Old Divides, New Devices: Global Citizenship for Only Half of the World

Abstract

When we assess the benefits and limitations of state citizenship versus a voluntary model of global citizenship, we need to compare the reality of the state with the reality of cloud communities or the ideal of the state with the ideal of cloud communities. I am attracted to a system of voluntary membership where citizenship does not come coupled with the right to exclude, and I can see the advantages of ‘trustless systems’. Both of those things are compatible with the kind of utopian society Marx thought would come after capitalism had been superseded and when the need for a state (understood as a collective coercive system of punishment) would have withered away. But speaking about reality, capitalist relations control the state and they will control cloud communities. Without remedying the asymmetries of access to the means of connection, and the exclusions they generate, the ideal of global citizenship will be as illusory as the ideal of a state that is effective in distributing social goods. While in the case of the state, we have at least a history of political mobilisation and, if lucky, democratic learning processes and institutions on which to rely when seeking change, nothing of that sort is available in the cloud. So we should probably hold on to state citizenship for the conflictual period of transition and leave cloud communities to the future utopian society that may become accessible once interconnectedness is truly global. If it ever does.