ABSTRACT

The digerati tell us that a new world order, or one composed of ‘digital nations,’ is being born in cyberspace, and it will bring a revolutionary end to politics as we know it. While much of this talk is just talk, the wired writings of these infoinsurrectionists circulate some intriguing conjectures about nationality, sovereignty and territoriality in the contemporary world system. This chapter reexamines these digital discourses to poke and prod at the still indistinct expanses of cyberspace, whose n-dimensionalities stretch away from the on-ramps to the telematic infobahns that the digerati tell us are ‘the road ahead.’ For all the pilgrims turning onto these telematic roads ahead, new kinds of productive power, working within the datasphere’s network of networks, are reshaping subjectivity and society at the (wo)man/machine interface. Such digital discourses, with their own superconductive disciplinarities, are warping the Euclidean spaces and Newtonian times of the modern sovereign state, where relative wealth, power or culture has been measured by the movements of physical material across landscapes or seascapes, against clock and calendar time.