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Credit to Author: Alexis Wichowski| Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2017 14:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWe reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.\u201d So declared MIT professor\u00a0David D. Clark<\/a>\u00a0in 1992. Twenty-five years later, this sentiment mirrors the global zeitgeist more than ever. The\u00a0American public distrusts government<\/a>\u00a0in record numbers. Other nation-states disdain the US<\/a>\u00a0to world-historical degrees. A non-nation-state,\u00a0Facebook, just topped 2 billion users<\/a>\u2014more than a quarter of the world\u2019s population, surpassing even China\u2019s population by almost 40 percent. In short, nation-states are not the only game in town anymore.<\/p>\n Alexis Wichowski (@awichowski<\/a>) teaches technology, media, and government at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. She is also the press secretary for the City of New York's department of veterans' services. Views expressed here are her own.<\/p>\n It is time to name this new landscape. The world is no longer dominated by nation-states alone. We have moved into a non-state, net-state era.<\/p>\n Why \u201cnet-states\u201d? Because the world is no longer neatly divided into states (countries like the US, France, and India) and non-states (terrorist organizations like ISIS and al Qaeda). Ever since Barbara Ehrenreich\u2019s 2011 article<\/a> \u201cComing to a Theater Near You: War Without Humans\u201d described the \u201cemergence of a new kind of enemy, so-called non-state actors,\u201d the term transformed into a fancy way of saying \u201cbad guy.\u201d Now we need new language to describe the non-state,\u00a0non-bad-guys. I propose \u201cnet-states.\u201d<\/p>\n Net-states are digital non-state actors, without the violence. Like nation-states, they\u2019re a wildly diverse bunch. Some are the equivalent to global superpowers: the Googles, the Facebooks, the Twitters. Others are mere gatherings of pranksters, like Lulzsec<\/a> (whose sole purpose for action is \u201cfor the lulz\u201d\u2014the laughs). Others still are paramilitary operations, such as GhostSec, an invite-only cyberarmy specifically created to target ISIS. There are also hacktivist collectives like Anonymous<\/a> and Wikileaks<\/a>.<\/p>\n Regardless of their differences in size and raison d\u2019etre, net-states of all stripes share three key qualities: They exist largely online, enjoy international devotees, and advance belief-driven agendas that they pursue separate from, and at times, above, the law.<\/p>\n Take Google, for instance. In 2013, the company launched an anti-censorship initiative called\u00a0Project Shield<\/a>, a sort of online safe haven<\/a> for news sites censored by their national governments. Democratic countries like the US may laud such efforts, but in countries where Project Shield has been deployed across Asia and Africa\u2014where free speech is not necessarily protected\u2014those governments would be well within their rights to see Google\u2019s actions as both disruptive and illegal. While Project Shield may be branded a business practice that generates good PR for the company, it also embodies Google\u2019s fundamental doctrine to bring about positive change in the world. As co-founder Sergey Brin put it in a\u00a02014 interview<\/a>, \u201cthe societal goal is our primary goal.\u201d<\/p>\n Anonymous\u2014the hackers and pranksters most famous for the Operation Chanology<\/a> protest movement against Scientology\u2014occupies a very different role from Google among net-states. It's not a business; it's not even an official, card-carrying membership organization.<\/p>\n But Anonymous, too, dabbles in actions traditionally in the domain of government. For instance, after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, Anonymous disabled between\u00a05,500<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a020,000<\/a>\u00a0ISIS-backed Twitter accounts\u00a0within 48 hours. Governments have their own official channels to shut down terrorist social media accounts too, but doing so legally at such a large scale likely generates a tad more paperwork than can be processed in just two days.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth pausing for a moment to consider the point of all this. With\u00a0deaths by terrorism steadily rising<\/a>\u00a0each year, does placing a new name on our already extant world order do anything to actually make us safer?<\/p>\n I argue that it does, because nation-states need a wake-up call: The world needs net-states in order to defeat the non-states. We\u2019re not beating them on our own. To win information-era wars, countries need to recognize the power of the net-states, not as an ancillary locale of assembly in the cyberspace, but as critical entities wielding the kind of power and influence necessary to go toe-to-toe with non-state actors.<\/p>\n The world needs net-states, because they occupy the same territory as the non-states: the digital sphere. As such, they understand their norms and tactics far more than a land-war, Cold-War era strategist ever could. Major General Michael K. Nagata, commander of American special operations forces in the Middle East, circled this idea back in 2014, in a leaked confidential conversation about ISIS. He said<\/a>, \u201cWe do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it. We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.\u201d<\/p>\n Failure to understand the idea is part of why the US continues to be stuck in the war on terror. And the US is indeed stuck: Secretary of defense James Mattis\u00a0confirmed<\/a> that in June, saying in a briefing<\/a> to Congress, \u201cWe are not winning in Afghanistan,\u201d His commanders have classified the 16 years of war a \u201cstalemate.\u201d And without the net-states, the war will likely continue to be one.<\/p>\n The US airstrikes acolytes by the thousands as if they were Old World beasts they can hunt to extinction. But deploying traditional military tactics in battles of belief are the equivalent of setting bear traps for ghosts: They\u2019re not going to work. They\u2019re not relying on the wrong weapons; they\u2019re relying on the wrong worldview. And even purportedly innovative tactics, like government-generated counter-terrorism messaging, while logical in theory, relies on the same outdated perspective (see \u201cThink Again Turn Away,\u201d the State Department\u2019s failed attempt<\/a> at targeting ISIS Twitter accounts with direct rebuttals). It\u2019s like hearing your parents tell you that drugs are bad. What we need are the cool kids to say it. We need the net-states to say it.<\/p>\n So, nation-states, adapt. And don\u2019t just acknowledge net-states; work with them. Incorporate information-era savvy alongside military campaigns. The risk of not doing so is to lose the faith of the people. Worse, failure to adapt to the information age unwittingly nudges the population ever closer to \u201creject kings and voting\u201d, to instead embrace \u201crough consensus and running code.\u201d In other words, forget the anointed powers\u2014put your faith in the general approval of the people and whoever\u2019s actually getting things done. Honestly, when faced with the question of who gets the will of the people today, how many of us would really say \u201cthe United States\u201d over \u201cGoogle\u201d?<\/p>\n In sum, the US can\u2019t keep just shooting terrorists; ideas are the gun in this knife fight. And the keepers of ideas\u2014the places people turn to set them free and watch them spread\u2014are the net-states;\u00a0not\u00a0the nation-states. Nation-states ignore our non-state, net-state world order at all our peril.<\/p>\n WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n \n