Eleanor Saitta: So yeah. I’m going to talk a lit­tle bit about this idea of per­form­ing states. And I’d like to start with kind of the typ­i­cal intro­duc­tion and talk­ing about who I am and where I’m from. 

This is who var­i­ous states think I am. I have two pass­ports and Finnish res­i­den­cy card. There’s a few oth­er bits of state iden­ti­ty that we’ll get to in a lit­tle bit. And I’m going to spend a lit­tle bit of time dig­ging into iden­ti­ty because I think it’s inter­est­ing to look at how the rela­tion­ships we have with states shape the way we see states as con­structs and as enti­ties. And so I’m going to start with some old fam­i­ly pho­tos because it’s kind of fun.

So, my father was born in Rome. His father was born in Sicily. His moth­er was actu­al­ly born in the Uffizi in Florence, because that’s where the fam­i­ly office was. And they moved to New York dur­ing the war in ​’43 or so. 

Like many peo­ple, my dad end­ed up in a bunch of dead-end jobs, you know, like many war immi­grants. A bunch of dead end jobs in Beth Page New York, liv­ing out in Long Island. So he joined the Air Force and he end­ed up work­ing on nukes in Greece in the mid 60s, which is what even­tu­al­ly killed him. He got the GI Bill. He went to Cooper Union, became an architect. 

My moth­er was born in Melbourne. She was the daugh­ter of a fair­ly well-connected aca­d­e­m­ic. She worked sum­mer jobs to buy pas­sage to London, because Australia was tiny and if you want­ed to do any­thing with your life you had to leave. 

They both end­ed up in New York. They moved out to California and then they had me, because this was New York in the 1970s and it was no place to have a kid or real­ly do much of any­thing unless you were spec­tac­u­lar­ly wealthy. (Some things have not changed very much.) 

I grew up in California, but the California I grew up in was a California of two peo­ple who were yes, immi­grants, but not immi­grants with­in the American nar­ra­tive of ​“this is America the land of oppor­tu­ni­ty” etc. It was ​“this is America, it was con­ve­nient.” I remem­ber being told explic­it­ly when I was fair­ly small grow­ing up, ​“We’re not from here. We’re not like those peo­ple.” Which is prob­a­bly not a thing you should ever tell a child. Please don’t tell your chil­dren that, even if you believe it. 

But it left me with a very inter­est­ing rela­tion­ship with this place which was becom­ing a real seat of pow­er around the world. And we’ll talk about that a lit­tle bit later. 

So I grew up, and I went to school and failed out of school, and end­ed up drift­ing into Seattle, and drift­ing into doing secu­ri­ty work. And got bored with Seattle because it was a land of absolute­ly no cul­ture except a love­ly music scene. And end­ed up mov­ing to New York, as peo­ple are wont to do. 

There’s a bit at the end of the move where you’re sup­posed to stop. And I kind of for­got to do that. So this was my 2013, or part of my 2013. And I spent sev­en or eight years trav­el­ing full-time. That year, I think—I think it was that year, I was mov­ing about thir­ty kilo­me­ters an hour for the year. 

I was doing it for a lot of dif­fer­ent rea­sons, par­tial­ly because I kind of fell into doing NGO work and and secu­ri­ty sup­port for NGOs ands news orga­ni­za­tions. But par­tial­ly because I real­ized that when I was in the US as some­one who had grown up there, I could­n’t see the rest of the world. And this is some­thing which I think is prob­a­bly not uncom­mon as an expe­ri­ence for peo­ple who live in empires? But it is very dif­fi­cult to get any per­spec­tive of what any­thing else in the world means. Previously to the American empire, I don’t know that we’ve real­ly noticed that lack of per­spec­tive because we’ve…the assump­tion has been that you see the world from the per­spec­tive of where you are. The assump­tion has not been that you live on the Internet and see the world from the per­spec­tive of every­one you know every­where else around the world. But I found that while I was liv­ing there, I did­n’t under­stand the sto­ries, and as soon as I left the coun­try they start­ed mak­ing sense again.

How many peo­ple here have read Kyle Chayka’s piece ​“Airspace?” I rec­om­mend look­ing it up. It’s a great lit­tle essay. He’s basi­cal­ly talk­ing about this idea that there is an aes­thet­ic which has become…both acci­den­tal­ly and inten­tion­al­ly uni­ver­sal in cer­tain kinds of spaces. I used to joke with friends that I lived in one neigh­bor­hood that just had real­ly real­ly shit­ty pub­lic tran­sit, you know, and it would take twelve hours on the bus to get from the Prenzlauer Berg part of the neigh­bor­hood to the Soho part of the neighborhood. 

And this is kind of what he was get­ting at with air­space, although I hope I lived in a slight­ly more gen­uine world. This idea that even out­side this bub­ble of empire that stretch­es across mil­i­tary bases and var­i­ous things, there is anoth­er lay­er of space that a por­tion of human­i­ty moves through that is the kind of dis­tressed wood that you see in cafes. That you see the same table, or you know, the local repro­duc­tion with­in the equiv­a­lent aes­thet­ic of the same table, in cafes just about every­where that are tar­get­ing the same kind of person. 

One of the things I learned when I was trav­el­ing, and I think it was… It took me a while to real­ly under­stand what it meant to not live any­where. There’s this idea that like oh, it’s just trav­el­ing; oh, I’d love to go trav­el­ing. And then you real­ize that okay like, there’s all these prob­lems of like, well I don’t have a fixed address, you know. Like all of these things of what it means to be…possibly not home­less in the struc­ture of priv­i­lege that that implies, but you still have all of the same legal issues. And one of the things that I learned from oth­er friends who trav­eled in very dif­fer­ent ways is that the equiv­a­lent thing to ask­ing a set­tled friend ​“Where do you live?” Like, ​“what kind of neigh­bor­hood do you live in? Is it a rich neigh­bor­hood? Is it a poor neigh­bor­hood? Do you live in a house? Do you live in an apart­ment?” is, ​“How fast do you move?” or, ​“How fre­quent­ly do you move?”

So for 2013 my goal for the year was to get my aver­age time per city up to a week a city, which I did not suc­ceed at. I think I was about four and a half days. But I had oth­er friends who also trav­eled full-time, but they changed cities once a month. And they maybe moved by train instead of by plane. Or they lived out of a van and drove around the country. 

And in many cas­es this was a class dis­tinc­tion but in a lot of them not. One of my cowork­ers at the first secu­ri­ty job that I worked at, and a research part­ner still to this day, lived in a van for the bet­ter part of a decade. She decid­ed she want­ed to leave Seattle at some point and bought a van to dri­ve around the coun­try to fig­ure out where she want­ed to live next. And she real­ized that she real­ly liked liv­ing in a van. So she did. And that expe­ri­ence was anoth­er thing that real­ly shaped the way I kind of saw the coun­try and saw coun­tries as a category. 

When asked where I was from…which is, you know, one of the first things that you get asked, I used to say I was from the Internet. Which start­ed out as as a fun­ny joke and at var­i­ous times became more and less bit­ter. And obvi­ous­ly when I’m out­side of the US I read as American. But one of the inter­est­ing expe­ri­ences and one of the things that real­ly kind of led me to start say­ing that fair­ly seri­ous­ly is that when I was inside the US I did­n’t real­ly feel like an American—I did­n’t real­ly under­stand what this coun­try that I was sup­pos­ed­ly from meant. 

And also there are ways in which I was fair­ly lit­er­al­ly from the Internet. I maybe don’t know what it means to be American but I do under­stand what it means to be a Californian. I don’t know how many of you are famil­iar with the his­to­ry of the Bay Area. It is a very fas­ci­nat­ing place which is full of tox­ic waste dumps because when the first peo­ple build­ing Internet sys­tems and com­put­er sys­tems there start­ed doing man­u­fac­tur­ing, they real­ly did­n’t under­stand safe­ty reg­u­la­tions or they just did­n’t care. So, you get these kinds of plaques which is the sort of hero­ism of oh, this is Silicon Valley, this is all that. And you also have more Superfund sites per hun­dred square miles than any­where else in the coun­try by a fair bit. And I think that that is real­ly an entire­ly just sum­ma­ry of the area, of hav­ing both of those sides. Although I’m start­ing to ques­tion the heroism.

One of the things that we’ve been hear­ing late­ly is peo­ple push­ing to rename… ​“Oh, we should­n’t call it Silicon Valley, we should call Surveillance Valley. We should be more hon­est about what it is.” And as my friend Ingrid was say­ing the oth­er day I mean, yes you could do that, but real­ly the sil­i­con is impor­tant too, guys. Let’s not for­get about the tox­ic waste dumps. 

The Internet I’m from is dead. And this was kind of a star­tling thing to real­ize a few years ago. Well, real­ly, a few months ago ful­ly. That the place that I iden­ti­fied with does­n’t exist and has been replaced with some­thing else which is much big­ger, and much more aggres­sive, and in some ways much more hos­tile but most­ly just much more unpredictable. 

Now, obvi­ous­ly we’ve been talk­ing about the death of the Internet for a very very long time. This is a piece from 1995 where Clifford Stoll was pre­dict­ing the death of the Internet. So it’s been a pop­u­lar hobby. 

But I want to talk about this idea from a friend of mine, Quinn Norton, called the invis­i­ble city. If you look at the his­to­ry of urban­iza­tion, it took us about 140 years to move some­thing like half of the world’s pop­u­la­tion from rur­al vil­lages to the city. And for most of that peri­od, a lot of peo­ple were basi­cal­ly doing the equiv­a­lent of walk­ing out into the street and get­ting imme­di­ate­ly past­ed by a tram. Because they had real­ly no idea how to live in the city. And it took us a very long time—and you know, we had a head start on this; this is some­thing that’s been going on for longer—to learn what it means to live in a city. 

So, civic inat­ten­tion, right. You’re sit­ting in a cof­fee shop and some­one at the table next to you is talk­ing about who they slept with last night. Except it’s not a very inter­est­ing sto­ry. It’s not a sto­ry that you’re gonna lis­ten to just because oh, it’s real­ly fun and it’s engag­ing. No, it’s actu­al­ly just real­ly bor­ing. So you ignore them. Because, why would­n’t you? That was not some­thing that came nat­u­ral­ly to us as a species. We had to learn that oh yeah, that’s bor­ing. They are not part of your social world…who cares? And this is some­thing that… You know, you can you can go back in the archives and find peo­ple who talked about this and talked about this as an explic­it thing that you had to learn how to do. The coun­try bump­kins who showed up and did­n’t get it for quite a while. 

We have now in twen­ty years moved half the world’s pop­u­la­tion, give or take—two bil­lion peo­ple any­ways, solidly—to one city. And we all live in one city. And we keep walk­ing out into the street and get­ting past­ed by trams. And we don’t even under­stand what the trams are. We not only do not know how to live togeth­er online, we don’t even real­ly under­stand that it’s a prob­lem. We don’t even real­ly see this. 

And then some days you wake up and you notice ​“Oh. Jesus. That’s a tram and it’s in my bed­room.” Which hap­pened to my friend Quinn the oth­er day when eight mil­lion peo­ple decid­ed she was a Nazi sym­pa­thiz­er. Which is a real­ly shit­ty way to start your morn­ing, let me tell you. 

So I guess now I’m from here. But what I want to talk about is social script. When we talk about learn­ing how to not get hit by trans, on the Internet what we’re talk­ing about is how to be human, how to per­form human in a city, how to per­form inter­ac­tion with each other. 

And those are real­ly impor­tant, and they’re real­ly use­ful, and they’re real­ly inter­est­ing when we start talk­ing about bor­ders. How many peo­ple here have crossed a hos­tile bor­der? Yeah. It’s a fair num­ber. I remem­ber the first time I was… This was kind of just at the start of when I was trav­el­ing. And I was fly­ing into the UK. And I’d basi­cal­ly been wan­der­ing around Europe for six weeks with a back­pack, and I was super sleep-deprived. And I show up at the English bor­der being like, ​“Yeah I’m here for like maybe ten days. I don’t know…” This did not go well. They were very not pleased to see a super sleep-deprived, pos­si­bly slight­ly hun­gover American show­ing up with a back­pack and no par­tic­u­lar­ly clear trav­el plans. 

And for­tu­nate­ly I did have like three dif­fer­ent cred­it cards with the name that matched my pass­port, so they even­tu­al­ly let me through. But that abil­i­ty to at least pre­tend priv­i­lege, right, whether or not you are actu­al­ly of the priv­i­leged trav­el­ing class or not. The abil­i­ty to per­form priv­i­lege at a bor­der, right—and it is a per­for­mance, you know. That per­for­mance is some­thing that any­one who trav­els in com­pli­cat­ed con­texts learns. And every­one around them learns it, too. And I don’t know like… I’m assum­ing that most of you have EU pass­ports, so you prob­a­bly do not have the expe­ri­ence of being at the ​“all oth­er pass­ports” line and being like okay, there’s four all oth­er pass­ports lines, and I have twen­ty min­utes to make my flight. And you look ahead at who’s in front of you. And you do all of the same racial stereo­typ­ing that you think the bor­der guards are going to do. And then you look at how much paper­work they’re car­ry­ing. And any­body who’s car­ry­ing too much paper­work, you get in a dif­fer­ent line. Because they’re gonna have a very com­pli­cat­ed con­ver­sa­tion with the bor­der guard. Although last time I crossed in there was a very rich-looking American gen­tle­man in front of me who real­ly did­n’t under­stand that no, I’m sor­ry sir. I don’t care if you’re a Swedish dou­ble cit­i­zen. You can’t enter Sweden indef­i­nite­ly with­out a Swedish pass­port. You need to actu­al­ly have the pass­port. He did­n’t seem to under­stand this. 

But we end up doing that kind of both mod­u­lat­ing our own per­for­mance; look­ing at how we per­form; choose to per­form priv­i­lege; when it’s acces­si­ble to us; if it’s not acces­si­ble to us then we work around it in oth­er ways. And we watch the per­for­mances of oth­er peo­ple around us when they’re going to affect us. 

This by the way is some­thing that I find real­ly amus­ing. I could not find a pho­to of the exact spot or even a map of the exact spot that I’m think­ing of. In Dublin airport—and I think I’ve seen this in Reykjavik and a cou­ple of oth­er small­er inter­na­tion­al air­ports. It’s a one-level air­port. So you get the cor­ri­dor com­ing in from the gate, and you get the cor­ri­dor that goes off to immi­gra­tion. And there’s this box where there’s doors on four sides. They’re auto­mat­ic doors. In at least the Dublin case, there’s a patch of ground where it’s got kind of motion sen­sors on the two feeding-in cor­ri­dors and a timer. When the timer expires, it clos­es one set of doors, waits till it detects the patch of ground is emp­ty, opens the oth­er set of doors. So this chunk of ground is shared. This chunk func­tion­al­ly is part of two cor­ri­dors so that peo­ple can get on to the plane and peo­ple can move along the route to pass­port control. 

Now this means that you’ve got a robot mov­ing a patch of ground between nation­al­i­ties. Because when I’ve board­ed there it’s been inter­na­tion­al pas­sen­gers com­ing in, and Schengen flights going out. So this patch of ground has a robot mov­ing it in and out of the Schengen region. 

And I always find the phys­i­cal per­for­mance of… Like the lit­er­al­ly phys­i­cal per­for­mance of mov­ing through that kind of bor­der space to be real­ly inter­est­ing. Especially these days as it’s got­ten messier and more com­pli­cat­ed, when I’m leav­ing the US there’s always this kind of phys­i­cal sense of release. Of like, okay, I’m no longer… You know, I’ve made it through pass­port con­trol. I’m on the oth­er side. I’m not nec­es­sar­i­ly in a coun­try yet, you know. Maybe I’ve cleared— I’m just—I’m in inter­na­tion­al tran­sit. I’m still not any­where but I’m also not in the US. And that kind of lim­bo space is some­thing that I find real­ly interesting. 

Back to those social scripts. I want to talk about them a lit­tle bit. And what I want to talk about is live action role play­ing. Now this is gonna sound com­plete­ly ridicu­lous, but bear with me for a lit­tle bit. When I talk about live action role play­ing some of you will have no idea what I’m talk­ing about, and some of you will have a men­tal image of a bunch of peo­ple run­ning around in the woods with foam swords pre­tend­ing to be elves and orcs and beat­ing each oth­er over the head. That is what I’m talk­ing about, but I’m specif­i­cal­ly talk­ing about where larp went in the Nordics. If you’re inter­est­ed in why I think it went there, ask me lat­er and we’ll get drinks. 

But this is a pho­to from a game called Ground Zero which I often use as an intro­duc­tion. Ground Zero was first played in 1998. It was a game for about twenty-five play­ers. It was set in Topeka, Kansas in 1962. It’s a Finnish game; it was played in Turku. And the week before the game, they got togeth­er and had a din­ner par­ty in char­ac­ter. You know, kind of lis­tened to music of the era, under­stood what their social rela­tion­ships were, and it was just kind of a nor­mal dinner. 

When the game start­ed, they all went down into the base­ment of a rec cen­ter that had been redone as a bomb shel­ter. And here they are kind of troop­ing down into the into the base­ment in char­ac­ter. And the game was set dur­ing the Cuban Missile Crisis. So there’s an in-game game radio which is play­ing his­tor­i­cal radio pieces. And the sit­u­a­tion out­side gets worse and worse. And at some point it changed over into fic­tion­al­ized record­ings. And at some point, there’s a burst of sta­t­ic and the radio goes dead because New York has just been nuked. And then the pow­er cuts out. 

And then about forty min­utes lat­er, there is a mas­sive earth-shattering boom. Because what they thought was a wall full of card­board box­es of canned goods was actu­al­ly a wall full of speak­ers. I think they actu­al­ly blew out about a third of the speak­ers in the wall because they had the amps turned up too high. And that’s it. Then they sit in the dark for the next twenty-two hours and try and under­stand what it means for every­one they know to be dead. 

The game ends the next morn­ing. The orga­niz­ers basi­cal­ly rip open a door and say okay, it’s over. And they tell peo­ple the shel­ter cracked, water leaked in. Over the next three or four weeks half of you died of can­cer. We’re not telling whom. End.

And it was a fair­ly emo­tion­al­ly pow­er­ful expe­ri­ence, espe­cial­ly for folks who were of the gen­er­a­tion that was very aware of the Cold War. This was this was a less dis­tant mem­o­ry then it cer­tain­ly would be for folks their age now. And it was incred­i­bly emo­tion­al­ly mov­ing, you know, the kind of polit­i­cal mes­sage that was part of what they were talk­ing about was real­ly very strong. 

This is my friend [Jok?], and she’s talk­ing about des­ignable surface—Johanna Koljonen—and she’s a Swedish media writer among oth­er things. And this is kind of one of the most key ideas, right. You have a game, you want to change peo­ple’s under­stand­ing of the world. One of the biggest things you need to do then is to shape their behav­ior, and to shape their under­stand­ing of the mean­ing of social inter­ac­tion. So we used des­ignable sur­face to do this, right. And this is some­thing that we think about in oth­er con­texts. If you’ve dealt with sys­tems design or ser­vice design as a dis­ci­pline, as it’s kind of devel­op­ing, you think about touch­points, that kind of thing. But sur­face design is look­ing at a much broad­er set of all pos­si­ble inter­ac­tions with the sys­tem that end up shap­ing emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence and emo­tion­al mean­ing, much more than than just kind of this oh yeah, that sign explains how I inter­act with this box. 

You can rewrite social scripts fair­ly exten­sive­ly if you use your des­ignable sur­face well. This is a game called Mellan him­mel och hav, Between Heaven and Sea. It was an Ursula Le Guin-themed fic­tion. This was run in 2003. It was an explic­it­ly hap­py nar­ra­tive. It was a tale of a com­mu­ni­ty on a world that has a very long sea­son cycle. And spring is return­ing, and the com­mu­ni­ty is prepar­ing for a mar­riage. And it’s a fair­ly small com­mu­ni­ty so this is a big deal. 

But every­one in the com­mu­ni­ty is sort­ed— Marriages are all four peo­ple. And the per­formed gen­ders are not male and female. Although those exist that’s a med­ical issue, basi­cal­ly. There are morn­ing peo­ple and evening peo­ple. So morn­ing peo­ple are the prac­ti­cal ones. They get up ear­ly, they build infra­struc­ture. They man­age the tasks of the com­mu­ni­ty. Evening peo­ple stay up late into the night talk­ing about pol­i­tics. You know, it’s ridicu­lous to think that an evening per­son is going to get any­thing done, prac­ti­cal­ly, because they’re not up when the work hap­pens. Just like it’s ridicu­lous to think that a morn­ing per­son is going to be politically-involved. 

So every every mar­riage has two morn­ing peo­ple and two evening peo­ple, and that’s kind of the struc­ture. And, as you can see—these are these are all in-game photos—they had six days of work­shops before­hand. And a lot of real­ly inten­sive work went into kind of strip­ping away and then rebuild­ing peo­ple’s under­stand­ing of gen­der iden­ti­ty and gen­der role and gen­der performance. 

And this had some real­ly last­ing effects. You know, there are a num­ber of peo­ple whose actu­al gen­der iden­ti­ties shift­ed because of what the game let them expe­ri­ence and they under­stood them­selves to be a dif­fer­ent per­son. Not because the game brain­washed them or any­thing but because it gave them a space for explo­ration. They were also liv­ing in extreme­ly close quar­ters in the game. Six folks I know end­ed up shar­ing a fair­ly small like thirty-five square meter one-bedroom apart­ment for three or four years after the game. Because they real­ized that if they did that they could live in cen­tral Stockholm and basi­cal­ly not pay rent. And the game had taught them both some spe­cif­ic tech­niques for how to func­tion­al­ly live in that kind of space, but also had shown them that they could build scripts that were actu­al­ly that aggres­sive in terms of rewrit­ing their lives. 

Now doing this in real­i­ty is often hard­er, change is slow­er, con­sent is a lot more com­plex. The tools you can use are more restrict­ed. But social script design can work in inter­est­ing ways. 

So let’s get back to bor­ders. What a bor­der is is chang­ing, and it’s chang­ing fair­ly rapid­ly. This is what the US gov­ern­ment des­ig­nates as the bor­der zone. This is the region of the US, which includes about 90-something per­cent of the American pop­u­la­tion, that cus­toms and bor­der con­trol con­sid­ers to be with­in scope of their oper­a­tions. So any­thing that they can do when you come through cus­toms at JFK, they can do any­where in the bor­der zone. Including every­one in Hawaii. You can’t get away from the bor­der in Hawaii. 

We also have spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones. When I was putting this togeth­er I actu­al­ly went to see like oh, spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones. Those are like, fair­ly com­plex pieces of gov­ern­ment bureau­cra­cy. Surely there must be a fairly—you know like, there must be a list, right? And some­body must have com­piled a map of all of the spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones in the world. 

Nope.

There were maybe about 10,000 of them. Ish. We know where… Someone knows where all of them are. But they are in many coun­tries fair­ly inten­tion­al­ly opaque. A spe­cial eco­nom­ic zone, for those not famil­iar with the term, is a des­ig­nat­ed region of a coun­try which is not nec­es­sar­i­ly part of the coun­try’s soil for cer­tain pur­pos­es, gen­er­al­ly includ­ing tar­iffs, trade reg­u­la­tions, and labor regulations—labor laws. And often includ­ing a real­ly pret­ty exten­sive set of stuff. This is the set of Chinese spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones. Many of those are cities or entire provinces, so these these aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly like, small patch­es of ground but like a free port, which might be a few ware­hous­es at an air­port which is out­side of the coun­try for cus­toms pur­pos­es. It’s kind of on the same con­tin­u­um. Free ports are where probably…if I had to guess, prob­a­bly at this point maybe a third or half of the world’s art is stored out of pub­lic view. Just because it’s being bought for invest­ment pur­pos­es and they don’t want to declare cus­toms on it any­where because that’s expen­sive and makes it less use­ful as an invest­ment vehicle.

We also have net­works of con­trol that tie into a lot of these things. This is Guiyang’s shiny new CCTV con­trol cen­ter that they showed off to the BBC a few weeks ago. The appear­ance of this cen­ter, like, does it need to be this kind of mas­sive room with all of these very shiny desks for the pur­pos­es of what’s going on there? No. But it’s a very use­ful des­ignable sur­face for the state to shape the social scripts of response to CCTV. This is one of the CCTV cen­ters where all the cam­eras in the city are hooked up to a face rec sys­tem. And so they took a pho­to of some BBC reporter, had him get dropped off some­where ran­dom in the city, start walk­ing around, and they found him in sev­en min­utes. Now, we can also talk about false pos­i­tives and you all of the oth­er issues with sys­tems like this, even ignor­ing the minor human rights prob­lems. But as a struc­ture of con­trol which is being rolled it’s an inter­est­ing data point. 

Here’s a Western exam­ple, very tight geolo­ca­tion indoors. This is deployed in a lot of malls in rich­er Western coun­tries, where it’s not leg­is­lat­ed against. So they pick up the WiFi radio in your phone, and Bluetooth if you’ve got it on. Cross-reference that against say, the MAC address that the Facebook app has exfil­trat­ed out. You know, there’ll be a data bro­ker that’ll kind of bring all these things togeth­er, so that then they can say, push ads to you for things that you might’ve seen in stores that you spent a bunch of time lin­ger­ing in. 

So why do we actu­al­ly need a phys­i­cal bor­der? Like it’s clear­ly… Like, you know, the future is not even­ly dis­trib­uted, what­ev­er what­ev­er, but like it’s clear­ly kind of irrel­e­vant. So a nation is infra­struc­ture for some­one’s stan­dard of liv­ing. Probably not your stan­dard of living. 

This is a a map from 1650 of places that were con­sid­ered nations by…whoever com­piled this map. And so the mod­ern nation project co-rose with indus­tri­al infra­struc­ture. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. 

So you’ve got you know, a bit more in 1850; the colo­nial pow­ers have start­ed expand­ing. And then all of a sud­den, 1900, almost total. 1940, there are no more gray areas on the map. 

Now this is a hilar­i­ous­ly ter­ri­ble map. It does not rec­og­nize any indige­nous pop­u­la­tions that might con­sid­er them­selves to have been a nation. Also, many of these things, cer­tain­ly in 1940, were states by name but not states in any func­tion­al way. But what they care about here, what the peo­ple who com­piled this map care about are nations that are sig­ni­fied and leg­i­ble to the col­lec­tive project of nation­ifi­ca­ca­tion, which was a…you know, again, you can read the receipts. There was a very aggres­sive, care­ful project to ensure that land was not left out­side of the sys­tem of nations, because for the pur­pos­es for which nations were being con­struct­ed, they need­ed the sys­tem to be as total as pos­si­ble. States of excep­tion were…states of leakage—they were weaknesses. 

Now, we can look at mul­ti­ple things that we might call nations or peo­ples or that kind of thing. We can look at shared cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty. And many, some, of these states have shared cul­tur­al iden­ti­ties. Some of them even had shared cul­tur­al iden­ti­ties before some­one drew a line on a map. We can look at the kind of sig­ni­fied nation view that this actu­al­ly rep­re­sents. But what they actu­al­ly are is geographically-bounded coer­cive infra­struc­tur­al col­lec­tives, right. This is a chunk of land where peo­ple are build­ing infra­struc­ture. It is one pool of infra­struc­ture. And you don’t get the choice of opt­ing out of that pool of infra­struc­ture. Because it’s not pos­si­ble to build industrial-scale infra­struc­ture unless it is a coer­cive col­lec­tive project. We can debate the coer­cive bit, but cer­tain­ly giv­en the polit­i­cal tools that peo­ple had at the time they did­n’t know how else to do it. 

Who here has read The Art of Not Being Governed? James C. Scott? Okay, a few. So The Art of Not Being Governed is an expla­na­tion of the pol­i­tics of Zomia, which is this bit of Southeast Asia, or specif­i­cal­ly the parts of Southeast Asia that are too far above sea lev­el to grow rice. Because his­tor­i­cal­ly, states in that region were con­nect­ed to rice grow­ing. And one of the real­ly inter­est­ing things about that his­to­ry is that it’s not the nar­ra­tive that we tra­di­tion­al­ly hear of like, states expand and bring peo­ple into their fold, and that kind of thing. It went both ways. You had a lot of peo­ple being like, ​“Hmm. This state isn’t work­ing out so well for me. I think I’ll leave. I’ll go up into the hills and become a non-state per­son for some peri­od of time, until maybe con­di­tions get bet­ter.” And all of that stuff about shared cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty, that all changed. That all changed, and changed actu­al­ly quite rapid­ly, in line with these col­lec­tive movements. 

One of the things which end­ed up being very use­ful, by the way, were sweet pota­toes. They’re great. You put them in the ground. They grow. You can’t take them with you, they’re too heavy. You can’t steal them, they’re not expro­pri­at­able by a state. You leave them in the ground for two years—they’re still there. And it’s inter­est­ing when we’ve talked about shift­ing bor­ders, if we think about you know, how cli­mate change may shift the rice-cultivatable areas in that region, we may get the state­able areas there—at least in the tra­di­tion­al def­i­n­i­tion of what states have been in that region—shifting just based on bio­me shift­ing. Now, of course mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy has changed what is state­able in those places. 

Production has become glob­al. This is part of a fair­ly sim­ple sup­ply chain map for a lap­top. It’s very very sim­pli­fied. But if we want to sur­vive cli­mate change, we need to see not just pro­duc­tion, not just the sup­ply chain side, but all of the infra­struc­ture projects have to be con­ceived of in terms of glob­al scope, right. Because they have a glob­al impact. 

I have one more fam­i­ly pho­to which sig­nif­i­cant­ly changed my rela­tion­ship with the US. Just before I left I became a full US cit­i­zen, which is to say a cor­po­ra­tion. Which was a real­ly weird expe­ri­ence because it real­ly does put you in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent mode of inter­act­ing both with the US and with most oth­er states. Part of that cap­i­tal flow, in some ways. So there’s part of me that can move around much more freely than the phys­i­cal body can. 

We are in a moment of choice as a species. If we are going to sur­vive the next hun­dred years—eh…let’s be more real­is­tic: the next six­ty years, with what we cur­rent­ly see as globally-organized indus­tri­al civ­i­liza­tion intact and func­tion­ing, we need to ter­raform this plan­et. Now, the good news is this is the eas­i­est plan­et to ter­raform that we’re ever going to inter­act with. If you look at the kind of rea­son­able mid­line sce­nar­ios, we’ve passed two degrees Celsius. And if you look at the rea­son­able impact esti­mates for what that means…we’re not keep­ing indus­tri­al orga­nized glob­al civ­i­liza­tion after two degrees. So, if we want it back, if we want to have our future back, we need to start ter­raform­ing. We have lost the abil­i­ty to be local, right. This idea that we can only act local­ly, what­ev­er, that we can live in a place and see our­selves as just peo­ple who live in that place, that’s gone. We now get to learn what it means to be a glob­al species. 

What this requires of us is that our infra­struc­tur­al col­lec­tiv­i­ty, you know, that geographically-coercive, geographically-bounded infra­struc­tur­al col­lec­tive, that thing that we made the nation to do, that has to get bro­ken up. We have to unbound all of those infra­struc­tur­al col­lec­tives. Because if we don’t, we will build infra­struc­ture that does not work for the plan­et. This is not option­al; we do that or we die. 

We also need to flat­ten wealth inequal­i­ty. And we need to do that not because the megarich are killing the plan­et and should be mur­dered. Although they are, and they pos­si­bly should be. But we need to do that because every­one in India wants a car, and an air con­di­tion­er, and a fridge, and that is entire­ly fuck­ing rea­son­able. And if we would like to stop them, our options are…kill them, or fig­ure out a way to give those things to them. And we’re going to pick one of those things and start doing that. And we will not psy­chi­cal­ly sur­vive, we will not cul­tur­al­ly sur­vive, killing most of the world, and we prob­a­bly should­n’t try. So there­fore we should prob­a­bly fig­ure out how to both flat­ten what we take and also pro­vide that infra­struc­ture in a way that is actu­al­ly func­tion­al for everyone. 

Now, all of this means that the thing that we built the nation to do we don’t need any­more. As you may have noticed, things that have become unnec­es­sary in polit­i­cal terms do not just go away. But let’s think in slight­ly deep­er time, right. Modern nations are about 400 years old. The era of total nation­hood is maybe eighty years old. We live in a tran­sient moment of total nations. This will pass. One of the things that I think we can do that is pos­si­bly one of the more impor­tant things that we can do right now is to fig­ure out how to pre­hearse an under­stand­ing of what it means to exist beyond the total nation. And by pre­hearse I mean play. You know. That’s how we under­stand, that’s how we learn about things that are unknown to us, right. Later on we fig­ure out oh okay, you can go to a class­room, you can recite these canned facts—that does­n’t help when you don’t under­stand a thing and there’s no one to teach you. So we need to pre­hearse our way into a future. Thank you.