The Global Empire E-Book

Jan Söderqvist

• Herausgeber: Aniara
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: The Futurica Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 597

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The digital revolution entails that all important aspects of our existence fundamentally change: How we see the world and how we see ourselves, how we think, how we work, how we relate to and communicate with each other, and what is even possible to imagine. Everything is set in motion, which means that Philosophy must also set itself in motion. It must philosophize about its own movement, and even about movement as such. The history of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going must be rewritten. This is what Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist perform in The Futurica Trilogy, originally published between 2000–2009. The Global Empire discusses - among other things - how the global communication networks create a need for political decision-making on a global level.

Leseprobe

The Futurica Trilogy

The Global Empire

Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist © 2025

Aniara Press AB, Stockholm

www.aniara.one

[email protected]

Book cover & typesetting

Per Gustafsson (modernstyle.se)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The World State and History as a Process of Domestication

2. Empire, Plurarchy and the Virtual Nomadic Tribe

3. The Genealogy of Netocratic Ethics

4. The Renaissance of Ideology

5. The Dialectic between Eternalism and Mobilism

6. The Paradox of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Paradoxism

7. The Meteorology of Knowledge and the Paradoxical Subject

8. Eternalism’s Radical Pragmatism

9. Neo-Darwinism and Horizontal Biology

10. The War between the Replicators – the Memes’ Victory over the Genes

11. Perforated Bodies and Chemical Liberation

12. Socioanalytical Ethics and the Collapse of the Capitalist Left

13. The Ecstasy of the Event and the Fading Gaze of Nature

14. Nazism as a Sociotechnological Phenomenon

15. Sex, Power and Network Dynamics – the Necessary Metamorphosis of Feminism

16. The Infrastructure of the Empire and Eternalism’s Moral Imperative

Futurica Glossary

1.THE ROAD TO THE WORLD STATE AND HISTORY AS A PROCESS OF DOMESTICATION

In the end, everything depends on knowledge. The dynamism behind social development, the energy that enables us to crawl over decisive thresholds, arises from ideas and communication. How are we to play the cards we have been dealt? Of course the cards themselves are of crucial importance. Circumstances determine which aspects of knowledge are useful. A refined interplay is established: certain circumstances give rise to certain social structures, which in turn give rise to new circumstances, and so on. Out of what was originally a series of random events a pattern emerges which can be discerned from a distance. Developments point in a particular direction, making it possible to put together relatively credible hypotheses about the future.

One of the decisive thresholds in history was the fixed dwelling-place, and this revolutionary innovation was only made possible by a long sequence of random factors which happened to coincide. For a variety of reasons, there was a shortage of animals to hunt in many areas, which provided a strong impetus to crawl across the threshold and set about something entirely new: the production of food instead of hunting and gathering. But before this could happen, certain preconditions had to be satisfied: for instance, the soil had to be good enough to support crops, and the climate had to be favourable. But there also had to be a good supply of animal and plant species that were suitable for domestication. Besides this, a modicum of rudimentary knowledge about growing crops was essential, since the most fertile soil in the world is useless to people who do not know how to manage it. Consequently there had to be a transitional phase during which mankind could begin to produce food on a small scale, as a complement to the spoils of hunting and gathering. To start with, all of these circumstances coincided in one single place on earth, the region around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers known as the Fertile Crescent, approximately 11,000 years ago.

One thing led to another. Population growth took off, partly because of increased access to food, and partly because women could have children at closer intervals because they were no longer restricted by how much they could carry in their arms during their eternal migration. Increased welfare resulted in larger settlements, with a higher population density, which in turn created favourable preconditions for further economic and technological development, which in turn led to increased welfare. The population grew rapidly, and its internal solidarity of interests became stronger and stronger, and the network of mutual dependence became ever more finely meshed. Co-operation, trade, the exchange of services and favours became more and more important. Increasingly people began to play non-zero-sum games with each other, in other words: more and more opportunities for different forms of mutually beneficial social and economic interaction arose and were exploited. One person would exchange a surplus of grain for a load of ceramics, and both parties would be happy with the deal, thinking that they had profited by it.

A relative surplus of food, and better methods of storing food for future needs paved the way for a new type of economy and a completely new society, with a considerably more sophisticated division of labour than before, and a hierarchical social structure. Subordination and solidarity turned out to be an effective strategy in a society which was in more or less peaceful competition with other societies. The general good benefited by decision-making being concentrated in one or a few leaders, because this gave savings of efficiency and time. Mankind therefore allowed itself to be tamed in the service of maximised self-interest. ‘The tamest tribes are the strongest’, as the English nineteenth-century critic Walter Bagehot put it. The political élite which assumed power appropriated the right to levy taxes. Debts arose, and accumulated. The expanding and increasingly complex economy reached the critical point where a system of accounting was needed, and from this system written language arose in approximately 2000 BC. And with that we reach the next revolutionary innovation, which in turn necessitated a far more effective feedback loop, and the process of civilisation accelerated still further.

To begin with, written language was primarily a useful tool for the élite which was in power. With the help of the written word they could not only keep records of tax debts, but also disseminate propaganda and issue orders from a distance, with a reasonable expectation that these orders would be carried out to the letter. At the same time the amount of knowledge available to the reading and writing élite multiplied many times over, which only served to increase levels of social and intellectual complexity. The law showed itself to be much more than an instrument of repression; it also became a lubricant reducing levels of friction within society. Because contracts had to be obeyed, and the citizens were made aware that cheats ran the risk of being prosecuted under the law, so faith in social order increased, a faith which would prove an immensely valuable social capital. The tamed population began to tame everything in sight with the help of its dramatically increased knowledge. The intensity of intellectual exchange increased, and different cultures began to influence one another. New, hitherto unimagined possibilities to play non-zero-sum games opened up. Written language was imbued, not surprisingly, with a magical shimmer. The word was made holy.

With the arrival of written language, history and politics began to take serious shape. With the help of written language, people began to put down mythical roots in the soil and in their regions – rather than in the tribe and in nomadic existence, as had been the case under the preceding primitivism – and these were reflected in the power relationships that developed. Power was no longer a question of strength, speed and the other physical capabilities that marked out a successful hunter or gatherer, but was increasingly a matter of control of the land which was becoming the basic value within society. As society grew in size and became ever more close-knit, and as mankind allowed itself to be tamed, then the desire to protect personal property became more abstract and passed into a participation in a collective desire to protect territory instead. The transition from chieftancy to state became possible. A paradigm shift took place from the perspective of history as the history of information technology, and feudalism began to take shape. The idea of the state grew steadily stronger and the first empires were established in the river valleys of Asia and North Africa. History underwent an experimental phase in which different structures and ideologies were tried out. The increased mass of expanding state civilisations exerted ever greater gravitational pull on the surrounding remnants of hunter-gatherer society. A social order which rested heavily upon the written word was established and proved to be superior to its primitive predecessors.

A fundamental ideological assumption in this context is the idea that the process of domestication as such – the taming of raw materials, plants, animals, and, in extension, mankind itself – is the ultimate precondition for the unique status of mankind in the world. We have managed to raise ourselves above nature by subordinating it, and, in extension, also ourselves. The reading and writing human being is basically, for good or ill, ‘unnatural’. Socrates, who had no intention of leaving any writings behind him, expresses through Plato the thought that writing is quite unnatural, that it replaces true wisdom with superficial wisdom because it encourages people to locate their memory outside of themselves, and therefore to neglect the function of their own memories.

But this is precisely the point. Socrates’ ideas, ironically enough, have reached us precisely thanks to writing. With the help of intelligent technology, mankind has throughout the course of history managed to position itself in an increasingly intelligent environment, and has therefore dramatically increased the amount of knowledge available. Of course writing is in one way ‘unnatural’, but one could equally claim that the continual acquisition of the unnatural is part of mankind’s particular nature, and that this, more than anything else, is what makes us human. Our history is ultimately the paradoxical story of how we have gradually become less natural, and, as a result, more cultural, by following our innate nature; how we have allowed ourselves to be tamed at the same time as taming everything around us. Philosophies, ideologies and religions both reflect and shape this process. Within eternalistic philosophy this all-encompassing metaphilosophical movement through history is known as civilisationism. No human activity, not even Socrates criticism of mankind’s increasing unnaturalness, is outside of this process.

The paradigm shift from primitivism to feudalism made mankind the first ethical creature in history. We began to look further into the future, temporal perspective took on a whole new significance, and we had cause to reflect upon our actions and their consequences. When food production replaced hunting and gathering as the main occupation, it was essential to wait patiently for the postponed pay-off from the labour expended; the farmer had to wait months, even years, to harvest the fruits of his labours, a harvest whose size would hopefully compensate for the wait. In the same way, investment in learning to read and write only pays off after a long period of study, but this pay-off is, in return, greater in terms of acquisition of knowledge and associated social status. This long-term thinking is thus a winning strategy, both for the individual and for society. Patience becomes one of the foremost virtues. Utopianism becomes subordinate to pragmatism and finds expression in feudalism’s shimmering dream of a paradisical existence as the just reward for the patient homo domesticus in another life.

The principal function of revolutions in information technology – each of which means that we crawl across yet another of civilisation’s thresholds; from spoken language to written language, to print, to interactive media – is to drive the process of domestication one step further. We become caught up in ever more finely-meshed and comprehensive communities; we internalise more and more of the codes of behaviour which were previously imprinted in laws and books of etiquette; we distance ourselves, in other words, more and more from nature and the animals that we once were. Increasing complexity of social structures goes hand in hand with a higher level of abstract thought. The pious hope has always been that this narrative contains an in-built rationality: that the complete person, finally realised in the future, will have succeeded in freeing himself entirely from such atavistic bad habits as jealousy, competition, violence and so on. In the desire to attain this increasingly secularised utopia, this final accomplishment of society, the socially constructive properties of written (and later printed) language were put to good use.

Laws became part of history. With the help of the written word those in power could distribute decrees and encourage the standardisation of social morals. The problem was that worldly laws, as opposed to those that were believed to have been given by God, were not written in stone. As society grew and empires acquired colonies, it became absolutely necessary for the sake of credibility to make sure that the law was universally applicable. As a consequence, primitivism’s old tribal myths were abandoned in favour of theological discourse: laws may be written on degradable material, but the Word itself, as an idea, came directly from God. And because there could only be one law, universally applicable, there could only be one god. Universalistic monotheism out-performed tribalistic polytheism not because of any intellectual superiority, but because it was a necessary condition for the marriage of empire and written language; it provided the increasingly powerful state and its growing armies with the indispensable universal legitimacy for wars of conquest. Whereas a tribal chieftain sought credibility by dint of being the descendant of the founding father, the monarch, leader of permanent settlements and military commander of armies in wars against competing societies, pronounced himself the representative of the only true god on earth.

The Iranian religious founder, Zarathustra, is in many ways pre-eminent among the early ideologists of the feudalistic paradigm. He realised the decisive role that permanent settlements would play in the historical process when he lay the foundations for Zoroastrianism, the first recorded monotheism in the world. In his philosophy Zarathustra focuses on the continual struggle which, after the invention of written language, has been raging between on the one hand mankind’s desire to allow itself to be tamed – man as civilised being, fundamentally different from and of higher standing than animals – what he calls asha, and, on the other hand, the desire for liberation from this impulse – mankind as untamed lone wolf – which he calls druj. Because Zarathustra’s ethical reasoning ends up favouring asha over druj, Zoroastrianism is therefore the first thought-out political philosophy which promotes the benefits of civilisation. Later philosophical and theological discourses have struggled endlessly with the same question, and oscillated between the two poles of asha and druj to varying degrees, according to the fashion of the age. All later philosophies which point in the same civilisationist direction, from the Egyptian monotheism of the pharaoh Akhenaton onwards, should therefore be seen as variations of Zoroastrianism, the original ideology of domestication.

The conflict between the desire to be tamed and the desire for freedom from this impulse is turned on its head with the transition from capitalism to informationalism. Once Friedrich Nietzsche had launched the concept of the eternal recurrence of the same, this destructive conflict in the collective consciousness seems to have become the fundamental precondition for human existence. Compliance and submission to the collective is transformed into the individual’s desire for self-realisation in contrast to the collective, which is transformed into obedience and submission to the individual, which is transformed into the collective’s desire for identity, which brings us back to the start. Mankind’s ambitions and desires are enclosed within an eternal circle: the eternal recurrence of the same. The process of civilisation can be reduced philosophically to the dialectic tension between eternalism (in lay terms: structure and culture) and mobilism (chaos and nature). Out of this relationship, so paradoxical on all its levels, a steadily more complex social structure emerges.

The word empire has its roots in military Latin. The emperor is the man who has the right to express imperatives or commands; the emperor and the successful general are one and the same person. The empire is the conquered territory over which the emperor exerts his authority and in which he is obeyed. But the concept of empire also comprises the idea of a single state encompassing the whole world. Consequently the Roman Empire was thought to encompass the whole world, or rather, the only part of it that was thought to matter. Beyond the borders of the empire a few groups of uncivilised barbarians lived a meaningless existence in the depths of ignorance; they could just be left to get on with it. Eventually, of course, the Romans paid a high price for their pride. Similar ambitions and thoughts have existed within every people with an imperial view of themselves, such as the Persians, and within imperial China – in the same way as the Romans demonised the Germanic tribes, the Persians demonised the Turks and Arabs, and the Chinese demonised the Mongols – and all of them, sooner or later, suffered the same fate as the Romans. External circumstances changed, internal structures grew weaker, the empires imploded.

It is clear that the worldview of these feudal empires contained a problematic gap between ideology and reality: they must therefore be regarded as unrealised or false empires. The imperial identity rested upon the large-scale production of barbaric demonology, which demanded the aggressive denial of neighbouring people’s humanity. In false empires the Other is still excluded and is denied human status on racial grounds. The Other has a value only as part of the demonology in question. Because of the threat and the terrifying example he provides, he is a cohesive factor. The boundaries of the empire are the boundaries of civilisation, and civilisation cannot expand unless the empire destroys barbarity with military means, after which any survivors among the enemy could be converted to the empire’s monotheistic world-view through missionary work. But before this project is realised, the barbarians remain by definition inhuman. Captured barbarians are at best good enough to act as slaves within the empire. Consequently the ‘discovery’ of the New World can hardly be seen as a meeting of two civilisations, but as the starting-shot for a most brutal form of annexation.

The political philosophy of eternalism concentrates, for the first time in history, on preparing the way for an authentic empire as an alternative to false empires. In the authentic empire no-one can use force against the Other to create his own social identity, because the Other is already included in the empire before it even existed. Nationalism, racism and class struggle are all rejected, and society’s production of identity comes instead from subcultural demonologies, which are created with the help of sophisticated sociometric instruments which act in the collective subconscious. This means that eternalism is strongly opposed to the demands of both liberalism and Marxism for a Hegelian dialectic as the basis for the production of all social identity. Thanks to the ideas of mobilistic philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze, Hegelian dialectics undergo a dramatic modification within eternalistic thought: the authentic empire is an open, not closed, social construction, whose only boundary is the entire collective existence of all humanity. For the first time in history there is nothing outside the entirety of society, and therefore no possibility to nurture any form of demonised Otherness, other than the almost playful demonologies constructed between subcultures within the boundaries of the empire.

Consequently it is almost unnecessary to point out that the global empire has never yet existed; it becomes historically imaginable and possible only with the advent of informationalism. But numerous indications point clearly in this direction: in one arena after the other, power is gradually being lifted from the national level to the supranational. The national dimension is becoming irrelevant in an increasing number of spheres. When China enters the WTO and Russia concludes co-operation pacts with NATO, there are no longer any alternative power-centres which can seriously compete with the emerging global conglomerate, either politically, economically or militarily. Because the main source of collective identity under capitalism – the nation state – is gradually being broken up and losing its significance, the idea of the authentic empire has arisen and is quickly developing to become the dominant vision of informationalism. As a result, the domestication process is entering an entirely new phase. New opportunities for non-zero-sum games are opening up.

The question is not so much whether a global political organisation will emerge, but when it will happen, and what shape it will assume. Many players are admittedly sceptical towards anything connected to globalisation, and suggest that it is a fiction, that the nation state is and will remain the metaphysical basis for politics; but they forget that even the system of nation states was once largely fictional, and that it could only be established at the price of blood-letting on an industrial scale. Well into the twentieth century, war was still the dominant organisational principle and source of the nation state’s production of identity. What is controversial today will be banal tomorrow; within the informationalist paradigm globalism will become as given a basis for politics as étatism was under capitalism. Isolationism and anti-globalism have already been transformed into pointless attitudes; the debate will instead hinge upon which of the various competing globalisation alternatives is most desirable. Consequently the globalisation process is not a matter of the end of history in the sense that Francis Fukuyama meant, but about new conflicts taking place within a new arena.

The question which interests us most of all is the role of eternalism in this new globalism. What is possible, what should we hope for, and why? It is important to remember in this context that the eternalist idea of a global state cannot be seen as a classic utopia in any ideological sense, but should be seen as an unavoidable stage in a historical process whose progress towards ever greater and more structured complexity is clearly discernible. The global state is not the desired solution to any particular social problem; it ought instead to be regarded as the next stop of the domestication process, and is therefore the system within which a long series of new social problems will arise and even be solved. This means that the global system has no transcendental status within eternalism as it has in Hegelian and Marxist thinking. Instead, eternalistic thinking is about repeatedly applying the necessary radical pragmatism: constantly questioning the many changing and shifting aspects of the world state.

Determinism in this context merely applies to the truly broad perspective, concerning the material/technological framework. The world state ultimately only reflects developments within, and is the necessary result of increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies and the growth of mass-interactivity. Global communications are not only becoming more rapid, but also more intensive and therefore more constitutive. The medium is, more than ever before, also the message. Developments within the information-technological complex also mean that mankind’s ecological circumstances are changing. Our genes do not have time to adapt – a process that takes an agonisingly long time – but our memes, on the other hand, do. New memes will be favoured by the new circumstances which arise in the ecological system. Consequently our social structures will have to change, and relatively quickly as well; this is unavoidable, and wishing for anything else is as pointless as it is misdirected. Human activity will in turn alter the ecosystem. The process is immensely complex, different alternatives bring with them advantages as well as disadvantages: it is necessary to continually evaluate and adopt a position to different trends and counter-trends, forces and counter-forces, one at a time. The only value that remains constant and universal in this society will be the significance of value-production itself. Eternalism’s focus on the world state is therefore ultimately about something as pragmatic as the maximisation of value-production within a global political organisation.

Under the capitalist paradigm the nation state was the basic political institution and étatism the cohesive supreme ideology. This structure developed out of the revolution in information technology embodied by the printing press and the concrete products connected with it: the printed book, the newspaper, the banknote. Only when printed texts were accessible in mass editions were there the preconditions for the growth of literacy skills, which in turn created an audience for pure information, one which helped manufacture political opinion. When this gigantic snowball finally started to move, it swept aside the old feudal society. The increase in knowledge, improved communications, technical advances, increased welfare, the rise of salon-culture: all of these combined and strengthened one another in the productive feedback loop that was the capitalist ecosystem, and whose sovereign lubricant was the ever more refined monetary economy.

The underlying dynamic in this system was imperialist and colonialist. The rapidly expanding manufacturing industries needed both a constant supply of cheap raw materials as well as new markets to exploit. Predetermined economic laws forced capitalism into constant and increasing expansion. When this expansion had finally covered the whole world, there was nothing left for capitalism to consume other than capitalism itself. This critical, self-consuming state, hypercapitalism, came about at the end of the twentieth century once all possibilities for continued external expansion had been exhausted. There were no new markets left to discover, and the old ones were showing worrying signs of saturation. Appetites were of necessity forced inwards. What had once been individual markets had become integrated through this process into a single, global market; a process which had been supported and accelerated by the development and spread of interactive information technologies. These were in turn popularised and spread by the market, in a cultural development parallel to economic globalisation. What we see today is how the capitalist feedback loop is ebbing away and being replaced by an informationalist alternative, which is in turn generating a new ecosystem with a new set of rules.

This crisis is built into the internal logic of capitalism, which seems to pull the rug out from under itself. Businesses are continually pressed to improve their products and cut their costs in order to retain customers and attract new ones. Their margins shrink as competition gets tougher. This development is accelerated dramatically by interactive information technologies, which give consumers powerful new tools. It is suddenly possible to compare goods and services from a global array of suppliers. The boundaries between nation states are becoming irrelevant in this context; the international geography of capitalism is being replaced by informationalism’s attentional topography.

Intensively networking and relentlessly disloyal consumers are forcing profit-driven businesses down on their knees. The customer is constantly ready to change supplier, businesses must be permanently ready to offer some unique form of added value – which their competitors copy at once – or must cut their margins still further. All the talk about ‘meaner and leaner’ becomes, to the horror of the share-holders, grim reality. It is the growth of this network-economy, rather than the rise and fall of any internet-adapted mail-order company, which is the genuinely new aspect in all this talk of a ‘new economy’ for the information age. In the long term this development will mean that traditional expansionist businesses will fall away and be replaced by businesses as events, the only credible model for business in an attentionalist economy.

The opponents of global thinking have often chosen to see the process in purely economic terms, and have been horrified at how transnational companies have been allowed to practice ruthless exploitation without any restraining legislation. This sort of reasoning, however, is based upon a serious misunderstanding; economic globalisation presupposes and is actually dependent upon an equivalent, albeit delayed, process of political and judicial globalisation. A lawless situation is to no-one’s advantage, at least not long-term. The smallest production companies in poor developing countries and the largest supranational conglomerates of the western world share the same interest in being tied into a comprehensible structure, economic as well as political and judicial. Consequently it is not the state as administrator of power and jurisdiction which will become obsolete under informationalism, but the nation as the basis for the state. The state as an institution is being transferred from the national to the global level.

The American constitution is in this respect a good example because it is based upon a desire to create a community and a collective identity upon a willingness to submit to certain ideals, rather than the closed idea that the nation must be founded upon the common ethnic background of its inhabitants. In this instance identity is not something one is born with, but something one creates together with one’s surroundings, a process which agrees with the strategies and interests of the netocracy. The word ‘nation’ certainly crops up frequently in official American rhetoric, but its meaning is entirely different to what it would be in Europe, for instance. This does not mean that American opinion will find it any easier to take to the global empire as an idea, or to accept the global state as supreme in a concrete politico-judicial sense. There are many more factors at play in the struggle between the new global-state level and the old organisation of nation-states than just attitudes to the production of identity. But as far as the central role of ethics is concerned – and the subordinate role of ethnicity – then the American constitution can be seen as practically identical to the multicultural model the global state must be built upon.

Naturally the establishment of a global politico-judicial order should be regarded as an élite programme. The netocracy, the upper-class of the global empire, will divide the key positions between their respective subordinate groupings: the curators who sort information, the entrepreneurial nexialists, and the ideology-producing eternalists. At the same time, paradoxically, the globalisation project is the only chance for the consumtariat, the global underclass, to achieve a functional distribution of resources. Dealing with the politics of distribution on a national level in informationalist society where economic resources move like lightning across old national boundaries is of little use. The complexity of the global economy, and the absence of self-evident areas of community, mean that the regulatory function of the state is more important now than ever before in history. And since the price of anarchy is so high for all interested parties, all available resources will be used to come up with a set of rules which are acceptable to as many people as possible, where attentionality, the credible maintenance of the rules, will be more central than ever.

One central aspect of this development is the growing need for a means of identity production which is adapted to informationalism: how new transnational and subcultural forces arise and how they relate to the growing global state. The issues which stand out as the most significant will produce a deficit of identity which will be filled by new ideological movements, partly as suggestions at solutions to these issues, and partly because they provide an attractive, subcultural identity both for the activists in the innermost network and to their more loosely-connected sympathisers. This process is taking place with the close collaboration of the media, and the result is an explosion of event-oriented, global movements based upon identity-producing, network-dynamic complexes. These are usually temporary – look at how quickly the glow faded and activity died within Attac – but often noisy and attention-generating movements are conquering more and more of the public arena from political parties. They have something which is not wholly irrelevant in this context – they are simply more entertaining.

The merciless competition for media attention is fostering a hard, Darwinian knock-out system between the virtual subcultures. Only those best-suited, most clearly meaningful and most relevantly defined in relation to the political and media realities will survive. Politics as ideology is changing more and more into politics as lifestyle; credibility is not to be found in any more or less realistic utopia, but in a successfully arranged Event. Movements develop, explode and disappear; identities are swapped and upgraded. The norm is not that the movement outlives the activist, but precisely the reverse, that the activist will only engage as long as the movement is vital – in other words: as long as the movement can be seen as an event – and will then move on. This is eternalism’s radical pragmatism at grass-roots level. Radicalism is no longer connected, as it was under capitalism, with imaginative utopias, but with attention and concrete results. The achieved level of attention corresponds to the amount of awareness multiplied by credibility; both of these amounts have to be high if the level of attention is going to be of significant size. With this definition we can present the fundamental sociometric instrument for working out how attention can best be maximised under certain political and economic circumstances (see illustration).

One clear example of how the expanding netocracy is spontaneously adopting the radical pragmatics of eternalism is how the first generation of netocratic philanthropists is demonstratively breaking the rules set down by capitalist philanthropy. Capitalist fortunes tended to be bequeathed to the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie. Only a small portion was left for philanthropic causes, usually in return for some sort of tax rebate, and often in a way which was designed to highlight the donor’s generosity: hospital wings named after the deceased, donations to cultural institutions in exchange for prominently displayed notices of the donor’s name. But the inherited fortune was always central, first as a material basis for the heirs’ social identity, and secondly as concrete confirmation of the central, transcendental idea of the paradigm, that of Progress.

The netocracy has a completely different view of financial resources to that of the bourgeoisie. Money has no great transcendental value in itself, but is merely a tool. The fortune has lost its capitalist position as central cultural fetish. The new élite’s view of progress is different as well: the economy they are living in is characterised not by continually growing businesses and fortunes, but by quickly blossoming and subsiding business events, which means that individual ownership is characterised by risk being spread more evenly. Business in the attentionalist economy is definitively separate from the individual, whose heavy investment in the company in question is limited to a matter of time and talent. As a result there is no company left to inherit, just a colourful portfolio of shares covering a wide range of interests.

This distanced attitude adopted by the netocracy characterises a new way of looking at financial resources. The dividual is replacing the individual as the human ideal, even within the business world. Businesses are primarily seen as events, whereas the financial resources which have been liberated from wholly-owned companies are instead attached to purely symbolic values. Assets have been given an attentional surface, which under current circumstances is the determining factor in their value, far more so than their nominal value on the stock exchange. For this reason the netocracy is not tempted by the thought of the unconditional transfer of financial resources, either to its offspring or through any form of philanthropic activity. Each transaction is instead closely bound by specific conditions, where the donor’s own future gain from the transaction is reckoned into the bargain; not out of avarice, but because the transaction’s attentionality in the eye of the recipient must be maintained at all costs if the transaction is to have the desired constructive effect.

The recipient must first and foremost, and for the good of all parties, see the positive result as being to his or her own advantage rather than that of the donor. Ironically, this means that the donor, right from the outset, must demand his own gain from the project if the project is to succeed. And this at the same time as the netocracy’s actual reward for its realistic attitude to the timeless, psychological rules of the economic game is the self-respect justified by history: the netocrat is in his capacity of active and engaged banker a considerably more effective philanthropist than the sentimental and irresponsible capitalist donor. He would sooner burn his fortune than give it away, because donated money is always harmful to the accomplishment of the non-zero-sum games that matter more than anything else. The aim is always to move your money around in a way that will be constructive for all parties. Otherwise it would be better not to have any money.

To the netocrat, inherited fortunes increasingly appear as a vulgar, lower-class concept, which gives rise to entirely different strategies for money and resources. At the same time philanthropy is changing from being a demonstrative expression of the dominant class’s goodwill, to being a radical pragmatic activism with a clearly stated goal; a political project which often starts as an aid to self-support, but which quickly develops into a creative network which benefits all involved parties. It is thus no longer a matter of successful people being more or less generous, but of being more or less smart and constructive. The netocratic philanthropist is not proud of his morals, but his intelligence. The Nietzschean Superman is taking on the role of financial manager.

The netocratic ideal is to create functional events, network-based situations which during their existence are characterised by creative interaction. The participants play non-zero-sum games with one another, with the aim that all participants should be able to leave the event as winners. The desire to allow oneself to be tamed also plays a central role here: the network and circumstances present a series of irrefutable demands to which participants must subject themselves if they are to benefit from the situation. These inherent demands are the basis for what is known within eternalist philosophy as socioanalytical ethics. At the same time, the desire for freedom from being tamed is an unavoidable ingredient. A thoroughly rational use of the network’s resources can never be entirely exhaustive. Far too many variable parameters are in play at the same time; within the vital and productive power-centre there is a constant creative insecurity. Discipline and subordination must be complemented with improvisational abilities and well-developed social instincts.

Security is therefore a word which is assuming, at least in part, new meanings. Genuine security lies in the project lacking internal security, stability exists in the process being in perpetual change. As a result, the netocrat, in contrast to the old capitalist, has no interest in annihilating his competitors: quite the reverse. Instead the netocrat welcomes increased competition in order to increase the creative insecurity in his own project, safe in the knowledge that these interesting games are all non-zero-sum in character, and that another person’s gain does not imply his or her own loss. It is just as much the competitors as collaborators who make it possible for the netocrat fully to realise his talents, which in practise means that the competitor is a highly valued partner. It is in this sort of break with rationalism, in the recognition of the necessary transrationalism of genuine interactivity, that eternalism diverges from the quasi-radical utopianism of the capitalist era. This is the most interesting ideological dimension of eternalism’s radical pragmatism.

During the transition from capitalism to informationalism a range of political problems is arising on a global level, with the result that every realistic attempt at action must also be on a global level. The most obvious example is a question which is crying out for supranational politics, and which also engages people and groups of activists all over the world: the hotly debated problem of environmental destruction. It is in the nature of the beast that a subject of this sort necessitates a global strategy, and even today it is already the subject of global action. It is a question of a rapidly progressing power-play between on the one hand multinational economic interests, which often underestimate the extent of the damage in question, and, on the other, an array of multinational environmental organisations, which in turn tend to exaggerate the threat. The respective under- and over-estimates of business and the activists ought, however, not only be seen as negotiating tactics or a means of media pressure, but must also, under informationalism, be seen as contributions to the production of social identity. The whole thing is further complicated by the fact that politicians on the global arena often try to make national politics of the issue. What is most important from our point of view however is that the subjects of debate – air, water, animal life – cannot be discussed in terms of the nation state. Nature respects no national boundaries, which makes them meaningless in this context. Only a global state can deal seriously with this issue of vital significance for mankind.

The main driving force behind the global management of political problems is not, however, demands for altered, supranational legislation, but rather demands for a boundary-transgressing method of supervision as a guarantee that legislation already in place is being upheld. This is certainly the case with environmental crimes, where difficulties arise when different jurisdictions collide, and because there is no single relevant and comprehensive jurisdiction – as is the case with international waters, a political phenomenon which would actually disappear if the world-state came into being – but also because local authorities often develop far too close ties with local business, with the result that external pressure is needed, from a global police-force, for instance, with no attachments to particular interests. Where tax is concerned, it is a matter of plugging the loopholes and co-ordinating resources in the first instance in order to implement existing legislation. And as far as so-called crimes against humanity are concerned, international courts are already quickly being established, with the task of enforcing legislation which would otherwise be purely decorative.

Even individual economic participants have every reason to press for global legislation and functional global enforcement. With the transition from an economy based on manufacturing industries to one based primarily on ideas, the majority of both interest and profit opportunities is displaced onto digital products and services. This development in turn leads to an economy increasingly based on patents and copyright. Establishing and protecting copyright will be of decisive importance to the global economy. All of this is in turn based upon a global system of regulation and the global co-ordination of police activity. The result of this globalistic development is that legislation and implementation in one area after the other have to be raised to a supranational level. As a result of the increasingly comprehensive network of military treaties, even the right to use violence has been raised to the same level. All this has very little to do with traditional political ideology; it is instead a matter of sheer pragmatism. Nothing but the exercise of power on a global level and global domestication offers even a theoretical solution to the most pressing problems.

It might look as though this system can, indeed, ought to be questioned, and that there are no compulsive reasons for poor countries to submit to these supranational sets of rules which primarily protect the advantages of businesses based and taxed in rich countries. The nation states which position themselves outside more or less global agreements regarding the rules of copyright law, or which sign up formally but will not or cannot ensure that these rules are enforced within their boundaries will also see certain short-term benefits. Domestic industry can rake in profits by copying inventions and products and ignoring their legal protection: the music industries of China and Russia, and the Indian and Brazilian pharmaceutical industries at the turn of the millennium are all good examples of this. But in the long run these economies are harming themselves, firstly because the drawbacks are greater than the benefits of not being able to participate fully in supranational non-zero-sum games, and secondly because pirate copying will eventually force prices down to such a low level that it will not be possible to use resources to develop current products further, which will lead to the stagnation of the market.

The problem here is that the price levels of a pirated market never reflect the actual costs of producing the product in question; someone else is always responsible for considerable additional costs. So a lawless situation arises where there is no account taken of the long-term need to be competitive in an ideas-based economy. The collapse of the market in question will become permanent because the most innovative companies in the area will stay away. Instead, they will seek out regions where copyright is protected, regions which in the long run will gain an advantage in terms of both knowledge and economic success, which in turn will increasingly attract leading-edge competence within an ever more mobile and global netocracy. A positive feedback loop becomes established, while the neglected lawless economies are sucked into a destructive spiral. Slowly but surely the benefits of the domestication process are becoming clearer: the global protection of copyright is in the longer term a necessity. It is to everyone’s advantage. And because this is not merely a matter of producing rules, but primarily of seeing that existing rules are enforced, the system of global jurisdiction and supranational means of control which has been gradually established will secure widespread support. Once the nation’s position as the organising principle for wielding power has been abandoned, there will be no going back. The global state will be the only credible solution when it comes to filling the power vacuum.

This vacuum will initially be an acute problem in two areas in particular: long-term investment, and social measures such as healthcare and education. The growing mobility of capital and workforce, and increased competition between different states and regions for the most attractive companies will lead to regional political bartering with tax rebates and other benefits, which will mean that the income of the nation state will shrink and its room for manoeuvre will become increasingly limited. Large investment packages in infrastructure will become more difficult to put together. All the promises of the old welfare state will become, not least for purely demographic reasons, impossible to honour; one after the other, different activities will be farmed out to the private sector, and the subsequent stress on cost-effectiveness will reduce the level of service. High quality education and healthcare will increasingly become a class issue, a privilege for those with most money and the best contacts, with the result that there will be widespread and growing discontent.

The instinctive reaction to this discontent is a nostalgic harking back to the good old days of the strong nation state, which in the short term will benefit isolationist and locally patriotic politicians who oppose developments towards globalisation. But this nostalgia fails when its anti-globalist proponents fail to produce the promised results with their historically romanticised, unrealistic solutions. Old strategies work badly in changed circumstances. In the absence of realistic alternatives, there will be a growing opinion that a global economy demands global politics. Even issues of taxation will become global. Only with the establishment of a world state will there be sufficient political power to get to grips with the so-called tax havens around the world, which will be essential in the long-term if economic policies are to have a minimum of credibility.

The world state tolerates no alternative jurisdictions, no sanctioned sanctuaries for special interest groups, no pockets of resistance where anti-globalisation movements can establish themselves; it also demands the necessary military means to maintain a legitimate system. A consensus is not always possible or even desirable, severe conflicts will arise, and the use of force in the name of unity is not impossible. It is important to remember that the capitalist system of nation states, which alternately co-operated with and fought with each other, was to a great extent the result of the brutal use of force. National unity also had a strong element of force to it. Religious minorities, ethnic identities, local dialects and subcultures – all of these struggled against the ideology on offer, and were often mercilessly subdued. The creation of the world state risks being at least as bloody; a large number of often powerful groups fear for good reason that their power and status are going to be destroyed by developments. And they will probably offer serious resistance.

The reason that we will eventually accept a certain level of force for the sake of global order is that the alternative looks even worse. The alternative to the global state is not a peaceful system of international co-existence built on mutual tolerance and understanding, but a state of global confusion and lawlessness which will benefit no-one but those in power locally: often oppressive regimes which would otherwise be dethroned. But all the while these local élites would be undermined by a continually expanding level of digital interactivity. Just as no nation in the long term can deny an internally democratic decision-making process – not least because of the breakthrough of mass-interactivity – so no nation can stand outside the jurisdiction of the world state, for the same reasons. The isolation and gulagisation of entire countries is unsustainable in the long term. Punishment in the form of withheld prosperity is too painful, and the temptation to participate in the global community will eventually become too strong.

The increasing pressure on the system of nation states is strengthened further by three growing problems which are becoming increasingly prominent in the political arena both on the national and transnational level: migration, epidemic illnesses and network-related crime. All of these problems are related to increased mobility and the collapse of national boundaries. This development is in turn irreversible, firstly because the advantages of increased mobility are perceived, for good reason, to outweigh the disadvantages, and secondly because the spread of mass-interactivity makes it impossible to limit information in such a way that traditional boundaries can be maintained. These problems are so serious, however, that they cannot be effectively countered unless power is exerted on a global level.

Global urbanisation has gradually eroded traditional ties to large, cohesive families and old tribal traditions. Existence has been ‘atomised’: identity has been changed into each individual’s own project, a matter of lifestyle choice rather than of cultural belonging. At the same time, global access to the mass media is growing dramatically and thereby limiting the cultural differences between what was previously the centre and the margins. Young people feel an increasing sense of community with people of the same age no matter which country they are from, and feel increasingly unconnected with their fellow countrymen of other ages. Network-based subcultures are growing in their extent and importance. The remaining differences between regions, for example in welfare and career opportunities, are thus more apparent, which, when combined with an increased need for workforce immigration and the low birth-rates of the old industrialised nations, is placing the more developed regions under powerful migrationary pressure. Someone has to care for the well-off but isolated elderly. Even the most precious national and ethnic characteristics will gradually be eroded.

Migrationary pressure means that the rich regions are competing for the most attractive workforce from poorer regions. Recruitment will therefore become the subject of intense business, which will create a whole new set of problems. One of the most significant of these is the brain drain from poorer, less developed regions; educated, imaginative young people are migrating en masse to wealthier but aged regions. Demography and migration will bring about radically altered political circumstances, where the earlier gulf between North and South moves into each separate region. Demands are growing for a functional, supranational political structure which will protect the legitimate interests of migrants and handle other problems connected with the rapid rise in global mobility.

Large-scale movement across borders and the growing overcrowding of big cities is increasing the risk that new viruses and bacteria previously unknown to the human immune system will arise and spread across the world. Behind the tabloid headlines about ‘killer bacteria’ there is a grim reality. There is scarcely any other threat to man – including environmental catastrophes and nuclear accidents – that would cause as much damage as a new influenza virus unlike the viruses we have previously been exposed to, which we would therefore be unable to counteract. Even if research did manage to identify the virus quickly, it would take weeks, maybe months, to produce and distribute a vaccine, whereas the virus would only take a few days to cover the planet.

This phenomenon is in no way a new one: the evolutionary theorists and historians Jared Diamond and Manuel De Landa have shown how, in the early stages of capitalism, urbanisation favoured viruses and bacteria at the expense of human beings. People died like flies in overcrowded squalor; the eventual advantages of city life had a high price. In this respect history could quite easily repeat itself, and the consequences would – thanks to rapid communication and increased mobility – be many times worse than previous epidemics. Influenza may not be the disaster scenario most favoured by the media or by different ideologies, but when the day comes and people start dying in a new epidemic, it will not be long before there are desperate cries for global action, with no regard for national sovereignty. A global strategy for minimising the risk of spreading dangerous viruses and bacteria is therefore of immense value. It would be enough for the threat of such an epidemic to be perceived as real for support for a world state to grow considerably.

The most acute problem propelling development towards a supranational political system at the beginning of the twenty-first century is, however, the rapid expansion of global criminal networks. Whether it be the threat from religious fundamentalist terrorist sects based in the margins of the geopolitical map, or the more conventional criminality of trafficking in drugs, people or weapons, time and time again the need is becoming apparent for a supranational police and judicial system which can at least keep pace with these organisations, whose effectiveness is largely dependent upon their use of new, interactive technologies.

This global clampdown on crime will bring with it a fundamental cultural shift in so far as the need for prioritisation will lead to a re-evaluation of what really can and ought to be defined as a crime. What in the eyes of the wider world could be regarded as the moralising prejudices of any single culture should not reckon on receiving much of the available resources, especially not when these values are measured against a general threat of violence against the world state itself. It is therefore unlikely, for instance, that any particular drug would be combated when it is permitted and accepted in other parts of the world. Border controls will no longer be relevant, just like city tolls under capitalism. In accordance with the radical pragmatism of eternalism, all organised dealings in goods and services will eventually be decriminalised, and will be regulated and taxed in the usual way.

Under capitalism the concept of sovereignty was central to the presentation of the state. Each nation was sovereign, in other words: supreme and self-determining within its own borders, which every other nation was expected to respect, at least in peacetime. In this way it was hoped that no-one else would get involved in the nation’s own internal affairs. This national sovereignty was in practice, and often also in theory, identical to the sovereignty of the ruler, and it therefore reflected the patriarchal system. Just as the patriarch was the ultimate decision-making instance within the family, so the head of state’s wishes were law within that particular state. The welfare of the nation was a question of the ruler’s welfare. But as a consequence of increasing democratisation and the growth in trade between nations, views of sovereignty gradually changed, from having been primarily legal to being mostly economic in character: national sovereignty became largely a matter of controlling the national economy.

Now that the whole idea of national economy if collapsing, now that companies and investors have the whole world to move in, and now that the mutual dependence among the members of any particular nation are weakening, so the concept of national sovereignty is becoming problematical, as has already been seen in the arena of global politics. It is no longer easy to see what comprises a legitimate nation whose sovereignty must be respected, when outsiders keep getting mixed up in conflicts which would traditionally be seen as internal, and who do so with a professed humanitarian and definitively global purpose.

As a result, the very concept of the nation has ceased to be interesting in terms of realpolitik. Power is engaged in a upwards movement, and is migrating from the national to the global level. The domestication process is entering a new and revolutionary stage. We have been dealt a new hand of cards, and the big question is whether we are capable of playing them in a remotely intelligent way. The table is laid for the global banquet, there are no longer any significant objections in principal. That is not to say that events are predetermined in detail, or that the transition will proceed smoothly. But it is difficult to see how any other platform for the exercising of power could work once informationalism has broken through entirely.

To a great extent the globalisation project is a question of opinion-forming, and of active engagement both within what is called civil society and among the different players in the world’s various markets. It is a matter of highlighting the advantages of non-zero-sum games. The American writer Robert Wright stresses this when he presents three reasons for the establishment of the world state: firstly, executive power has historically always tended to expand to the geographic extent that is necessary to solve social problems of non-zero-sum character which neither the market nor moral codes can deal with successfully. Secondly, the problems of non-zero-sum character which arise with informationalism are generally supranational. And thirdly, technological development is the driving force behind this whole process. As a result, pressure towards a world state will gradually increase with time. That is where we are today.

Ironically, the world state may yet prove to be the salvation of the nation state. Just as the nation state was once in a position to return a measure of political authority to the regions which subordinated themselves to national sovereignty, so there are good reasons to allow the nation to retain at least a ceremonial function in the global system. This could create a typical non-zero-sum game in which all participants win. The alternative scenario is global disintegration, an inferno of regional conflicts, antagonistic city states with their own armies, et cetera. Consequently there is a clearly defined task for and an acute need of eternalism’s radical pragmatism. The great enemy is not so much the divided opposition’s forces, but a lack of fantasy and engagement on our part. Informationalism signifies a renaissance of political activism, not least because interactive media-technologies offer the perfect instrument for people who want to be active and influence the passage of history.

2.EMPIRE, PLURARCHY AND THE VIRTUAL NOMADIC TRIBE

All states, particularly empires, require a cohesive idea about a collective subject, a common history with a common fate, a sort of cultural root-system out of which the exercising of power could be said to grow organically. This relationship between the idea of the state and the immanence of the state becomes more important the more comprehensive and complex the state in question actually is. Consequently the world state most definitely presupposes an idea of a global community, where the things that unite people are prioritised over those that separate them. Within eternalistic philosophy this concept is called the global empire, in full awareness that this must precede the world state as an established political fact. By studying and mapping out the global empire in the collective unconscious, it is possible to predict and even influence political developments. As a result, there will be a stable, universal platform for the political philosophy of eternalism, and thereby also for the political activism of informationalism.