I'm not sure how this will solve the problem. You'll still get artificial lines and physical and economic barriers. They'll just be drawn between cities and rural areas instead of between countries.
The reality is that there are now three populations - one connected, educated, cosmopolitan, and international. Another made of globalisation's cast-offs, who tend to be poorly educated, rural, reactionary, and reliant almost entirely on right-wing propaganda outlets for its world view. And a third, which is an indentured working class in the emerging economies which build things for the other two, but has very limited personal and economic freedoms.
Connected people are - ironically - more similar than different the world over. Allowing for local colour, you'll hear the same conversations in Barcelona, Berlin, Berkeley, Bankgkok, and Beijing. These people often see nation states as a distraction - something that gets in the way of getting cool shit done.
The cast-offs are also more similar than different, but they still identify strongly with nation states and nationalist politics because they have no other identity they can call their own. National pride is literally the only thing that allows them to feel any agency in their lives.
The Brexit and Trump votes are Luddite machine riots, where the machine is the globalised order.
Technology can't fix this. Globalisation has to decide what it wants to do with them.
The sensible humane option is to work out some way to re-enfranchise them.
The inhumane option - historically popular, and looking more and more likely - is to cull them in a major war and hope nothing else gets broken.
It's a bigger problem than it looks. In fact we have a is a kind of reinvention of medieval feudalism, with a plutocratic nobility who can move around freely, a supportive caste of technological and financial aspirants who can move with permissions, and an indentured worker caste who can't move, and sometimes don't want to.
There is no sense in which this is a functioning, inclusive popular democracy. It has some of the trappings - popular votes, etc. But absolutely none of the substance.
"I'm not sure how this will solve the problem. You'll still get artificial lines and physical and economic barriers. They'll just be drawn between cities and rural areas instead of between countries."
The point is that they don't have to be so immutable. We don't have to tie together two populations that don't want to be together if it's less of a Major World Shift to draw a new line between them and declare a new polity, or merge two polities that have no great need to be separate anymore.
A lot of the conflict in the US right now is in some sense artificial, imposed by the lines that exist. The truth is, what does it matter to San Francisco if the heartland is "racist homophobic bigots" and what does it matter to the heartland if San Francisco are "globalists engaged in foolish social policies and crazy obsessions with things that don't matter", if they weren't bound together by centuries-old lines? Obviously economic ties continue either way, because trade is flowing regardless and neither of the two are, in practice, all that concerned about the other places in the world that have the same description. It's only the people you're locked in the room with that bother you. Maybe we should unlock the door instead of having increasingly bitter and violent fights about who gets the couch tonight.
The reality is that there are now three populations - one connected, educated, cosmopolitan, and international. Another made of globalisation's cast-offs, who tend to be poorly educated, rural, reactionary, and reliant almost entirely on right-wing propaganda outlets for its world view. And a third, which is an indentured working class in the emerging economies which build things for the other two, but has very limited personal and economic freedoms.
Connected people are - ironically - more similar than different the world over. Allowing for local colour, you'll hear the same conversations in Barcelona, Berlin, Berkeley, Bankgkok, and Beijing. These people often see nation states as a distraction - something that gets in the way of getting cool shit done.
The cast-offs are also more similar than different, but they still identify strongly with nation states and nationalist politics because they have no other identity they can call their own. National pride is literally the only thing that allows them to feel any agency in their lives.
The Brexit and Trump votes are Luddite machine riots, where the machine is the globalised order.
Technology can't fix this. Globalisation has to decide what it wants to do with them.
The sensible humane option is to work out some way to re-enfranchise them.
The inhumane option - historically popular, and looking more and more likely - is to cull them in a major war and hope nothing else gets broken.
It's a bigger problem than it looks. In fact we have a is a kind of reinvention of medieval feudalism, with a plutocratic nobility who can move around freely, a supportive caste of technological and financial aspirants who can move with permissions, and an indentured worker caste who can't move, and sometimes don't want to.
There is no sense in which this is a functioning, inclusive popular democracy. It has some of the trappings - popular votes, etc. But absolutely none of the substance.