I have caught myself thinking about the idea of “virtual state”, though understood in more serious way than existing so-called internet countries. By virtual state I mean here state recognized by other “serious” countries, but which is not bound by geography, i.e. citizens share rights and duties and are communicating and working together regardless of their physical location.
A question that came to my mind was: what would it take for an internet country to be recognized by traditional countries and to yield real world-altering power? And a side question: how to guarantee sovereignty in the world that still thinks in geographical terms?
Experience from last decade shows that even small groups of people working totally remotely and even anonymously can make an impact. If such groups could be extended to include large number of people and work in systematic way for well-being of all their members, wouldn’t it be a natural consequence to grant them political and international independence?
I would really like to see this happen. Of course, in present world it may turn out unsustainable, because such distributed organization won’t have proper means to defend its independence and we know from history that so-called “international guarantees” rarely guarantee anything at all, thus the ultimate (maybe only) way to defend something is to be able to do it by yourself.
On the other hand, if virtual state had some way to seriously threaten systems of other countries, it could repel potential agression. I mean, something like a ‘nuclear button’ — you make a move against our digital structure, we throw digital bombs on your non-digital buildings. Though it probably would be called “terrorism”, I guess.
So — after I’ve written these thoughts down — I see only one possible way to build serious and trustworthy virtual state: build it in organic way, respecting existing boundaries, offering opportunities that don’t exist in current world, with an agenda to gather as many powerful and influencing individuals as possible, then build and test country-running systems and only then try to emancipate this proto-state from the old world’s chains.
By the way, one side-effect of virtual state that I find positive is this: if true AI will ever be built, problem of citizenship for non-humans won’t exist. 😉