Forget what you thought you knew about geopolitics and economics …
An interesting article in Wired, “Net states rule the world; we need to recognize their power”, is very much in line with some of the themes that Rebecca MacKinnon talked about in her highly recommendable book “Consent of the networked”, for which I had the honor of writing an epilogue for the Spanish edition. Both deal with the changes to geopolitics and the traditional economy due to the superposition of a global information network in which borders progressively make less sense, where transaction costs are reduced to a minimum, and in which large corporations such as Google, Facebook or Amazon could end up playing a bigger role than many governments.
Facebook has more than two billion users, and although some are fake, this is still much larger than the population of China, and all of them are affected by changes to the company’s policies. It’s harder to know how many Google users there are, but Gmail alone has more than one billion users and Android more than two billion. It is estimated that Amazon had more than three hundred million active users at the beginning of 2016, and now has 541,900 employees, the size of a small country. Any of these companies can make decisions, for example, at a fiscal level, capable of generating imbalances in the trade balances of some economies.
What is the future of traditional geopolitics in a world in which the companies of the future are intangible, with the structure of DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, able to choose which tax regime suits them best and can hire employees all over the world through distributed governance models and smart contracts? For relatively little money, you can become an e-resident of Estonia, regardless of your location and your passport, giving you a national identity document and the right to set up companies in the Baltic republic, which boasts of being the most advanced digital society in the world.
Virtual citizenships and, of course, virtual currencies: in 2015, when the Greek crisis was at its most severe, the country considered the possibility of adopting bitcoin as a national currency. What would have happened if they had done so, taking into account that the exchange rate of the cryptocurrency then was around $230 and now exceeds $7,500, and is so liquid that it is possible to have a bitcoin debit card and pay with it anywhere in the world? Could the economy of a whole country be organized around a concept that most people in the world still don’t understand and that some consider a pyramid scheme?
The Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers released today, what do they prove? A corrupted system that does not work anymore, being used by wealthy individuals and corporations to “optimize” taxes in what constitutes a clear lack of transparency, principles and social responsibility. Borders, countries and nationalities, all increasingly irrelevant. Workers who choose their passport and residence based on criteria of all kinds, and who deliver their work through global networks via inviolable smart contracts, charging in cryptocurrencies. Companies that finance themselves by issuing their own tokens and pay their tax where they choose through fiscal optimization processes that take advantage of the still current and manifestly obsolete legislation currently in place.
Economic power is no longer about nation states and is of a different nature, defined not by the place where you were born, but by other factors: everything we thought we knew about geopolitics and the global economy blown out of the water.
Are we ready to start, or even just to think about starting, this conversation? Or will it take place without us?
(En español, aquí)
