's "Imagine" is attained through an Agile
mindset.

If the Iron Law of Oligarchy[2] doesn't win out first.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number)

[2]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy)

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richardjdare
I hear this a lot, but Dunbar's number is 150. There are about 68 million
people in the United Kingdom right now and 308 million in the United States.
Dunbar's number looks to me as something you can apply to village life, or
bands of cavemen, but not any national structure from the past few hundred
years. Something else must be going on when we move from thinking about "Dave
from down the road", to "I identify with citizen X who lives 500 miles away
that I've never met, but I don't identify with Non-Citizen Y who lives 501
miles away on the other side of that fence"

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smitty1e
Indeed, this is my (apparently unpopular) point:

> Dunbar's number looks to me as something you can apply to village life, or
> bands of cavemen, but not any national structure from the past few hundred
> years.

I'd extend your few centuries to all of human history and argue that:

1) humans scale poorly

2) all efforts to scale them tend toward Towers of Babel

The counter-example is a military, where healthy young people can be
coordinated at scale in an authoriterian system with a significant external
threat.

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richardjdare
So are you arguing for an "Ishmael" style neo-tribalism, or maybe small
networks of self-ruling villages/poleis rather than advocating for nationalism
against possible internationalist structures?

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smitty1e
The point I'm after tends toward the latter, networked structure.

The higher the center of gravity of the bureaucratic/aristocratic structure,
and look at what the US has become in the last century, the greater the Tower
of Babel risk.

The losers of the last Presidential election have declared a soft civil war.

Streamlined, simpler systems with higher-frequency, term-limited office-
holders, can move toward Nirvana: redistributing power, not wealth.

