On this point, Anderson is quite absolute.
One of the key challenges is that nation-states weren’t a rupture in time, but rather were continuous with existing power structures. Perhaps, but it’s an extraordinarily simplistic comparison, one that misses some of the key originators of these nation-states. Aren’t we going through exactly the kind of media revolution that drove the first nation-states a few centuries ago?
#Nationstates heads will roll series
Isn’t the internet nothing but a series of imagined communities? Aren’t subreddits literally the seeds of nation-states? Every time Anderson mentioned the printing press or “print-capitalism,” I couldn’t help but replace the word “press” with WordPress and print-capitalism with advertising or surveillance capitalism. Certainly, the concept that the internet is its own sovereign entity has been with us almost since its invention (just take a look at John Perry Barlow’s original manifesto on the independence of cyberspace if you haven’t).
#Nationstates heads will roll full
There are dozens of other epiphanies and thoughts roaming throughout those pages, and so the best way to get the full flavor is just to pick up a used copy and dive in.įor my purposes though, I was curious to see how well Anderson’s thesis could be applied to the nation-state of the internet. That’s effectively the heart of the thesis of this petite book, which numbers just over 200 pages of eminently readable if occasionally turgid writing. We aren’t looking at convergent evolution, but rather clones of one model for organizing the nation implemented across the world. Intense circulation among local elites - the bureaucrats, lawyers, and professionals of these states - and their lack of mobility back to their empires’ capitals created a community of people who realized they had more in common with each other than the people on the other side of the Atlantic.Īs other communities globally start to understand their unique place in the world, they import these early models of nation-states through the rich print culture of books and newspapers. Anderson argues for a sociological perspective on where these states originate from. The nation-state itself was developed first in South America in the decline and aftermath of the Spanish and Portuguese empires.
Lexicographers researched and published dictionaries and thesauruses, and the printing presses - under pressure from capitalism’s dictates - created rich shelves of books filled with the stories and myths of peoples who just a few decades ago didn’t “exist” in the mind’s eye. The printing press is the necessary invention, but Anderson tracks the rise of nation-states to the development of vernacular media - French language as opposed to the Latin of the Catholic Church. In order to imagine a community though, there needs to be media that actually links that community together. Certainly it is among the most heavily cited: Google Scholar pegs it at almost 93,000 citations.īenedict Anderson, a political scientist and historian, ponders over a simple question: where does nationalism come from? How do we come to form a common bond with others under symbols like a flag, even though we have never - and will almost never - meet all of our comrades-in-arms? Why does every country consider itself “special,” yet for all intents and purposes they all look identical (heads of state, colors and flags, etc.) Also, why is the nation-state invented so late?Īnderson’s answer is his title: people come to form nations when they can imagine their community and the values and people it holds, and thus can demarcate the borders (physical and cognitive) of who is a member of that hypothetical club and who is not. That question led me to Imagined Communities, a book from 1983 and one of the most lauded (and debated) social science works ever published. It’s clearly on a lot of other people’s minds as well: when we interviewed Matt Howard of Norwest on Equity a few weeks back, he noted (unprompted) that Uber is one of the few companies that could reach “nation-state” status when it IPOs.Ĭlearly, the internet is home to many, diverse communities of similar-minded people, but how do those communities transmute from disparate bands into a nation-state?
The internet is a community, but can it be a nation-state? It’s a question that I have been pondering on and off this year, what with the rise of digital nomads and the deeply libertarian ethos baked into parts of the blockchain community.
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