Photo by Nastya Sensei
Dr. Balaji S. Srinivasan presents a novel concept of Cloud Countries in his 9 April 2021 essay titled “How to Start a New Country”. While there is no doubt that there are communities which exist only online, the question of creating a political entity starting with a digital community is not commonly discussed in the workaday world. Srinivasan balances historical precedent, technological advancement, and social tendencies to establish the possibility of a new type of polity: Cloud Countries.
Srinivasan provides the reader with a brief overview of seven ways to start a new country. The first six - Election, Revolution, War, Micronations, Seasteading, and Space Colonization - have been a part of broader public discourse. The first three could be considered traditional and the last three more contemporary. The novel county-creating method introduced by Dr. Srinivasan in this essay is the idea of Cloud Countries.
Cloud Countries are proposed as the preferred method and based on the concept of “cloud first, land last”. The formation of an online digital community would be the first step toward such an entity. Cloud Countries would form based around interactions in digital space using upcoming, readily available technology (such as VR). Srinivasan draws a playful analogy to LARPing (Live Action Role-Playing Game) and discusses how such a “feat of imagination practiced by large numbers of people at the same time” can be incredibly powerful, suggesting cryptocurrency as an example.
Cloud first, land last can seem very counter-intuitive at first. It goes against what humankind has traditionally done for as long as history has been written (and arguably longer). The question to ask, then, is what would be the problems of a cloud first, land last country or civilization?
One could argue that many of the problems a cloud-based country would run into are likely the inverse of those faced by territory-based countries. Cloud-based countries would be composed of people who opted-in because of a shared ideology, rather than shared location. Territory-based countries are made up of people who are within a certain proximity, but may have drastically different ideologies.
When ideologies differ too much internally, the result is sometimes revolution and violence (i.e., the US Civil War, the French Revolution, and many others throughout history). However, ideology is only part of what holds polities together, there is also an internal physical dependence. Human-beings are physical, and regardless of ideology we all have basic physical needs such as food, water, and shelter. When a country is based on contiguous territory, it is arguably easier to create and maintain the baseline requirements for a population, and particularly to maintain and distribute them in the face of a disaster.
Dr. Srinivasan’s Cloud Country vision would be of a polity that achieves both numerical and societal definitions of a country (outlined in his essay). I think it’s safe to assume that his vision would be of a country that is also resilient. In order for a country on Planet Earth to persist through time, it must be able to withstand both natural and humanitarian disasters. The method of territory acquisition and occupation proposed in the article creates a vulnerability that could result in reduced resilience of a Cloud Country.
re•sil•i•ence
n. the quality of being able to return quickly to a previous good condition after problems
Dr. Srinivasan proposes a “reverse diaspora” in which territory would be acquired by a Cloud Country, but “not necessarily contiguous territory”.
There are at least three characteristics which increase a country’s resilience that would be limited or made impossible without at least one large swath of contiguous territory owned by a Cloud Country. It is these three items that need to be more thoroughly addressed in order to establish if a Cloud Country could be resilient and, therefore, persist throughout time:
Self-sustaining agricultural production.
Adequate natural resources.
A baseline of internal supply chains.
Self-sustaining agricultural production. As mentioned before, humans are physical beings that have physical needs. Food and water are chief among these. While it is possible the acquire food and water from other countries (this is currently done) one could pose that the stability and independence of a nation is heavily dependent on that nations ability to feed its peoples.
Adequate natural resources. Natural resources are highly undervalued in today’s society and go hand-in-hand with self-sustaining agricultural production. In the US, it’s rare for people to ponder where all their building supplies are sourced (often forests and mines within the US). Whole economies are built around natural resource management, extraction, development, etc. This includes recreation and conservation efforts as well as mining and timber harvesting. While there are plenty of skill sets with a high market value that are not related to natural resources on the surface (say architecture) they are often linked in other ways.
A baseline of internal supply chains. Supply chains are another wildly undervalued piece of society. They appear invisible, especially if you live in a well-stocked city. One observation that most people could make during the beginning stages of the pandemic is that not having well established internal supply chains is a vulnerability. Most people did not suffer dramatically in the US - toilet paper and cleaning supplies ran out in many locations, but deaths were generally caused by the virus not the breakdown in supply chains. But if we were to scale the supply chain breakdown, what could have happened? People could have starved. If water distribution broke down people could have died of common diseases or thirst. When electricity went out in Texas at least 111 people died.
I would therefore argue that a Cloud Country’s resilience will suffer to the degree that its citizens are dependent on surrounding countries’ agricultural production, supply chains, and natural resources.
For example, if a natural or humanitarian disaster to occur, the Cloud Country’s pockets (distributed throughout the world) would be dependent on other country’s agricultural production, supply chains, natural resources, and governments to survive the event. Such dependence would reduces the Cloud Country’s individual resilience and would also likely serve as a barrier to achieving societal recognition.
The most obvious solution to this problem would be for Cloud Countries work toward acquiring contiguous territory. There are likely other, better solutions and I feel these are very much worth discussing as well.
You can read Dr. Balaji S. Srinivasan’s whole essay on 1729.com/how-to-start-a-new-country.