Slashdot Mirror
Creation of a Cybernation
Thanks to martin for pointing us over to a recent story about Cyber Yuga. It's essentially the formation of an online "nation", which some requirements for citizenship, including reading the Constitution and voting on changes to it, as well as some civic responsibility in running the "country". In any case, a very cool idea-will this be the future? What do you folks think?
One of the requirements for Prince Edward Island to join Canada as a Province in 1949 was that the Canadian Constitution be amended to decree the colour of margerine in Prince Edward Island.
Given that kind of lunacy (I can say disparaging things like that, having lost my Canadian residency, but retaining Citizenship), Secretary of Coca-Cola doesn't strike me as all that silly.
In Liberty, Rene
Actually, if you read that site, you'll find that in MOST cases you can NOT have dual citizenship. In certain individual cases the US Government will allow the recognition of dual-citizenship, but in the majority they do not.
The point of that site is saying as long as you're careful about it, it doesn't really matter. But its generally not a good idea to pass off a Canadian passport upon entry to the US if you're a US citizen, and vice versa. If you had true dual citizenship, you could use either citizenship at any time.
The point being that a lot of these "fake" countries -- and I'm not saying this one is this way -- are used as ways to "get back" at the US government, either in claiming to be able to live in the US but not live by its laws (like paying taxes) or other things. In that regard many are like cults, in that their primary intent is to thumb their collective noses at the countries that people are truely citizens of. If you were born in the US to canadian parents, yeah, maybe the US will let you keep dual citizenship (but I know a bunch of people who have been forced to choose), but in a B.S. case like this, if you tried using that citizenship in any way, I'd guess the weight of the US Government would come crashing down upon you.
This is nothing new, there's at least a half dozen other "global citizen" type scams that have been going on for years on the Internet. Usually they have you pay a stragely large amount of money for a passport and citizenship documents that wouldn't be recognized as legal proof of age at a movie theater, much less at any customs or immagration point in the world.
Its just stupid moneymaking schemes, or cult-like practices in some cases.
Lets see what do you get for your money (depending on how you push the issue with the government):
1) Useless passport and citizenship paperwork that won't be recognized by anyone.
or
2) You (at least in the US) revoke your US citizenship (you can't have dual citizenship in the US past the age of 18) and you learn REAL fast what a plus it really is in the world to be a US citizen.
Slashdot forms it's own country and declares war on www.microsoft.com, www.aol.com and www.robsucks.com . (the Axis) After a huge bloody war in which the casualty numbers have to be written in scientific notation (the war is held in Quake 3 arena). It is decided that Hemos is to be Earth Czar. Anyone calling themselves MEEPT is hunted down and clubbed with salami.
Incidentally, based on the web page, I think this effort is a way of salvaging a really horrible situation through humour more than a serious effort. I think they have serious intentions of connecting people together, but not of starting a real country. And they seem to be pretty upfront about this, so I wouldn't judge them as a scam.
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/09151790
For some reason the submission script stripped out the URL
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Governments do compete, but they call it war. "Hot", physical wars like Vietnam, or "cold", economic wars of the Reagan era. They are monopolistic within a given geographic region, but social and economic pressures from other countries have a tremendous impact even in peace.
The United States is the Microsoft of the political arena. The U.S. uses its sheer economic force to coerce other political entities into following its ideologies and ignores pleas for change from even large consortiums of other countries.
Governments are like infrastructure, and citizens rarely have much more say in choosing their government than they do in choosing which highways go past their house. Even in democracies, most decisions are made by unelected bureaucrats and elected officials that represent so many people that the concept of representation is meaningless.
It would be kind of nice to be able to choose one's government like one chooses an ISP. People who wanted security could subscribe to a police state, whereas people who wanted more freedom and privacy could join a government that lets them take more risks. The possibility of this happening, in an on-line sense, is very real. When I go to make an on-line transaction with another entity (say, a person or business), we would agree first to an arbitrating agency that would enforce the rules of the transaction and collect a fee (tax) for enforcing those rules.
These choices are already here in the real world, as evidenced by people choosing to live in covenant-controlled communities with stricter rules than those supplied by the local government. Unfortunately, opportunities for people who wish less security and more personal control are rare.
An electronic nation seems silly, but it could work as a collective bargaining unit for its members. It could start out by lobbying for policy changes in the various governments of its members. Get, say, 100 million people from around the world signed on, and I guarantee that you will be able to get pretty much any conventional government to sit down at the table to talk.
Pie-in-the-sky stuff, though.
Hmm.. all the land is company property, the products of the employees' labor is company property, and all services are provided by the company. And I thought we won the cold war.
Be worried when it becomes illegal to quit your job.
Especially when you have a floating country! But then you don't need to be virtual at all... You'd just have a lot of expatriates.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Only truly valuable people would have to 'defect' to other companies.. :)
And effort/productivity would be rewarded financially, or at least materially. Still the Capitalist model of economics, but your basic needs would be a benefit of employment.
This wasn't only done in Eastern Europe. Company housing and 'The Company Store' are very American in nature. But back then we had single purpose (more or less) companies.
Being a citizen of a corporation would not be much different than being the citizen of a country. You can still borrow stuff, and get into debt, and have to work it off... Ultimatelly be exiled into contractor land, and have a lien placed on your future income until you're debt free.
We'd need rules of engagement, and humance employee treatment treaties among the mega-corps.. Something like the Geneva Convention. Maybe the Wal-Mart Treaty or something.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I have several problems with it though.
1) Although I can understand the sentimental value the founders place on their name, I do not think a "virtual nation" should be based on any physical one, not even in name.
2) If we're going to do the "virtual nation" bit, it should be limited to one, namely a governing body which concerns the entire Internet, independent of any nation.
3) No bill of rights. Then again, this wouldn't be practical unless a virtual nation concerning the whole Net was founded. This one's particularly important, because there needs to be a free speech amendment (FUN FACT: For all the dumb laws the US has, it's also the only nation with a free speech amendment). Come to think of it, what other amendments could one put into the constitution of a virtual nation; very few apply. I suppose protection against illegal search and seizure would be good (since it implies the right to use strong encryption). Anyone else got any others?
Those are the three main problems I see with this one. Then again, it wouldn't be particularly easy to create a single governing body for the Net, considering that physical governments would likely brand us as separatists and/or terrorists and have us all killed.
Can someone explain to me the point of having a citizenship in a "country" like this? What will it get you?
:)
Absolutely nothing. I can't see how having this kind of citizenship and living in any country in the world would have any benefits other than making life more difficult for you.
Would you pay taxes to the online country? What about my rights? Can I live in a country where free speech doesn't exists, yet I have free speech because I'm a citizen of OnlineCountryX?
Can I get out of paying my US Taxes by gaining citizenship?
Give me a break. What a load of trash! Without land, a country really doesn't have any power. And I doubt that any online country will be recognized without some kind of land.
But this is all my opinion, of course.
Finder
Readers have been quick to point out the "been there, done that" aspect - and I definitely concur; from either a conceptual or a technological viewpoint, there's nothing new here, check out Nomic, MUDs such as Shattered World, and countless others.
However... I'm dismayed at the knee-jerk "this is a scam" reflex. The reference to "former Yugoslav citizens" is particularly interesting in the context of recent events in that region; I can well understand the desire to create "from scratch" a nation based on hopefully saner principles.
For the skeptical and/or cynical, Greg Egan's novel Distress has an interesting digression at one point about how an 'artifical' nation, in the novel the island Stateless, is more likely to succeed in ensuring that democratic ideals flourish than an 'accidental' nation formed by the tortuous contingencies of history and geography; the people who move there want it to succeed.
Granted, the "Algorithm of the Social System" bit sounds silly and gimmicky, but hey, to succeed on the Internet you need a minimum of that. Meanwhile, I urge readers to judge the experiment on its own merits; its proclaimed intentions are, IMHO, beyond reproach.
Me bad. 'Twas Newfoundland that joined Canada in '49, methinks, not PEI. Working too hard.
In Liberty, Rene
A self regulating nation of 2000 citizens, in which every citizen heads a department? 100% of the population works for the government? ha!
The boundaries of nations are being re-drawn alright, but not by grass-roots opportunists such as these. They're being redrawn by the mega-corps. What did Gibson call them? Zaibatsu?
Think of it, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, a corporation becomes self-sustaining.. It's own transportation system, communication network, food supply, health-care, manufacturing system... An ATT/TWA/Fleet/Purina/Blue Cross/Exxon/GM buys up trackts of land all over the world and declares independence. All it's employees become citizens and have their needs take care of by the parent company - driving a company-made car, wearing company-made clothes, shopping in company stores stocked with company food... Vacationing on remote corporate properties.
Distributed nations. See Gibson - Count Zero and Sterling - Islands in the Net.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I can see it now: Slashdotters join this cyber-nation and immediately start complaining that their rights are being violated!
Peasant:"help help! Im being repressed!"
King:"Bloody peasant!"