Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA

Keywords: Nationality, nation-building, nation-state, nodal point, globalization, individualization, internet, digital technology, postmodernism, sociology.

Article style and source: Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 3-6, 1998.

Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Territories and Telemetries
• Nation-Building and Mashination-Building
  • A. Nation-Building
  • B. Performativity
  • C. Mashination-Building
• Nodality and Individualization
• Nodal Points
• From Nationality to Nodality
• A Closing
• References

Abstract

This paper re-examines the social, political, and cultural implications of reorganizing the spatial sites needed to conduct everyday life in advanced industrial economies from structures rooted in sovereign territory, or political nationality, to ones tied to commercial networks, or digital nodality. The nature of social welfare services in many advanced nation-states has placed a tremendous emphasis on individual goods and services, and this shift toward individuation is being accentuated in all on-line environments. The reduction of collective goods to highly individuated services makes possible new social collectives that could emulate many of the benefits of national territorial groupings without being tied to traditional country-centered sites. This shift would perhaps recenter the immediate locality as a primary place for personal existence, because this would be where many people's network access would be. Yet, it also could accelerate the mobilization of even more people in lives centered upon temporary residence, work, and leisure as nodal links, services, and benefits permit many to no longer tie themselves down for life to one particular site. New class conflicts and boundaries, then, will emerge around network access, economic assets, information skills, and travel options in societies knit together by Internet connectivity.

Introduction

Once the Y2K crisis is addressed in a mass retrofit of all the world's embedded computing and communicating machineries, the development of the Internet over the past generation will prove to be one of this century's greatest legacies for the twenty-first century. At first, a product of America's Cold War state, TCP/IP has been joined with other networking software packages. They now are rapidly coevolving with computing, telecom and connectivity technics in an entirely new form of built environment, which is infiltrating and encircling all previously existing built and unbuilt environments. Of course, the Net's origins are totally entwined with the Cold War, and its current operations cannot be separated from the politics and economics of contemporary global capitalism. Still, what is found with every component at the beginning of the Net, like most things modern and postmodern, "is not," as Foucault suggests, "the inviolable identity of their origin," but rather "the dissension of other things" which suggest how their inner workings "have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms" (1977: 142).

This genealogical glance at the present moment in cybernetic connectivity, therefore, makes no special claim about the continuity of certain temporal sequences or a discontinuity of specific causal influences in the Net's evolution. On the contrary, pure knowledge of causes and outcomes is impossible. At best, one only can upset fixed regimes of knowledge production as they have produced what are now consumed as historical truths, political necessities, or ethical certainties. Fortunately, the Net is one of the most complete registers for disclosing how technoscience and political economy mediate both power and knowledge. The shape and substance of nations and nodes should be reviewed here, even though their final forms remain obscured in the unfinalized empiricities of a still unfolding modernity.

Time and space, capital and labor, power and knowledge, even the market and the state are not natural givens that authority holds in constant check. Instead, they are forces that must be reshaped constantly as historical constructs "in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement of discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to another" (Foucault, 1978: 105-106) in the productive regime, of global capitalism. Their psycho-physical nexus is where societal regimes overlap with individual lives, and their connective technics merit further investigation. Ultimately, then, this investigation of nationality and nodality is an exercise in "deep technology," which, in turn, explores the manifold complexities of those "onto-political" (Connolly, 1992) domains underpinning contemporary states and markets. content

I. Territories and Telemetries

All spaces are reconstructed out of human discourse, including the expanses of cyberspace. Cyberspaces, however, seem to be even more like pure constructs, because they are continuously fabricated out of the telemetries of telecommunication/telecomputation networks as the elaborate products of programming function, data systematization, and system interoperations in large informational grids used to gather, store, manage or interpret bits of information. All spaces are produced by human subjects and nonhuman objects, but cyberspace compels human beings to reimagine their spatial situation in the simulations of many sorts of "virtual" being. As a subjectivity-emulating non-human object or a telepresent data packet out on the Net, human agency flows within the objective domains of telecommunication/telecomputation systems by (con)fusing a human agent's uses with a software structure's functions and a hardware function's systems. In boosting human actions into the digital domain, new modes of identity and community, territory and sovereignty, culture and society are emerging on-line in the constructs of cyberspace.

Living in societies organized by and within telematic telemetricality requires a broad facility with many different language games. Institutional decision-makers, however, strive to reduce this heterogeneity of most social, political, and cultural elements to fit the logics of techno-economic performativity. That is, they struggle to manage,

...these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices, following a logic which implies that their elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable. They allocate our lives for the growth of power. In matters of social justice and of scientific truth alike, the legitimation of that power is based on its optimizing the system's performance efficiency. The application of this criterion to all of our games necessarily entails a certain level of terror, whether soft or hard: be operational (that is, commensurable) or disappear (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv).

These decision rules, in turn, acquire paramount importance for everyone in the telematic economies and societies of the current world system. The politics of networked places, connectivity spaces, and digital domains, as Lyotard suggests, frequently revolve around one question: "who decides what knowledge is and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government" (1984: 9).

The mythos of cyberspace in many respects is merely an echo of modernity. Once again, a new metacultural complex fabricated out of technoscience appears to be creating a universalizing moral order, a uniform vision of nature, and a univocalized economic model. Bits, like most modern things, are privileged objects, which allegedly can go from anywhere to anywhere at anytime for anybody (Slouka, 1995). Yet, this omnipresence mostly ignores how much "anywhere" actually remains--in world-systems terms--a core location, and most movements are either from one core location to another or from the core to the periphery.

In many ways, the 1990s are quite extraordinary times. While we may not stand at the end of history, we are experiencing the beginning of virtuality. The shape of things to come increasingly takes the form of many different "e-things," ranging from e-commerce, e-documents, e-games, e-mail to e-privacy, e-society, e-technology, e-work. As Bill Gates reminds us, the coming thing on the road ahead is digitalization, but these developments in various forms of e-activity may not be merely the passing mileposts marking our progress toward greater efficiency and wider prosperity. Whose advancements "our progress" represent is actually much less clear than many believe. The hegemony of neo-liberal market capitalist regimes also is rooted in a quest for focused efficiency and deserved prosperity; and, in turn, these conditions of productions are shaping the productive conditions of digitalization as much, or even more, than digital technologies are remaking the present. Being digital mostly boils down to becoming wired to stay hired and avoiding getting fired.

Digitalization is doing much more than simply, as Negroponte (1995) argues, replacing the manipulation of atoms with the management of bits. To put another spin on terms extracted from computer technology, manipulating atoms is one operating system with its own unique user interfaces, wide area networks, peripheral components, intelligent agents, and killer applications. While much of it will not disappear, its workings are being displaced, disrupted, and disintegrated by the management of bits. This collision of a new and an old machinic regime will have, and indeed is already having, tremendous implications for individual subjectivity and collective solidarity as many built environments upon which human beings depend for material subsistence and ethical sustenance are being simultaneously dematerialized and virtualized. Most importantly, the embedded identities of nationality at physical sites are being tested by the user identities of nodality generated for, by, and of digital cites.

In reviewing the contradictions of nationality versus nodality, this analysis only considers newly emergent tendencies and unfolding possibilities. Despite what many netizens claim, the Net is still a comparatively small realm of user domains with relatively few hard and fast rules. Virtual life along with e-commerce, e-schooling, e-governance, and e-banking are quite promising, but from a global perspective only a very privileged few now enjoy such on-line services. Most people remain in the corporal, material, substantial tracks of a life off-line, and nationality for them continues to be a major determinant of their life chances. The rhetorics of netizenship, then, must be examined carefully. On one level, they are the very latest form of a familiar technified utopianism, which embeds an enthusiasm for universal access to a new technology at the base of new designs for social transformation. In this respect, the PC touts in Wired only recapitulate the millenarian dreams spun by railroaders, aviators, radiomen, motorists, rocketeers, and TV people over the years in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science. On another level, however, successful netizens also are laying the foundation for cybersecessionist movements from F2F markets, urban life, banks, public affairs, schools, and social institutions, which only accentuate and aggravate the incipient splits between the informationally competent classes (labelled by some as "symbolic analysts" or "the successful fifth") and the informationally obsolescent and superfluous classes (recognized by others as the deindustrialized underemployed or even underclass making up the unsuccessful remaining four-fifths of society). content

II. Nation-Building and Machination-Building

Again, these nations will not necessarily disappear, but digitalization is generating new crosscutting and crosspressuring forces within this pervasive but also fragile territorial order. With industrial modernity, individualization rested upon a new form of social agent--autonomous competent individuals--successfully negotiating personal survival amidst nationalized societal interdependencies: "thus work for others becomes the key to living in modernity, along with everything this presupposes: not just training, but also available jobs; not just a certain subjective ability, but demonstrable licensed competence; and not just that but also readiness and ability, as well as a diurnal, annual and life rhythm appropriate for learning and working" (Beck, 1997: 53-54). From 1648 to 1998, there has been a tendency for individuals to do all of this in territorial collectives under the governmental auspices of national states and amidst a nationalizing cultural identity. This persists, but it is also being augmented, complemented, supplemented for some by new life conduct possibilities on the Net. At this juncture, we talk about an America Online, but online societalization need not be Americanized in red, white, and blue code. And, in fact, many Americans online may already be members of other communities forging new modes of netizenship beyond citizenship in relations of nodality.

The system of national sovereignty is an ensemble of institutional arrangements for territorial rule, which empowers ruling elite blocs to impose their sets of rules from continuously operating central offices of coercive administration in some territorially bounded society (Poggi, 1978: 1). Rule boils down to giving commands, and getting compliance with them--by consent or coercion--from those who are ruled within the state's territory. The practices of ruling are the in-statement of rules concocted from the arts of convenant. In other words, the state acts as a double articulation of legal form--the covenant--and coercive content--the sword--by constantly reconstructing its rule out of reconstructed rules (Onuf, 1989: 1-65). Historically, as Hobbes (1962) himself marks, these institutional arrangements of commonwealth in territorial sovereignty acquired their most cohesive form first "in the 'new monarchies' of early-modern Europe such as Spain, France, and England" (Kennedy, 1992: 123). content

A. Nation-Building

With regard to individual humans and political society, there are no exceptions to this cosmic materialism. Hobbes has everyone observe their particular and universal motions, tracing out how their lines, lengths, and points constitute effects on one another. Indeed, his political philosophy is but a study of atomic, and atomized, bodies in motion, allowing us "to observe what proceeds from the addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division, of these motions, and what effects, what figures, and what properties they produce" (1994: 198). However, this fixation upon the body politic makes all bodies in motion come to be seen and heard in one way, allowing everything that is obviously at play in the covenants of/by/for bodies politic to be seen and managed.

The unterritorialized state of pre-political Nature is problematic inasmuch as "Nature hath given all things to all men," guaranteeing what "one man invadeth with right, and another with right resisteth; and men live thereby in perpetual diffidence...the estate of men in this natural liberty is the estate of war" (Hobbes, 1994: 80). Some means must be found to enforce peace, which simply is the absence of war, or "the will and intention of contending by force" (Hobbes, 1994: 80). An enduring mutual fear of war as well as the prospects of mutual aid in defense, Hobbes concludes, will lead to some common covenant: the state and civil society of nations.

Whether they spoke initially through the words of a civilian lawgiver or moved with the violence of a military strongman, the Leviathan's (in)statements of territorializing rule began with atomized nations that refashioned themselves into atomic political communities inhabiting civic spaces bounded by shared ethnonational identity under a common political authority (Agnew, 1987). Even so, these national sovereigns are "an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (Anderson, 1991: 6). By ruling over some discrete space and setting rules behind definite borders, these ensembles of ruling agents imagine their interactions as becoming those of a particular natio, or nation, from some specific patria, or fatherland (Hobsbawn and Ranger, 1983).

There, according to Huizinga, the concept of natio, or people, nation, populace, bore its imaginary out of its spatially-centered, place-bound, territorialized birthing through which,

...little by little the various relationships of dependence and community obtaining exerted an influence on the restriction and delimitation of the concept natio. The glory of the kingship, the fealty to the liege lord, the protection of the bishop, the mildness of the master, created a great number of relationships of close community. Only the larger relationships of this sort could be expressed by the term natio (Huizinga, 1984: 107).

Despite their differing social bases, all of these ruling (in)statements share a fundamental trait: they assume by violence, default, or acclamation the prerogative of Hobbes' convenant: sovereignty, or the prerogatives of acting/speaking to/for all others as the legitimate authoritative voice (Blackburn, 1990). Acquiring nomological "powers of speech" among one people or ethnonational group constituted a centered, single nation, born of one "jurisdiction" (more literally, here, the artificial person's form of lawful speech, a center of legal diction, or a mode of speaking nomologically), for, but also over, the diverse array of peoples inhabiting the places where this lawful speech carries (Gellner, 1983). Ruling power reworks the ground, divides up its resources, commands wealth to materialize its rules, and rewrites the stories of its own origins, life, or death as the natio. The state, then, naturalizes its origins by giving birth to its members, by violence and in law.

Covenants of sovereign power, in turn, are duly born(e) by each state, and their officers follow rigid rules of ceaseless endocolonization, pulling together all of their prerogatives of jurisdiction inside, under, or behind their borders to ensure basic general uniformities of conduct among their own territories and peoples through monetary tightening, faith affirming, ethnic cleansing, military policing, domestic tranquilizing, or racial purifying. These tendencies merely mobilize Hobbes' vision of the Leviathan in specific institutionalized policies,

in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates, and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment, by which fastened to the seat of sovereignty every joint and member is moved to perform his duty, are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and roles of all the particular members, are the strength; salus populi, the people's safety, its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory, equity, and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war , death. Lastly, the pacts and convenants, by which this body politic were at first made, set together, and unified, resemble that fiat, of let us make a man (1962: 19).

So sovereigns controlling territory do by pacts and covenants make men and women; patria and matria bring forth the natio, or a birthing of peoples, who are born by/for/of/to artificial persons. The body politic bears its own political beings in the autogenic course of territorialized nation-building.

For the most part, Hobbes falls silent about the material benefits of common peace to be realized under the collective defense of some sovereign power. As long as every member of the body politic, or the subjects, accept and abide by the transfer of their powers and strengths to the sovereign by relinquishing their rights of resisting him, these convenants are presumed to promote commonwealth. Even though Hobbes admits that men still will not aim "every one at peace and food common to them all," like bees, ants, or other social insects, but rather will aim at "dominion, superiority, and private wealth" (1994: 105), it is another law of nature "that men allow commerce and traffic indifferently to one another" (1994: 92). Government is good for all: rulers and ruled, sovereign and subject, governor and governed. The inconvenience for the ruler of ruling over others as well as the inconveniences of the ruled arising out of being ruled inside a territory are insignificant in comparison to the prospect of returning to the state of war prior to or outside of the convenants creating the territorialized body politic. content

B. Performativity

With the transition to postindustrialism during the 1960s and 1970s, Lyotard sees the legitimacy of grand modernizing narratives, which often were nationalistic and statist in form and function, waning. The postmodern era is based "upon the perception of the existence of a modern era that dates from the time of the Enlightenment and that now has run its course: and this modern era was predicated on the notion of progress in knowledge, in the arts, in technology, and in human freedom as well, all of which was thought of as leading to a truly emancipated society: a society emancipated from poverty, despotism, and ignorance. But all of us can see that the development continues to take place without leading to the realization of any of these dreams of emancipation" (1984: 39). With this growing distrust in metanarratives of statist truth, cultural reason or national progress, Lyotard sees science and technology falling under the sway of "another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity--that is, the best possible input/output equation" (1984: 46).

Following Jameson, performativity also signals the rise of "a new social system beyond classical capitalism" emerging from "the world space of multinational capital" (1991: 59, 54). As Harvey (1989) argues, this new social system of multinational capital develops its own societalized world spaces by disintegrating the highly nationalized Fordist regime of industrial production, capital accumulation, and state intervention, which was fabricated from the 1930s through the 1970s by national welfare-states. In its place, a new performative regime of flexible accumulation, productive specialization, and state deregulation has emerged in loosely coupled transnational alliances of market centers, factory concentrations, technology generators, capital suppliers, and local governments since the 1980s. Under this horizon, Lyotard's vision of performativity anchors the wondrous new vision of societalization with its own manic logic of performativity. Today, "the State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power" (Lyotard, 1984: 46). content

C. Machination-Building

One cannot establish the morphology of the machine without concomitantly mapping the morphology of the society it serves. Any "technosystem" is also always an ecosystem (Ihde, 1990: 3). Machines, following Nye, are not simply a system of inanimate technologies with particular discrete functions; they are integral parts of a social world that shapes, and in turn is shaped by, these larger lifeworlds. "Each technology is an extension of human lives: someone makes it, someone owns it, some oppose it, many use it, and all interpret it" (Nye, 1990: ix). At the same time, each human life rests upon interpretations of any given mechanical extension as that apparatus helps make someone; indeed, it possesses someone, it resists someone, and it translates someone within its determinant motions and design. Machination-building in a Hobbesian register turns anarchic motion in the universe toward polyarchic labors in the commonwealth, repositioning men from a state of nature into "technologically sublime" (Nye, 1996) states of preternature. Beginning with Hobbes' scientific visions of mechanization,

The meandering energies of men, which had flowed over in meadow and garden, had crept into grotto and cave, during the Renascence, were turned by invention into a confined head of water above a turbine: they could sparkle and ripple and cool and revive and delight no more: they were harnessed for a more narrow and definite purpose: to move wheels and multiply society's capacity for work (Mumford, 1963: 53).

A machination is people born(e) by machinic systems, but it also has the population of machinic systems contoured around/over/within/under people. Machination-building requires a convergent collectivization of many habits, practices, and ideas about living everyday life, which the mechanical workplace and homeplace shape by creating abstract spaces for material events to occupy, personal moments to coincide, productive functions to fill (Kern, 1983).

Plainly, (wo)men make machines, machines make (wo)men, and almost all of this coevolution is far "beyond engineering" (Pool, 1997), because it begins and ends in the deep technology of machinationalistic movements. These synthetic materials and mechanics, in turn, engineer the apparatus undergirding new regulated, controlled, and analyzed subjectivities. Mechanization is about directing energy, information, or force in some predetermined fashion by means of mechanisms, and the marketplace provided the perfect application for these processes. Men and machines,

Faith had at last found a new object, not the moving of mountains, but the moving of engines and machines. Power: the application of power to motion, and the application of motion to production, and of production to money-making, and so the further increase of power--this was the worthiest object that a mechanical habit of mind and a mechanical mode of action put before men (Mumford, 1963: 53).

Once normality is locked into the productive power circuits of mechanization, the (con)fusions of (wo)men and machines are born(e) to work in machinational movements. In turn, machines become the measures of men, or men use machines to measure other men, by judging how much power they produce, apply to motion, move to production, or generate how much money wealth (Adas, 1989).

As its "anonymous history" (Giedion, 1948) discloses, mechanization also delivers humans into a new state of coevolution with machineries they need to make and manage these powers. The Creation of Nature is thereby displaced by environment of artifice. As Mumford concludes, "no part of the environment, no social conventions, could be taken for granted, once the machine had shown how far order and system and intelligence might prevail over the raw nature of things.... In projecting one side of the human personality into the concrete forms of the machine, we have created an independent environment that has reacted upon every other side of the personality (1963: 323-324). Machination-building reduces the body to energies, materials, exertions, and durations, like any other piece and part of all machines. Psychically and physically, machinic motions are imprinted upon the mind, trained in the hands, rested on the back for every machinationalized body.

Machinational movements in the national body politic are phenomena of considerable import. How men and machines interoperate in machination-building is a decisively important factor for securing profit, maintaining employment, exerting control, attaining benefits, keeping wealth, and sustaining technology in any particular place. Machinations can be subnationally divided or transnationally integrated, but a nationalist bias in machinational empires has left most of them to coincide with national communities. Hence, world handbooks of political development or annual surveys of modernization still count the number of automobiles, televisions, radios, toilets, or computers per thousand people in some nation to gauge how machinationally advanced that territory or people has become in the technology markets of global capitalism. Within every nation, there are exocolonizing traces of machinations in which machinic forces are contriving human actions and practices in determinate ways. Arguably, cybernation is simply another register of machinationalization. Yet, cybernations also seem bigger, better, and bolder than machinations. New cybernations will work better in strong nations, but no cybernation can become very strong without a set of successful, stabilized, and secure machinational service areas underpinning it.

Nevertheless, as new cybernation-builders see it, no contemporary machination is entirely unified, homogenous, or settled within the confines of its various body building, subject-forming, and power-generating practices. Specific cutting-edge technologies always coexist with what might be regarded as outmoded, obsolete, or outclassed techniques that still claim users, create loyalties, or capture supporters. Consequently, primordial attachments to bicycles, typewriters, handsaws, or windmills will coexist with the willing acceptance of jet aircraft, personal computers, power tools, and nuclear reactors. The subject formation of new cybernational movements have created another heterogenous population of diverse subjects, who also will cling more closely to some machinic fusions rather than others. Counting the aggregate numbers of various technical apparatuses, appliances, or agencies in a particular place therefore never begins to capture the real contours their nodal organization of space within any nation because it ignores the inconsistencies, complexities, and unpredictabilities of how hybridization actually works for any group of human subjects building their minds and bodies out of vast panoply of technical alternatives.

The location of bodies in space, and then their containment in grounded cultural, political, and social community have been the source of individual identity and collective solidarity in civil societies since 1648. Urbanized sites, societies, and systems are what carry the codes of community for nationalities. Natio is the birthing and bearing of subjectivity sustained by spatial containment, anchored to physical sites, and reproduced by shared interactions in some particular built environment. Language, culture, morality, art, and religion all are produced on site, and then reproduced by those confined to the spaces surrounding those sites. None of this, of course, will disappear, but it is being cross-pressured and cross-cut by digital networks with all of their peculiarly individuated options for exit, voice, and loyality.

Digitalization, then, is a new machinic regime. Like cities, networks are simultaneously the containers and contents of human thoughts and actions. Civil societies are communities that are citified, and their urban spaces thrive on the symbiotic coevolutionary development of their own expanse and rural places. Cities are physical structures to gather, store, and process information, material and energy; civilization, at the same time, is the refined product realized from such successful operations. Digital networks are new communal connectives that are data structures, and their bit spaces thrive on a coevolutionary symbiosis of their own domains and atomic analog zones. Digital networks are data structures to gather, store, and process information, material, and energy; digitalization, therefore, is a new processed world generated out of these effective practices. content

III. Nodality and Individualization

In the nineteenth century, modernization took place against the background of its opposite, a traditional world of mores, and a nature which was to be known and mastered. Today, at the threshold of the twenty-first century, in the developed Western world, modernization has consumed and lost its other and now undermines its own premises as a industrial society along with its functional principles. Modernization within the horizon of experience of pre-modernity is being displaced by reflexive modernization. In the nineteenth century, privileges of rank and religious world views were being demystified; today the same is happening to the understanding of science and technology in the classical industrial society, as well as to the modes of existence in work, leisure, the family and sexuality. Modernization within the paths of industrial society is being replaced by a modernization of the principles of industrial society, something not provided for in any of the theoretical scenarios and political recipe books still in use to this day. It is this antagonism opening up between industrial society and modernity which distorts our attempts at a 'social mapping,' since we are so thoroughly accustomed to conceiving of modernity within the categories of industrial society (Beck, 1992: 10).

Our maps of the present are distorted, because the terrains of industrial modernity have buckled and broken as industrial modernity itself is subjected to the ravages of on-going industrialized modernization. More and more wealth production, as the goal of industrial modernity, now, in fact, creates greater and greater risk production under conditions of reflexive modernization. As what were "latent side effects" now manifestly become the major outcomes of all modernizing projects, modernization changes.

Therefore, the systems of technoscience, the organizations of public policy, and codes of normative reasoning once used to overcome old obstacles often become instead the origin of new obstacles to human progress. In turn, everyone who mobilizes the techniques and theories of coping with organic tradition, wild nature, or revealed religion as a modernizing project to grapple with the unintended and unanticipated consequences of modernity is "not only not contributing anything to solving them, he is indeed creating and intensifying them" (Beck, 1997: 51). Wealth production and distribution has been in many ways the focal point of all modern nation-states as the problems of poverty, oppression, and exclusion have lingered into and beyond the Age of Enlightenment. Yet, the very instruments of economic growth, welfare policy, and technological innovation used by nation-states to produce more wealth, and redistribute it more equitably, often have created more second-order risks and dangers than they originally had to respond to in their first order set of challenges. Popular resistances to the modern welfare state from the New Left in the 1960s to the New Right in the 1990s are now forcing us

...to destroy the fictions of simple industrial-society modernity, according to which these are first-order problems. That would imply that more schools, more welfare, more social work, more economic growth, more jobs or more police and prisons, in general, more government, would solve the problem of the excluded, or at least push it down below the level of public scrutiny. This misunderstanding is based on the confusion of first and second modernity. It represses what must be recognized: that schools, welfare institutions, law and order policies, and so on, extend problems and produce new ones rather than solving them, and why this is so" (Beck, 1997: 53).

Amidst this crisis of governmentality, the nation-state is neither collapsing nor irrelevant. Nonetheless, its capabilities are in doubt, and other mechanisms are being explored for alternatives to its industrial structures and functions. In the "20:80 societies" of reflexive modernization, four-fifths of informationally obsolescent and superfluous people seem to be slipping into new wild zones of self-organized chaos; and, on the other hand, the successful fifth of informationally competent people are seceding into new built environments--some still architectural and territorial and others that are virtual and telemetrical. Nationality is not going away, especially for the immobile, pre-informational, poor. Nodality, however, is arriving, particularly for the relatively mobile, informational, rich. content

IV. Nodal Points

Nodality, then, evolves around sites of interest where flows of digital attention become influenced by the same webs of hypertextual tools, links, and codes. Among nations, one has a "home" group or ground by virtue of birth and development in an off-line place with other real subjects. Around nodes, one constructs "home" pages by organizing virtual objects at specific online sites. Framed in hypertext and caught in capitalist commerce, hypertextual capitalism is the material foundation of nodal identities. As Turkle notes,

On the Web, the idiom for constructing a "home" identity is to assemble a "homepage" of virtual objects that correspond to one's interests. One constructs a homepage by composing or "pasting" on it words, images, and sounds, and by making connections between it and other sites on the Internet or the Web. Like the agents in emergent AI, one's identity emerges from whom one knows, one's associations, and connections. People link their homepage to pages about such things as music, paintings, television shows, cities, books, photographs, comic strips, and fashion models....If we take the homepage as a real estate metaphor for the self, its decor is postmodern: Its different rooms with different styles are located on computer all over the world but through one's efforts, they are brought together to be of a piece (1997: 258-259).

Hypertext, then, is the central piece, unifying the many disparate elements assembled into the digital objects that now contain individual identities, express self-invented biographies, and articulate a new mode for societalizing subjectivities. Nodalities are formed on the fly in flows of commercial products and services, whose signs and substances now shape the innumerable connections, associations, and knowledges of postmodernized DIY individualization.

Nodality plays to individualization; indeed, it is, in many ways, increasingly based upon the conjoined evolution of cybernetic societalization and reflexive modernization. In cyberspace, no one may know that you are a dog, but everyone recognizes that PINs, IP addresses, and user IDs usually belong to individuals. While cybernetic utopians dream about one port, one person, lifetime personal telecom numbers, or cradle-to-grave e-mail boxes, few thank about collective agencies, holistic actors, or communal activities online beyond "the hive mind" (Kelly, 1994: 63) in billions of buzzing bits. Nation-states as large communities once promised collective welfare functions: low unemployment, social security, national pride. Nodalities assume the emergence of free-lancers, social instability, local ties, but laced together just-in-time by networks of data.

The hyperindividuation of informational society recasts personal and social agency. Whereas nations once mandated modes or behavior and thought, nodes presume an individual "as actor, designer, juggler and stage director of his own biography, identity, social networks, commitments and convictions. Put in plain terms, 'individualization' means the disintegration of the certainties of industrial society as well as the compulsion to find and invent new certainties for oneself and others without them" (Beck, 1997: 95). In some sense, informationalization forces all to become electronic existentialists as the standard biographies of older industrial societies become chosen biographies, DIY histories, autogenic experiences out in the flows of capital, data, labor, and product. Beck observes, "to use Sartre's term, people are condemned to individualization....whatever a man or woman was and is, whatever he or she thinks or does, constitutes the individuality of that particular person" (1997: 96).

The assumptions of methodological individualism in contemporary technoscience are now the most deeply embedded chips of a standardized technoculture. At the cybernetic interface, personal workstations, mainframe accounts, and network addresses all methodically individuate nodal interactions, and these realities are reflected back in everyday rhetorics. Compaq sells itself as a new economy of scope standing by on-line 7x24x52, waiting to fill each individual's "custom-built" machine order. "Get the technology," Compaq promises, "YOU WANT any way you want TO GET IT" (Businessweek, August 10, 1998: 14). Gateway 2000 matches Compaq's pledge to individuals with its even more comprehensive "Your:)Ware" packaged suite of computer products, ranging from custom-made machines and software bundles to ISP connections and guaranteed trade-up programs (http://www.gateway2000.com). PeopleSoft realizes individuals now must construct their own private enterprises, capital assets, and business communities, and do it also increasingly on-line. Hence, it promises individuals continuous rationalization support for "your supply chain," because it is PeopleSoft's promise: "We work in your world."™ (Businessweek, June 22, 1998: 83). Not to be out done by newcomers, IBM presents itself as the cybersecurity solution for online enterprises, or "e-businesses." "In transforming your business into an e-business," IBM advises, "the single most important issue you have to wrestle with is the issue of security" (Businessweek, June 22, 1998: 75).

Individual identity, then, in worlds managed by PeopleSoft, accessed through Your:)Ware, and sustained on e-business becomes one of multiple personality (dis)order. On the one hand, one centered nation-state opens up before many decentered nodal webs, which disorders the national character of homogenous political communities, and any one individual is condemned to constitute themselves out of activities, accesses, and assets opened to them online, which reorders the individual biography of increasingly disordered national citizen-subjects. And, on the other hand, real individuals with one relatively immobile, geographically emplaced, and psychosocially definite identity behind given national boundaries can become online much more mobile, displaced, and indefinite as they reinvent themselves as virtual agents. The welfare state's experiments in conditioning people, as Beck claims, for "ego-centred ways of life" (1997: 97) pays off in spades online as particular persons morph their way through the day as multiple personalities. Such modes of life of the screen raise tremendous identity questions, because multiple personalities can be quite disordering as well as very ordered. The waning stability of uniform national identities in place is captured by Turkle's endorsement of pluralized nodal identities online:

Every era constructs its own metaphors for psychological well-being. Not so long ago, stability was socially valued and culturally reinforced. Rigid gender roles, repetitive labor, the expectation of being in one kind of job or remaining in one town over a lifetime, all of these made consistency central to definitions of health. But these stable social worlds have broken down. In our time, health is described in terms of fluidity rather than stability. What matters most now is the ability to adapt and change--to new jobs, new career directions, new gender roles, new technologies (Turkle, 1997: 255).

Virtual communities anchored to nodal nets of interaction provide Turkle with the new normative structures to enforce these normalizing expectations. Stable points of subjectivity are reformed into the fluidized objects of many flexible geometries. They apply in societalized online environments "not only to human mental and physical spheres, but also to the bodies of corporations, governments, and businesses....in these environments, people either explicitly play roles (as in MUDs) or more subtly shape their online selves. Adults learn about being multiple and fluid--and so do children" (Turkle, 1997: 255-256). Aesthetics reveals this shift. Computer colorization, morphing, and restoration of classic Hollywood films shocked almost everyone only a decade ago, because the refashioned bits violated quasi-sacred images of cinematic personae we knew as stable, secure, and significant players--Hollywood greats, timeless stars, national icons. The mighty morphin' range of cybernetic power, however, has reframed the aesthetic reception of stable roles and fixed statuses in barely a decade. Realizing all are now mired in a new multiple personality (dis)order, audiences accept images of Fred Astaire dancing with 1990s vacuum cleaners, Forrest Gump mugging his scenarios in Nixon's White House, and Time-Warner networks playing Casablanca in color. As De Kerckhove observes, all of these aesthetic traces are signs of nodality reshaping territory, identity, and power:

There is no horizon on the Net, only expansions and contractions, and our relationship to it begins a formidable expansion of psychological size. The loss of a clear sense of boundaries, the expansion of our mental frameworks by satellite, the on-line redistribution of our powers of action, all of these add up to a confused body image. We can't be absolutely sure anymore were we begin and where we end (1997: 38).

The recalibration of normalization routines around such flexibility and plurality in networks moves Turkle to see nodal individualization "as a space for growth" (1997: 263). She recognizes, like Robert Jay Lifton (1993), the worth of a "protean self" for avoiding either "a dogmatic insistence on unity" or a "return to systems of belief, such as religious fundamentalism, that enforce conformity" (Turkle, 1997: 258). The societalization of new ways of life around nodality, then, essentially turns traditional nationalism or religious fundamentalism into a monopersonality disorder before the new multiple personality order. The digital being, which emerges in real life from virtual life, "is capable, like Proteus, of fluid transformations but is grounded in coherence and moral outlook. It is multiple but integrated" (Turkle, 1997: 258). In defiance of American First!ers, like Pat Buchanan, France First!ers, like Claude Le Pen, or Russia First!ers, like Vladimir Zhiranovsky, Turkle marks the new bottomline for cybernationalism nodal individualization: "You can have a sense of self without being one self" (1997: 258). Moreover, online practices and theories carried by "experiences in MUDs, on the WELL, on local bulletin boards, on commercial network services, and on the World Wide Web" all are bring these hypertextual realities home (Turkle, 1997: 258).

Nodality cannot exist without providing exclusive systems of access to the Net. The arrangements of access for most users outside of small hard-wired enclaves in government offices, at major universities, and with big corporations involve fee-for-service access with internet service providers, online services or portal companies. In the US, the number of ISPs has nearly tripled from about 1,500 in 1996 to almost 4,500 in 1998, and it includes small mom-and-pop firms as well as major corporations, like AT&T, MCI, and the baby Bell telcos (Richfel, 1998: 92, 94). Online services now mostly mean American Online and Compuserve, although smaller CATV operations with Net access are coupling it with phone service and cable TV (Richfel, 1998: 95). Portal companies, like Yahoo, mix the qualities of ISPs and online services, and they now number nine--Yahoo plus Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Alta Vista, AOL, the Microsoft Network, Netscapes Net Center, CNet, and NBC's Snap (Alden, 1998: 58). About 12 million users each are now hosted by Yahoo and AOL, and these influential, informed, and industrious workers are a big majority of the netizens now actively infiltrating American society.

As the passage points into and out of the Net, these organizations are attracting companies--maybe only 50 or 100 with the financial clout and global visibility to make this arrangement work--interested in generating commerce by providing services and/or content on the Net. Right now, even the biggest portal, Yahoo, sells only 14 percent of its banners, and all of the portals together control only 15 percent of Internet traffic (Alden, 1998: 60), but they draw 59 percent of all Internet ad dollars. The dollars spent at the portals will undoubtedly fall, the number or new portals will probably not increase much, and the massive investment in high bandwidth needed to thrive in the future will certainly force many small ISPs and most smaller portals out of business in the near future. Already the big media companies, like Time-Warner, Disney, and ABC, are maneuvering to partner with and/or control portals in order to push their media content out on the Net. Likewise, other nonmedia content providers, like books from Amazon.com or cars from Autoweb.com, are partnering with Internet traffic vendors, like Yahoo, in order to cluster specific exclusive access capabilities at the portal. In some ways, this is simply making and selling audience, like radio and TV. In other ways, it is also making and selling new clusters of clients, customers, or consumers on the merits of collaborating with them, and them alone, in the provision of many necessities for everyday life. The die will be completely cast for nodality when and if computer producing and telco firms impose their proprietary architectures and privileged networks upon users in standards-setting development, like Microsoft in PC software or Cisco Systems in big networks.

Nodality must be seen as a cluster of thoughts and actions tied to the individualization/societalization dialectic in neoliberal fast capitalism. While some continue to see the Internet as a strongly centered national project in which digital data flows mimic the growth of automotive superhighways, the real message of the information superhighway is one tied to postnational superscripts of an "information super my-way." The personhood attained amidst a nationhood grounded in shared coexistence with compatriots is something different than the i-ness marked up hypertextually as one of many configurations of u-ness around the @-ness of nodes.

Nodalities, then, are another quarter in the subpolis constructed by contemporary technoscience. Working above, below, and within nation-states, networks set agendas, define norms, allocate values, determine policies, organize production, and manage consumption in ways separate and apart from the routines controlled by nation-states. For some, like the new inchoate blocs of netizens, these nodal systems of governance are superior to those of nation-states, and they advocate a complete hollowing out, or, in some cases, even an abolition of the state. For others, nodalities seem to promise special purpose governmental supplements to the neoliberal nightwatchman state in the form of cyberschooling, cyberbanking, cybervoting, cybercommuting, cybermarketing, cyberworking, and cybershopping that can give access to the finest world class services for anyone anywhere anytime without undue local, regional, national state interference. By switching personal allegiance and individual access from territorial units to telemetrical nodes, societalized ways of life could be enhanced and enjoyed supposedly by everyone from everywhere all the time. Yet, if birthplace is no longer the most legitimate claim on some social product, and universal entitlement is not recognized as an equitable system of economic distribution, then some more inequitable criteria of access, which is in keeping with current-day neoliberalism, will undoubtedly prevail. Nodalities will not recognize members by birth, but will instead grant access only to those with sufficient capital assets, substantial earned incomes, and/or significant work skills.

In the lifeworld shaped by cybernation-builders, the information super my-ways of nodality are pointing toward neo-feudal norms of economic agency and social subjectivity. Today's employment, education, and economic environments are said to mirror those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Hence, natio is being shaken by the condotta as nodalities make it possible for workers, learners, and buyers to act like freelances or condottieri. As Worth now advises, nodal individuals have much to learn from these examples.

Ultimately, the condottieri were answerable only to themselves, responsible for their own security and safety, for their own skills, their own savings, their own futures. Rather than leaving themselves at the mercy of the lord employers, they took charge of their work lives. If you want to live rich, it's the professional condottieri who should be your model, not the helpless peasant draftee....The condottieri took pride in their individual skills and their profession. Forget about being an organization man. The organization gave up on you (and every other employee) more than a decade ago. It's time you gave up on it (Pullan with Levine, 1998: 74).

With nations and corporations unable and/or unwilling to assist their nationals and employees, the system of societalization shifts toward individualization in new and different ways. The myths of Wired and Worth portray the cybercondottieri and netizens of the nodes living rich and being famous, but the realities of living beyond the portfolios of Yahoo, Netscape or AOL point more toward working as technotemp or webback labor without benefits or surfing late at night in cyberporn sites for distraction.

Recent figures indicate that nearly 52 million people use the Internet, and 59 percent of them surf the Net from home. This is a large number, but it only is global tally of everyone in the larger orbit of emergent world wide web of netizens. For Americans, these figures about life in the 20:80 society online must be compared with the offline realities of 1 in every 35 U.S. adults at the end of 1997 being imprisoned, in jail, on parole, or probation (The Arizona Republic, August 17, 1998, A3). content

V. From Nationality to Nodality

Just as the individual citizen/producer/national represents "a reality fabricated by this specific technology ow power" that Foucault describes as "discipline," the clients of open architecture/cross platform/asychronously transferable modes of information represent the latest "technique for constituting individuals as correlative elements of power and knowledge" (Foucault, 1979: 194). The panoptic scan and permanent memory of computer networks are highly productive forms of knowledge for polycentric, telemetrical, and digital systems of power. From a distance in the flow of data, on a transnational scale or at the local level, "power produces," once again, "it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth" (Foucault, 1979: 194) with its hardware's technics and software's techniques. As server client, end user, network node, and permanent record, "the individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production" (Foucault, 1979: 194).

At the intersections of network places, and connectivity spaces, as Gergen claims, "our range of social participation is expanding exponentially. As we absorb the views, values, and visions of others, and live out the multiple plots in which we are enmeshed, we enter a postmodern consciousness" (1991: 15-16). Whether or not it is postmodern perhaps is less clear, but sharply sounded personal identities and clearly bordered social communities are increasingly in doubt on-line. The multimediations of every digital domain, as Deibert affirms, carry a functional bias toward decentered and fragmented identities," and away from modern conceptions of the autonomous sovereign individual," in which cyberspace generates "a plurality of 'worlds' and multiple 'realities,' each of which is contingent on social constructions, or 'language-games' that constitute and orient the field of experience" (1997: 187).

These decentered and fragmentary identities, however, are linked as innumerable nodes in the countless networks generating the telematic terrains of telemetricality. One increasingly slips away from the status and role of territorialized national into the status and role of a telemetrified node, whose nodality remains open to many more complex language games. Like any other nodal point in a network, the individual can be a sender, a receiver, and/or a referent in the relays routing of informational flows. States with the ability to mount national information infrastructure initiatives, like the United States or Singapore, may recode territorialized nationality in the terms of telemetrified nodality. Most regimes, however, lack the initiative and/or infrastructure to re-inform their subjects in nationally informationalized ways. Consequently, other information infrastructure initiatives infiltrate most nations with the performative protocols that suit the world's most dominant businesses and great powers.

Multiculturalism, for example, accentuates how thoroughly nationalist enculturation is a series of language games. Separate and apart from some "home land," nationalistic collectivities can produce and reproduce themselves in the denotative, performative, connotative, and prescriptive utterances of a "common tongue" anywhere they meet on-line or off-line. The dynamics of multiculturalized nationalisms amply illustrate that "to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics" (Lyotard, 1984: 10). The nodal identity and community of a global economy organized around telematic telemetries positions one within alliance networks or connective coalitions that give birth to the senders, receivers, and referents of the multicultural nation. Indeed, the mobility and dispersion of individuals in today's fast capitalist economies accentuates how "the observable social bond is composed of language 'moves'" (Lyotard, 1984: 11) within most multiculturalizing nationalistic groups of the contemporary world system.

A logic of nodality is frequently affirmed in multiculturalism. When one is either a sender, a receiver, or a referent, the discursive discipline of multiculturalism gains complete coherence. Instead of colocation in time and space serving as the definitive register of national identity and community, interoperation in a distributed network of disciplinary discourse begins to define identity and community. One sends, receives, or referentially grounds discursive disciplinary instructions. In fact, nationality evolves into nodality, and multiculturalist politics reflect the push and pull of nodalistic social forces. A nodal identity permits one to be located practically anywhere. As long as basic connections can be maintained for sending and receiving the discursive content of multiculturalized identity and community, the referents of such collectivities can easily flow anywhere their personal and professional lives take them.

Moreover, the disconnection of networked telematic enculturation from grounded organic traditions enables many new discursive formations beyond those of national kith and kin to frame human identities in new nodal communities made out of shared consumer goods, common mass media, mutual advanced technologies, coincident aesthetic preferences, or parallel market niches (Jones, 1995). Quasi-cultures with some real solidity, therefore, begin to reproduce themselves around collecting Barbie dolls, watching Star Trek, driving Harley Davidson motorcycles, dancing in country and western bars, or living in declining mill towns. Likewise, a nodal identity can form in East Los Angeles, Jamaica, Manchester, Italy, Melbourne, and non-pakeha New Zealand around "blackness" in music, fashion, and political icons shared by many uprooted and still non-white racial groups. The acts and artifacts that define the cultural understandings of such social groups increasingly circulate globally, but collect locally, as these multiculturalizing forces cut across and through the transnational communities of deterritorialized states and societies (Luke, 1994).

Turkle's musings about "life on the screen" easily can support such reimagings of multiculturalized nationalism in the nodality of an on-line environment. In cyberspace, identity is often a series of multiple roles in which society and community are composite materials concocted out of various codes, discourses, and games. Multiculturalized menus for nationalism, then, "blur the boundaries between self and game, self and rule, self and simulation" such that as one player observes, "'you are what you pretend to be...you are what you play.' But people don't just become who they play, they play who they are or who they want to be or who they don't want to be" (Turkle, 1997: 192).

Microsoft's or Apple's window-driven operating systems essentially become "a powerful new metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system....The experience of this parallelism encourages treating on-screen and off-screen lives with a surprising degree of equality. Experiences on the Internet extend the metaphor of windows" as now real-life in multiculturalized nationalisms can open just like one more window in any multitasked operating system. No one screen necessarily has primacy, and all of them operate in parallel interfunctionality according to the configurations most appropriate for the individuals and groups sharing the outcomes of their choices to collaborate in this fashion( Luke, 1989).

These tendencies, as Turkle suggests, add up to "taking things at their interface value" in which "people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real" (1997: 23). Therefore, the territoriality, sovereignty or community generated out of computer-mediated communications means that "programs are treated as social actors we can do business with, provided that they work" (Turkle, 1997: 104). If people treat computers "in ways that blur the boundary between things and people" (Turkle, 1997: 102), then all of those things and people, which once had fixed boundaries and clear distinctions, begin to blur along many of their historical borders as well. Telematic networks, while not quite political entities, are increasingly taken at their interface values as their representations of reality become more openly accepted as composing what is "the real" by nodes in the network. Provided that these nodal relations work, and now they mostly do when it comes to making money, trading shares, broadcasting television, calling overseas, designing products, playing games, or tracking business, such hyperreal relations of individual and social life in digital domains blur the distinctions between local and global, domestic and foreign, real life and virtual life, or homeplace and marketplace in telemetrified nodalities beyond territorialized nationality. content

VI. A Closing

Those who collaborate in the collective construction of actual transnationality around the nodes of telematic telemetries, in turn, also might not necessarily hold as dear their nominal nationality within traditional territorial space. Instead, they increasingly can slip into other organizational registers of time and space working and living as co-accelerant, com-motive, or con-chronous agents of fast capitalist firms or performative professional groups. In moving from the spatio-temporal perspectives of territoriality into the acceleration effects of instant communication and rapid transportation, "all of Earth's inhabitants may well wind up thinking of themselves more as contemporaries than as citizens; they may in the process slip out of the contiguous space, distributed by quota, of the old Nation-State (or City-State), which harbored the demos, and into the atopic community of a "Planet-State" that unfolds as "a sort of omnipolitan periphery whose centre will be nowhere and circumference everywhere" (Virilio, 1995: 36). The omnipolitanization of the planet is articulated in many "real time" events off-line in terra incarnate: the greenhouse effect, new national diasphoras, holes in the ozone layer, the global demographic explosion, twenty-four hour a day currency markets, narcocapitalist agrarian economies, the environmental movement, or 7x24 cable TV news channels. Individuals, in turn, may judge their personal success in such omnipolitan spaces more often by the goods and services shared by the other "successful fifth" of global coaccelerants than by the condition of the "failed four-fifths," who while they might still be perhaps their coinhabitants of some fixed place, they are no longer commotive contemporaries riding on the same fast capitalist tracks in polyglot global flowmations (Reich, 1991).

This borderless world, however, constitutes a standing invitation for all to become even more orderless as technoeconomic flow displace once heavily emplaced social formations and individual activities. As one of the key architects of these changes asserts, the most rational form of global order will be one of completely un-stated (b)orderlessness. That is, the state apparatus, either on-line or off-line, should do nothing to retard global flows; it should instead serve as an accelerant, changing its services from a national to a nodal focus "so as to: allow individuals access to the best and cheapest goods and services from anywhere in the world; help corporations provide stable and rewarding jobs anywhere in the world regardless of the corporation's national identity; coordinate activities with other governments to minimize conflicts arising from narrow interest; avoid abrupt changes in economic and social fundamentals" (Ohmae, 1990: appx.).

In this new omnipolitan order beyond classical capitalism, idealist notions of loyalty or humanist visions of collective good dissipate into the phosphorous glow coming off the screens of power. Hewlett-Packard tells its clients to think outside old narrative boxes and inside new performative flows when it shows a female symbolic analyst logged on late at night in bed and says "You May Be Employed by a Company, but You Work for Yourself" (Fortune, August 17, 1998: 42-43). The grounded social contract of liberal democratic capitalism shatters in this image into billions of fragmented, temporary neo-liberal cybercondotta between fast capital and tech temps. Neither the Book of God nor the Book of Nature suffice as guides to the online omnipolis, one needs the Omnibook of H-P.

This discussion has scanned this omnipolitan order in order to examine how its nodal spaces, sites, and structures organize omnipolitanization from cyberspace. The digital domain is not quite a polis, but there are power systems of governmentality at play in networked places and connectivity spaces. Nodality now coexists with nationality, and many on-line operations are displacing off-line organizations. Cyberspace concretizes the abstractions of performativity, in ways that the market mythos cannot begin approach, while reimagining its scope and speed in the ideologies of new utopian moments beyond ordinary hardware and software in extraordinary Your:)Wares. content

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