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Text-based, voluntary cloud-based communities can sustain the values of civil-society, but it is difficult to imagine how they can generate laws that are involuntary and that operate on the bodies of participants.

My contribution does not intend not to defeat Orgad’s vision, but to outline significant worries about how we might make that vision real. Orgad does not want voluntary forms of transnational institution to take the place of states, but insists upon their validity and power as ‘state-like entities.’ It is this latter point with which I take issue. If these institutions are to become genuinely state-like, they must have some part in doing what it is that states do; and we must understand how they could do that sort of thing, and how we could move from where we are to where we might be. If, in contrast, these institutions are merely places for debate and for the creation of solidarity, then we have had them for a very long time indeed. It is then not clear what these tools provide us with except for scale and ease. Either way, I suggest, we have some work to do. Orgad’s vision is profoundly hopeful, while my own is not, and I genuinely hope I can be proven wrong.

Liav Orgad offers a characteristically insightful and provocative speculation on how novel technologies will facilitate global citizenship. Global interconnectedness is transforming individual identity composites to include transnational elements, and the migration of identity is, as Orgad argues, establishing more pervasive understandings of global responsibility. Along these three dimensions of interconnectedness, identity, and responsibility, we are assimilating an understanding of global citizenship. A recent worldwide poll found that a majority of respondents consider themselves more global citizens than citizens of their own countries.

Exercising citizenship has always involved some forms of technology, from voting pebbles in Ancient Greece to ballot boxes and electoral districting algorithms in modern representative democracies. However, the high levels of sophistication and, ultimately, opaqueness of technologies such as blockchain must be a real concern should we decide to entrust these technologies with the role of embodying democratic self-government. We are asked to take for granted the promises of new digital technologies and are kindly invited to take our places in shiny new cloud communities. However, we rarely understand how these technologies work, who designs and oversees them and whether we would be able to dispense of them if we find them wanting.

The contributions on cloud communities and citizenship in this blog raise both hopes and fears. The reality of an idea initially as outlandish as citizens of a digital cloud is materialising as we ponder and debate its practices. Political theory and the law must attempt to keep up with these rapidly changing circumstances. This comment raises some questions regarding three assumptions in this debate: (1) Cloud states have no territory; (2) Cloud states cannot exert violence; (3) Cloud state membership is based on choice.

In his kick-off contribution Orgad notes that the future of citizenship is dynamic and multi-layered. Yet so is the present, and so has been its past. The key question is whether we are ready to embrace a new approach to citizenship, based on ‘smart contracts’ operating in cyberspace and regulating needs of individuals, just as a business model would do. Even if digital technologies bring along numerous benefits we have to recognise that their á la carte approach is hardly conducive to the creation of a community of shared values among members. That is, it is hardly conducive to citizenship.

When we assess the benefits and limitations of state citizenship versus a voluntary model of global citizenship, we need to compare the reality of the state with the reality of cloud communities or the ideal of the state with the ideal of cloud communities. I am attracted to a system of voluntary membership where citizenship does not come coupled with the right to exclude, and I can see the advantages of ‘trustless systems’. Both of those things are compatible with the kind of utopian society Marx thought would come after capitalism had been superseded and when the need for a state (understood as a collective coercive system of punishment) would have withered away. But speaking about reality, capitalist relations control the state and they will control cloud communities. Without remedying the asymmetries of access to the means of connection, and the exclusions they generate, the ideal of global citizenship will be as illusory as the ideal of a state that is effective in distributing social goods. While in the case of the state, we have at least a history of political mobilisation and, if lucky, democratic learning processes and institutions on which to rely when seeking change, nothing of that sort is available in the cloud. So we should probably hold on to state citizenship for the conflictual period of transition and leave cloud communities to the future utopian society that may become accessible once interconnectedness is truly global. If it ever does.

New technologies, when deployed without addressing the flaws of the current legal-political reality are bound to become anything but an instrument of empowerment and liberation. It would be a grave mistake to put technology to the service of the mythology of citizenship, instead of interrogating citizenship’s essence and functions and questioning its darker corners.

Is the internet free of geography and/or materiality? Can we rely (exclusively) on technology such as the blockchain to solve the socio-political problems of our society? This contribution takes a sociological perspective to reflect on the possibilities and the constraints of technology, exploring the materiality of the cloud and the challenges of tech-enabled self-governance.

The virtual public space of blockchain communities will make citizens think, engage and act more virtually. In other words, the virtual reality of cloud agoras will have an impact on institutions and the participants themselves; it will yield pressures for more open, transparent and accountable institutions and will result in more virtuous, that is, actively engaged, citizens. Whether cloud agoras will prove to be decisive public spaces and strong promoters of democratic processes that make wealth, power and privilege accountable or merely subaltern counter publics will depend on the intentions and actions of their participants. In other words, the answer to the question whether the virtual public space of global citizenship will have a decisive influence on global, regional and national public policy-making is not theoretical or scholarly; it will be a contextual one.