ABSTRACT
A specter is haunting this age of informationality—the specter of state sovereignty. As a modern technique of governance based on territorial control, a “monopoly of violence” and the capacity to regulate the flow of goods, services, and people, the sovereign power of the nation-state is not yet ready to secede from the system of internationalism. The compact of alliances among nation-states over matters of trade, security, foreign aid, investment, and so forth, substantiates the ongoing relevance of the state form in shaping the mobile life of people and things. As the Internet gained purchase throughout the 1990s on the everyday experiences of those living within advanced economies in particular, the popular imagination became characterized by the notion of a “borderless” world of “frictionless capitalism.” such a view is the doxa of many: political philosophers, economists, international relations scholars, politicians, chief executive officers, activists, cyberlibertarians, advertising agencies, political spin doctors, and ecologists all have their variation on the theme of a postnational, global world system interlinked by informational flows.
