The Internet Against the Nation-State

When I was young, we all watched the same shows on TV. We listened to the same songs on the radio. The events I attended were local, shared with people from my community. But over the last few years, I’ve felt something shift. The shows I watch are only seen by a tiny fraction of the population. The music I listen to is only heard by a small group of people with similar tastes. The events I go to are filled with people who think like me, live like me, consume like me.

I started wondering: is the sense of a nation that shares culture going to become extinct?

When I watched a compilation of German hits from the 2000s recently, this thought hit me harder than ever. What I’m feeling has a name. Sociologists and cultural critics call it the death of the monoculture. And it’s not just nostalgia (it’s a fundamental shift in how society functions).

The End of Shared Experience

In the 1990s and 2000s, popular culture operated under conditions of scarcity. There were only a few TV channels, a few radio stations, and centralized gatekeepers deciding what got broadcast. If a German pop song was a hit, millions of people heard it simultaneously. If a TV show aired on Saturday night, it became watercooler conversation on Monday.

This created what we can call a monoculture (a shared baseline of references that connected you to your neighbor, regardless of whether you actually liked the same things).

Today, algorithms on platforms like Spotify, TikTok, and YouTube have replaced those gatekeepers. The internet shattered physical scarcity, allowing for infinite choice. But algorithms aren’t neutral. They’re designed to maximize engagement by feeding you hyper-personalized content. The result is that we now live in highly tailored micro-cultures, or filter bubbles.

You’re deeply connected to a small, global niche of people who share your exact interests (like AI, crypto, or specific indie music), but you’ve lost the shared cultural baseline with the person living next door to you.

The Crisis of the Imagined Community

This goes deeper than just entertainment. Political scientist Benedict Anderson coined the term “imagined communities” to describe nations. His argument was that a nation only exists because mass media (first newspapers, then TV and radio) allowed millions of strangers to consume the same news and stories at the exact same time, creating a shared national identity.

If the state no longer controls the flow of information, and citizens no longer consume the same media, the glue of the imagined community dissolves. When you get your news from decentralized Twitter accounts, your entertainment from niche YouTube creators, and your financial views from global crypto communities, your primary identity is no longer tied to your country’s citizenship. It becomes tied to those specific digital tribes.

The Network State vs. The Nation State

As someone studying software engineering, I see this clearly: the internet is a distributed system, and nation-states are legacy mainframes.

Nation-states require physical borders, centralized authority, and geographic proximity to function. The internet allows you to bypass geography entirely. This tension has given rise to the concept of the network state.

A network state flips the traditional model. Instead of people being forced into a community because they happen to be born on the same piece of land, people first build highly aligned communities online based on shared interests and values. Only later do these digital tribes crowdfund physical territory or organize real-world meetups.

The nostalgia I felt watching those 2000s music videos is mourning for lost social cohesion. The challenge for modern nation-states is that they can no longer rely on a shared cultural narrative to keep society together. Without a monoculture, political polarization increases because people aren’t just disagreeing on policies (they’re literally existing in different informational realities).

The Dark Side: Techno-Feudalism

But this trend brings up a worrying question. In a network state, won’t we just become feudal anarchists?

Picture this: people with the same shared identity living in small, hyper-specialized communities. One community where all the privacy-focused engineers live. Another where the firefighter community lives. Another for biohackers. Another for crypto maximalists.

This isn’t just speculation. Critics call this endpoint techno-feudalism.

The network state concept is built on the idea of exitocracy. If you don’t like the rules of a community, you simply exit and join another. But critics point out that this doesn’t automatically create a utopia. Instead, it can create digital fiefdoms.

In these highly aligned communities, the people who write the smart contracts or own the underlying blockchain infrastructure essentially have root access to the community’s assets and rules. They become modern digital lords. Furthermore, because the community is built entirely on strict alignment to one ideology, there’s no room for democratic debate. You either obey the founder’s algorithm, or you’re exiled.

The Hyper-Stratification Problem

My example of the engineers versus the firefighters highlights an ultimate flaw: a society needs friction, diversity, and cross-subsidization to survive.

If the ultra-wealthy engineers secede from the nation-state to form their own physical network archipelago with private security, private schools, and private healthcare, they drain the broader public infrastructure of its tax base. And who collects the trash? A society of only engineers cannot physically function. They still need plumbers, nurses, and firefighters. In a network state paradigm, these essential workers would likely become a subclass serving the specialized tech-enclaves (exactly like serfs serving a feudal lord’s castle).

Right now, the internet creates digital echo chambers. If the network state succeeds in moving these echo chambers into the physical world, the result is catastrophic fragmentation. When you never physically interact with people outside your ideological bubble, you lose basic human empathy for different ways of life.

The term “feudal anarchists” is a perfect paradox. It’s anarchist because it destroys the central nation-state in favor of decentralized, parallel societies. But it’s feudal because inside those mini-societies, control is highly centralized in the hands of the tech-founders who hold the private keys.

In a way, the nation-state (despite all its flaws) forces us to compromise and find middle ground with people we completely disagree with.

How States Are Fighting Back

Lawmakers are absolutely aware of this, especially in the European Union. They don’t use tech-bro terminology like network state or techno-feudalism, but they’re fighting the exact same underlying issue under names like internet fragmentation, echo chambers, and digital sovereignty.

The EU understands that the root cause of societal fragmentation is the core algorithm platforms use to maximize watch-time by feeding users increasingly extreme, hyper-personalized content.

To fight this, the EU enacted the Digital Services Act (DSA). Under Article 27, very large online platforms like X, TikTok, and YouTube are now legally forced to be transparent about their recommendation algorithms. They must offer users an option to view content without algorithmic profiling, such as a simple chronological timeline instead of a personalized “For You” page. The explicit goal is to pop the filter bubbles and expose people to a broader reality again.

Governments have also realized that big tech companies are essentially acting as quasi-nation-states. These companies set their own laws through terms of service, have their own citizens as users, and operate beyond traditional democratic institutions.

To prevent this shift, the EU is pushing for digital sovereignty by forcing digital networks to obey local, physical laws. This involves forcing platforms to store European data on European servers and heavily fining tech giants to prove that the physical state still has ultimate authority.

The Splinternet Dilemma

The tricky part is that in their attempt to protect society, nation-states are accelerating a different kind of fragmentation called the splinternet.

Because the EU, US, China, and Russia all have completely different laws regarding data, privacy, and speech, the single global internet is fracturing into regional internets. By aggressively regulating tech companies to protect citizens, the EU is inadvertently breaking the global, open internet into fragmented national silos.

Lawmakers are trying to force the chaotic, decentralized internet back into the neat geographic borders of the 20th-century nation-state. But as anyone who understands distributed systems knows, trying to force a decentralized network to behave like a centralized hierarchy is technically incredibly difficult.

Why the Nation-State Won (For Now)

I used to think protocols and peer-to-peer networks would make it impossible for states to enforce physical borders. But the reality is more nuanced. The companies maintaining large chunks of the internet are under the jurisdiction of nation-states. If the biggest tech companies had wanted to abolish the nation-state from the start, they might have had a shot. Now, it seems impossible.

The internet isn’t a magical cloud. It’s a massive, physical, industrial system. Internet scholars divide the web into layers: the logical layer of software and protocols, and the physical layer of hardware. The logical layer crosses borders easily. The physical layer cannot.

Every data center, every internet exchange point, and every server farm sits on specific land. Because it sits on land, it’s subject to the jurisdiction, zoning laws, and police force of the state controlling that territory. Even massive undersea fiber-optic cables that carry the vast majority of global internet traffic must eventually connect to land at heavily guarded and regulated landing stations. If a state wants to pull the plug, it knows exactly where the physical plug is.

The Corporation as the State’s Proxy

Tech monopolies may have the wealth of small nations, but they lack the one defining feature of a sovereign state: the monopoly on legitimate physical force.

Tech giants cannot exist without the state. They need the state’s power grid for their server farms, the state’s military to protect their data centers, and the state’s legal system to enforce their patents. Because these companies require physical offices, employees, and bank accounts in a country to operate, the state can easily coerce them.

Early tech pioneers had an anti-state, libertarian ethos. But today’s biggest tech companies have realized that fighting the state is bad for business. Instead, they’re integrating themselves into the state apparatus. Amazon and Microsoft build secure cloud infrastructure for the military and government. By becoming critical infrastructure for the state, these corporations ensure their survival (but by submitting to the ultimate authority of the nation-state).

Code and protocols can route around censorship, but they cannot route around physical reality. As long as servers require electricity and land, the people with the laws will hold ultimate power.

The Inertia of the Crowds

Decentralized alternatives keep emerging, but they remain niche. The barrier isn’t technology; it’s human nature. People are simply too comfortable to switch. Take messaging services as an example: everyone knows major group chat apps have questionable privacy practices, but they continue to use them instead of secure alternatives.

This reluctance exposes the massive power of network effects. A messaging app’s product isn’t its software interface. Its product is your mother, your university group, your football team. Secure alternatives may have objectively better cryptographic architecture, but if your family and friends aren’t there, the app has zero utility. The switching cost isn’t monetary (it’s social friction). Most people simply won’t spend their social capital forcing friends to switch.

When surveyed, people strongly claim they value data privacy. But their behavior contradicts this. Researchers explain this through the privacy paradox: the immediate, tangible benefit of social inclusion outweighs the abstract, invisible risk of data harvesting.

The Enshittification Playbook

Tech critic Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe how platforms intentionally exploit this human inertia.

Platforms often operate at a loss initially to build a phenomenal, free product with no ads and great features in order to trap users and build an inescapable network effect. Once users are locked in, the platform pivots to pleasing business customers, tweaking algorithms to maximize ad time and locking in advertisers who rely on the captive audience. Finally, once both users and businesses have no easy way out, the platform degrades service for everyone to extract massive profits for shareholders.

This playbook is only possible because modern platforms own the underlying protocol. If messaging apps were built like email on open protocols, you could download a different client the moment ads appeared and still message your friends. But because the platform owns the protocol, your only choice is enduring the ads or facing social isolation.

So What Now?

The internet degraded because tech platforms eliminated the discipline of classical capitalism by buying competitors, lobbying against regulations, and building massive switching costs. Once you have a monopoly, you’re no longer competing in a market. You’re a feudal lord collecting rent from everyone on your digital land.

We are left with two competing approaches to fix this. The state route focuses on antitrust and interoperability laws that force companies to open their borders, restoring market discipline. The decentralized route argues that relying on the state is too slow, and we should write the rules of competition directly into code through public blockchains where switching costs are mathematically zero.

The debate essentially boils down to whether we trust lawyers or algorithms more as the referee.

This isn’t just theory. This is the world we’re building right now. The question isn’t whether the internet will defeat the nation-state or vice versa. The question is what kind of society emerges from the collision.

The monoculture is dead. Long live… what, exactly?