Sublime

large networks bind members and create order by relying on fictions and fantasies.

Jim is what I call a rugged individualist. His brand of individualism comes straight out of the philosophy of the Enlightenment era, the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the same philosophical roots as the American Revolution and soon after that the French Revolution. Gone forever was the doctrine of the divine right of kings. It got repla

merit of traditional religious world-views

The “network” is defined by people who use the product to interact with each other.

Throughout most of human history, people grew up enmeshed in dense family networks that knitted together distant cousins and in-laws. In these regulated-relational worlds, people’s survival, identity, security, marriages, and success depended on the health and prosperity of kin-based networks, which often formed discrete institutions known as clans

The foundational trade-off of the internet was to cast scarcity, consensus, and identity aside in favor of freedom and openness.

convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation.

In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.