Archive

The Real Name Game

Citizenship, after not think­ing about it for a while, feels like some­thing we’re all think­ing about quite a lot these days. In the words of Hannah Arendt, cit­i­zen­ship is the right to have rights. All of your rights essen­tial­ly descend from your cit­i­zen­ship, because only coun­tries will pro­tect those rights.

What Does the Internet Bring to the Concept of a Country?

You all have, undoubt­ed­ly, friends in New York and San Francisco and Berlin and Tokyo and Australia or what­ev­er, all of whom you have much more in com­mon with than you do with your neigh­bor. You’ve cre­at­ed dias­po­ras of inter­est. The death of dis­tance has cre­at­ed many dif­fer­ent new forms of coun­try. Countries which aren’t based on how far it is from us to those guys over there, but new coun­tries based on what you’re inter­est­ed in.