Month: January 2011

[Note: this is a follow-up to my post a few days introducing the theme of un-nationalness.]

Krosno Odrzanskie, Poland. Dakar, Senegal. Greenwich, London. Uzice, Serbia. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Cardiff, Wales. Praia, Cape Verde. Edinburgh, Scotland. Derry, Northern Ireland. Blaegoevgrad, Bulgaria. Guadalajara, Mexico.

These are the birthplaces of the 11 who took the field in today’s Barclays Premier League soccer match between Manchester United and Stoke City, two venerable English clubs. The starting line-up were born, on average, 1896.56 miles from Manchester. Which is the distance between Manchester and Ankara, Turkey. Which is in Asia.

Not one person born in Manchester made that starting line-up.

The goals were scored by men born, on average, 4106.32 miles away from Manchester, one from Cape Verde and one from Mexico.

Why is all this important? Because until 1982, when Arnold Muhren transferred to United, they’d never really fielded a “foreign” player, from beyond the UK and Ireland. [While some claim Carlo Sartori in 1967 as the first, I am led to believe his family moved to Manchester while he was a young child, and he came through the junior ranks as any other domestic child.]

Talent knows no borders, and Manchester United have done a good job garnering and harnessing global talent. As far as the club was concerned, it did not matter where they were born, or what nation they represented. What mattered was how they played football.

So the Manchester United of today is quite different from the Manchester United of a few decades ago. All made possible because of the relatively free flow of capital, and of labour,  across borders, not just in Europe but beyond: at least four of the players aren’t European; and the owners of the club are American.

For some decades now, it has been getting easier and easier to move money around the world, with the unintended consequence of making terrorism and tax avoidance easier. For some decades now, it has been getting easier and easier to move around as an individual, as the relative cost of travel has dropped and the need for talent has grown unabated. So labour and capital have moved more freely than ever before, creating an environment Ken Ohmae described vividly over two decades ago in his seminal book The Borderless World.

But it’s not just labour and financial capital that move freely nowadays; knowledge or “human” capital, along with relationship or “social” capital, also have this ability now.

Which gives governments a real headache. Because they want to lock in their “customers”, the people and companies that pay the taxes that allow them to exist. The traditional swords and ploughshares of government — regulation and taxation — are fashioned into the flowers of freedom, as companies migrate between regulatory and tax regimes at will.

This erosion of “national” power is happening at all levels: the state, the company, even the individual, as the tools of lock-in get diminished in scale and quality.

In choice there is power; the continuing evolution of the tools of communication and transportation have increased “customer” choice significantly, and out of this choice has come about the growth of un-nationalness.

In some ways it’s what I have been saying for some time now: many of the lock-ins of the past are being eroded: every artificial scarcity is opposed by an equal and opposite artificial abundance; over time the abundance wins.

As a result, new institutions, organisations and ways of working continue to emerge, built on un-national principles. Facebook, Skype and Twitter would all appear on a list of the top ten “countries” of the world; virtual currencies continue to grow apace, despite not being issued, underwritten or guaranteed by countries; money is borrowed and lent at micro levels; political funds are raised on the internet; soon, even law will be drafted on a collaborative basis.

New, un-national fora are taking centre stage, ranging from the World Economic Forum to TED to the Web Science Trust.

New un-national tools like the internet and the Web are entering their golden age, enabling amazing levels of communal activity and collaboration.

Historical lock-in models practised by governments and monopolies and monolithic hierarchical institutions are being dismantled while they sleep; the movement from analog to digital has shattered the erstwhile peace of the news, publishing, music and film businesses; education and healthcare are in range; and government will follow.

For many years now, people like Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold and Esther Dyson have been writing about these changes. More recently, Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott and Doc Searls have been documenting the changes and explaining the rationale behind the changes.

But these are hard changes. So there is a reluctance amongst the changed to accept the change. Puerile pieces of legislation litter the landscape, as governments and incumbents seek to hold on to what they had.

But it’s over. Over. Because the tools of choice are in individual hands. And there is no master switch. By design.

Which means it’s time for all of us to understand more about the principles behind un-nationalness, underpinning the statelessness of today.

For starters, I think we should be considering these:

The Principle of Simultaneity: Un-national things happen at the same time everywhere; an un-national film is released everywhere and in all format in the same instant.

The Principle of Unownability:  Un-national things are owned by no one. In Doc Searls’ words, they’re NEA. Nobody owns them. Everyone can use them. Anyone can improve them.

The Principle of Emergence: Un-national things standardise through market adoption rather than by diktat or decree or regulation. There are no standards bodies to game, no lobby mechanisms, no palms to grease.

The Principle of Federability: Un-national things have to be built on the DNA of federation rather than the toxins of monoculture and monopoly.

When humans have real choice, they choose where they work, where they live, where they pay their taxes, where they raise their kids, where they die.

These choices are increasing, despite the efforts of some governments and some corporates.

Historical structures, built on hierarchical principles, had choke points where control could be established.

Today it’s like trying to control air or space or the oceans. Un-national things.

Of course new toxins emerge, new dangers become apparent. Which is why we need the work of people like TED. Like the WEF. Like the Berkman Center. To delight us with what is possible. To warn us of the risks. To give us a forum for debate. And to ensure we have the freedom and the choice to be part of those debates.

Incidentally, if you want to see what happens at Davos, why not try and get invited there? Take part in the Davos Debates, there’s still time.

A coda. If you have the time, read The Kernel For This Blog, something I wrote nearly six years ago. It’s how I visualised un-nationalness at the time.

Happy New Year everyone.

If you haven’t heard of William Stafford before, you should try and spend some time reading his poetry. Stafford, who died in 1993, was made the US equivalent of Poet Laureate in 1970, and was known for his gentle, pithy style. A prolific poet, he is estimated to have written over 22,000 poems, though only a fraction are available in print.

One of my favourite Stafford poems is At The Un-National Monument Along The Canadian Border, shown below, a good reason to go out and buy a collection of his poems today:

If you like what you see above, there’s also a decent archives site you can find here.

There are many reasons for my liking the poem. Even now, years after coming across it, I can still savour every line. I must admit I have a particular fondness for the ending, the sheer power and imagery of phrases like “hallowed by neglect” and “celebrate it by forgetting its name”.

There’s also a tangential reason for my liking the poem. Stafford’s use of the word “un-national”, a word that resonated quite powerfully in me.

For many years now, I’ve been pondering what it means to be “global”. [As I’ve written before, I was born a foreigner: my name was alone enough to tell people in Calcutta that I wasn’t from there; my colouring and accent were enough to tell people in Madras that I wasn’t from there. And yet, as the name of this blog suggests, I am extremely fond of Calcutta, and consider that the city, and its people, played a critical role in forming and shaping what I am today.]

When I joined BT some years ago, the issue of “being global” came up in conversation with the then CEO, Ben Vervaayen. At the first meeting I ever had with him, Ben brought up the issue, asking me to consider carefully the distinctions between “international”, “multinational” and “global”. And, especially since it was a topic of some personal interest already, I obliged.

And where I got to that evening sometime in 2006 was this: that perhaps a key distinction between “global” and all those other words like “international” and “multinational” lay in the fact that it didn’t contain the suffix -national, that the essence of being global could not be defined in the context of nations. There was a born-foreignness to it, a statelessness as it were.

Some years before that, I’d had the pleasure of discussing some of this with friends and colleagues at Dresdner Kleinwort, particularly Sean Park and Malcolm Dick. Incidentally, if you haven’t watched it yet, you must see Sean’s 2005 AmazonBay video. Amazing. [Disclosure: I’m a venture partner with Anthemis Group].

Particularly around the time that Sean was creating the video, we spent some time discussing the “death zone”, the vulnerable space in the middle as businesses migrated to the extremes of global and hyperlocal; it was here that the conversation first meandered into the “stateless” topic, as we ruminated on the fact that quite a few of the institutions destined for the death zone seemed to be characterised by having national structures and ambitions.

Against this backdrop, I’ve been spending time thinking about the whole national-versus-stateless thing, particularly since it seemed to come up in so many of the areas I was interested in. Our laws and regulations and business practices are intrinsically so national in structure and intent that they get incredibly messy when applied to things un-national. Here are a few examples:

• The attempts, in the US, to patent the healing properties of turmeric, amongst others
• The abomination of region coding and its impact, for example, on Spielberg’s Munich
• The ironic case of copyright problems with cover illustrations for Friedman’s The World is Flat
• Problems with obtaining permission for use of sampled music

These are just simple, random examples that come to mind, where there’s a tension between national law and global products and services. National versus un-national, stateless, global.

More recently, some six months ago, Jay Rosen referred to Wikileaks as the world’s first stateless news organisation. Incidentally, while touching on the subject of Wikileaks: you must read Clay Shirky’s “half-formed thoughts” on the subject, covering some of the issues of international versus stateless.

While in India, I read Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, which deals with cyclical development in information and communications industries, sine-curving between closed and open. One of the things that struck me about the book was that each cycle appears to be described in the context of a single country. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s well worth a read. Take a look at Cory Doctorow’s review here.

The internet, the Web, the Cloud, these are essentially disruptive global constructs for many of us. The atoms that serve as infrastructure for these global constructs are physically located in specific countries; the laws and regulations that govern the industries disrupted by these constructs are themselves usually national in structure; the firms doing the disrupting are quasi-stateless in character, trying more and more to be “global”; emerging and future generations have worldviews that are becoming more and more AmazonBay, discarding the national middle for the edges of global and hyperlocal.

We are all so steeped in national structures for every aspect of this: the law, the governance model, the access and delivery technologies, the ways of doing business — that we’re missing the point.

Everything is becoming more stateless, more global. We don’t know how to deal with it. So we’re all trying very hard to put genies back in bottles, pave cowpaths, turn back waves, all with the same result.

Abject failure.

And things are fraying at the edges. For some years now, I’ve been commenting on the internet, intellectual property law and identity, in the belief that these three “i”s are the foundation of the new, global, order. And of course I’ve tended to write about these things in the context of music and film and books and food, because those are the places where I see the cracks in the current foundations, as things move from analog to digital.

But it goes well beyond these. Take fundraising. It’s gone global. I love Causes, what it means, what it stands for, what can happen as a result. To me Causes is essentially global. Yet it has to have national collection processes, tax rebates, bank accounts. For most causes this dichotomy is fine, since so many causes are global. But what happens when you’re trying to raise political funds? Is an IP address a reasonable test of eligibility? Is physical residence?

The emerging generations want to use services independent of location of “origin” and location of “delivery”. Attempts to create artificial scarcity (by holding on to dinosaur constructs like physical-location-driven identity) are being responded to by a whole slew of spoofing and anonymisation tools; as the law becomes more of an ass in this context, you can be sure that the tools will get better.

For centuries now we’ve been learning about what happens when barriers to migration get reduced, as people, goods and capital flow more freely across borders. Countries haven’t disappeared as a result; but their powers tend to be modified to suit the borderlessness.

2011 is the year where we’re going to see this accelerate in new ways, as the implications of the copy-machine nature of the internet permeate every facet of our lives, including, but not limited to, government, business, health, education and welfare, rather than the traditional web-was-built-as-distribution-mechanism-for-films-music-and-advertisements hogwash. 2011 is the year we transform ourselves as we accelerate the move from things analog to things digital, as we continue the shifts from static to dynamic, from stabile to mobile, from on-premise to cloud, from individual to community….. and from international to global.

The un-national generation is here to stay. And they’re on the move.