Modern communications technologies have supposedly turned the world into a "global village." Although the term suggests a process of unification, globalism also seems to have nurtured--or at least coincided with--tribalism, as Benjamin R. Barber points out in "Jihad vs. McWorld." We now seem to live in a world where national boundaries and notions of nationality are simultaneously undermined and reinstated.
Cyberspace with its flow of global communication and data-exchange has contributed to the development of the "global village"--which invites the question whether "real life" notions of territoriality have in turn influenced the development of cyberspace. In how far have RL concepts of villages and cities, states and nations, defined the territories of cyberspace?
William Gibson's cyberspace is a datascape dominated by large corporations; institutions and corporations have also played a major role in the creation of the Web's data space, but on the Web you may also visit a multiplicity of personal home(page)s; and you will find a growing number of services/browsers that allow you to retrieve information about your RL neighborhood, to see what's playing in the movie theaters or what's shown in galleries and museums around town. The Second UN Conference on Human Settlements,Habitat II taking place in Istanbul (3-14 June)
--appropriately has a home on the Web, too
(http://www.unhabitat.org/habitat2/index.html). Domain names may be a form of virtual real estate, and IP addresses may provide a kind of map of the territory, but the Web is still known to be a borderless, global data space.
However, there are cities, states and nations that have been founded and built in cyberspace; these territories seem to fall into two major categories: They either try to recreate a digital version of an existing locality, or to reconfigure and experiment with existing notions of cities, states and nations in the essentially borderless digital space.
http://www.dds.nl/dds/info/english/engelsfolder95.html
An example of the former category is De Digitale Stad (DDS), the Amsterdam Digital City. It is supposed to be an elaboration of the city metaphor that gives visitors a sense of place. The Digital City bills itself as an electronic medium that provides easy access to governmental information at the local and at the national level, as well as to information provided by social organizations and citizens' groups. DDS tries to outline a future "digital society," and one of its goals is to actively participate in the renewal of small and middle-sized enterprises in the Amsterdam Region in order to strengthen its economic structure.
The basic framework of Digital City's interface consists of "squares," each of them defined by its own character and theme. Each square is bordered by four others and has its own cafe or pub where visitors may engage in real time chat & discussion pertaining to the square's theme. Visitors can always browse through the city-plan and be "teleported" to a location of their choice. Digital City also features a service called DNP ("druk-nieuw-populair" = crowded, new, popular), a function that, at any given time, indicates which locations are crowded, where new information has been posted, and which information and places have recently proven to be most popular.
DDS uses the city as a metaphor for the Web's theme-oriented discussion groups and meeting-places, and turns the client/server relationship into one between a tenant and landlord. "Built" on each square are eight buildings, which are rented to information providers. The tenant of a building gets full Internet functionality (shell-access, international e-mail, telnet, ftp).One of the eight buildings on a square is a collective building, "an ideal option for smaller businesses and non-profit organizations," since the shared rent is much lower (information providers in a collective building don't have shell accounts). Every square also sports a billboard, a "Webvertisement" that usually pictures a company's logo. Between each of the squares, there are "residential areas" where registered users of the Digital City can build their own "homes." Setting up a private dwelling is free of charge, but subjected to a number of rules. Residents of DDS may go over their registration data, assume a fake-identity, indicate whether they are available for talk, and send and receive messages through their mailboxes.
The effects of a project like DDS are debatable. Does the focus on a specific, "real life" locality and the access to information on a local and national level result in an enhanced, "instant access" experience for local visitors? Does it constitute a form of digital sightseeing, since outside visitors may learn about a "real life" locality they never have to "physically" visit? Or does it diminish the Web's status as a global data space that provides theme-oriented meeting places transcending national boundaries?
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~MLM/telepolis/english/telepolis.html
Similar questions were raised by Telepolis , an Exhibition and Symposium on the Interactive and Networked City, which took place in Luxembourg in November, 1995, and was realized by Medialab Munich e.V. in collaboration with various other project partners. Among these partners were the Architectural Space Laboratory (ASL) in Zürich, the Artificial Intelligence Lab in Brussels, the Institute for New Media in Frankfurt, the Digital City Amsterdam and Berlin's Internationale Stadt e.V. (International City)--a meeting center operated by artists that allows visitors to access "local" data and to form work-teams to jointly develop projects and realize them in "real life" and on the Web.
Telepolis took place at a congress center in Luxembourg, and its website currently features information on the project as well as a VRML tour. The project focused on the question whether it would be possible to find an architecture for an exhibition on the 'networked city,' since the term itself seems to contradict traditional notions of space. The project description points out that networks--as invisible fluxes of information, communication and finances--tend to deconstruct the central model of the city and to dematerialize its functions on a local level (street, square, city); the networked city functions on an abstract, symbolical and iconographic level and thus has no traditional spatial correspondence.
Telepolis tried to superimpose the dynamic structures of networks on architectonic structures of the city and to create a complex, fragmented image of a city.
Telepolis questions attempts to simply translate traditional structures of a city into the digital space, since it is based on the premise that the networked city is defined by the dissolution of traditional spatial boundaries, by dis-placement. There are other Web projects that take this dis-placement and dissolution of boundaries as a starting point and try to use it in order to transcend the limitations of traditional notions of nations.
http://www.refugee.net
The most ambitious and controversial among these projects is Refugee Republic , conceptualized and founded by artist Ingo Gunther. Refugee Republic attempts to address the problems raised by the ever increasing number of refugees, displaced persons and migrants. The initiative is based on the premise that refugees are not merely a problem, but also a solution in the sense of the Global Capital Infrastructure. According to Ingo Gunther, the world's refugee population--a trans-global net--are the best and perhaps only candidates to become a socio-economic and political/ideological avant-garde of the Millennium. Gunther suggests that the refugee population's involuntary fate of being an international avant-garde can be turned into "productive assets." The resonances of venture capitalism are an intentional irony (the Refugee Republic logo is reminiscent of the Rolls Royce one): Refugee Republic actually speculates in abstract forms of identity and the possibilities of the digital medium to empower those without a sovereign state.
The purpose of the Refugee Republic Corporation--incorporated in the State of Nevada--is to address the refugee issue "in a constructive and experimental manner." The corporation is authorized to issue 50 million shares of Class A voting stock and of non-voting Class B stock, respectively. The number of 50.000.000 shares represents the worldwide population of unregistered refugees. By purchasing stock, which is sold in pairs, an investor will sponsor as many refugees as shares bought. The non-voting stock will remain with the investor, while the sponsored refugees will receive voting stock. Thus, the refugee citizens/shareholders will own their country/corporation.
Gunther asserts that the historical Refugee Republics of modern history--the U.S.A. foremost--illustrate that a steady flow of foreigners is an essential part of the success of the richest countries in the world, but that the awareness of this fact seems to have reached an all-time worldwide low. He maintains that the future of a world that has limited itself to a gradual modification of exhausted historical socio-political structures might depend on such a Refugee Republic. According to Gunther, national borders all over the world become ever less permeable--as the availability and use of surveillance electronics and "passive" war machinery indicates (a color-key globe of landmine density is featured in the site's "Maps" section); ethnic, national, and geographical zones of tolerance fall victim to the transportation and information revolution/explosion. The project description points out that the officially acknowledged part (19 million of the total refugee population) is scattered all over the world, and the number of unregistered displaced persons world-wide has reached one percent of the world population. As Gunther proposes, the potential of a Refugee Republic consists in an experimental supra-territorial state that is multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual, able to anticipate socio-ideological and economic challenges and to force and provide solutions.
Refugee Republic may be an experimental concept rather than a meeting place for refugees offering practical first-aid, but it certainly owns its place on the Web--right now the best, and probably only, place to found this supra-territorial, multi-cultural state of dis-placed persons.
http://duplox.wz-berlin.de/netze/netzeforum/archive20may96/0201.html
The notion that a nation is defined by its culture is further explored by a project called HYPERNATION , commissioned by Galerie Oboro in Montreal and conceived by Hank Bull in Vancouver. HYPERNATION is a free idea zone inviting submissions (text, image, sound or video files) that address the question: "What is a nation in cyberspace?" Contributions from this discussion will be edited and posted to a website. Similar to Refugee Republic, HYPERNATION's project description suggests that the nation-state, as defined by borders, passports, central governments and economic policies, is chronically dysfunctional, destabilized, on the one hand, by trans-national capitalism and, on the other, by the aspirations of so-called "ethnic minorities" everywhere. HYPERNATION claims that the term "minorities" is misleading, since indigenous people and communities, defined over the centuries by language, religion, and art, make up the entire human population. Therefore HYPERNATION proposes the principle of "Aboriginal Title" as a way out of the current impasse, since it resists the definition of physical territory, passports, or ownership of the land; it recognizes the nation as being in motion, nomadic, traversing the land. As HYPERNATION puts it, "Maybe you are several nations."
Or maybe just one state.
http://www.evru.org
The Spanish conceptual artist Zush formed his own "mental state," which is both a literal manifestation of the inner world we each possess and a country with its own flag, currency and alphabet--consisting of himself. Born Alberto Porta in 1946, he changed his name to Zush after being submitted to a mental hospital with schizophrenia during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. At the hospital, he met a schizophrenic who gave him his new name and inspired him to found Evrugo Mental State . Zush, an internationally recognized artist, whose first foray into electronic media was a collaboration with Peter Gabriel on Gabriel's interactive music CD-ROM, XPLORA , has designed a CD-ROM about Evrugo and created a website He carries an Evrugi passport and writes in "Asura," his version of the Roman alphabet. Zush explained that he doesn't need flags and hymns, but that the only way to make people accept that you have your own state is the use of symbols of state. "It's purely for diplomatic reasons," he told Reuters news agency in the National Library of Madrid, Spain.
As Zush declares, "My territory is where I am"--which, presumably, includes being digital. Cybercities and cybernations do not only reflect a desire to reconfigure traditional concepts of city/state/nation and transcend them in a networked community; they also reflect a desire to use these very concepts in order to impose structure upon a vast virtual community of dis-placed persons--which is, compared to the entire human population on this planet, still a minority. Our territory is where we are?
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