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I for one, am thoroughly tired and fed up with being expected to think of another human being from two hours flight away as some kind of alien. It's absurd whe

I for one, am thoroughly tired and fed up with being expected to think of another human being from two hours flight away as some kind of alien. It's absurd when I can have face-to-face conversations with people on the other side of the world using the device in my pocket. We are already in the midst of a functionally global civilisation only no one believes in it. Here I am having effortless conversations with other humans from all over the world, yet somehow these same people are arbitrarily, absolute "others" who I might one day be expected to kill on the drum-beat and flag-wave of some demagogue who has managed to whip up the masses. The biggest disappointment of the past few years is that no one has outmanoeuvred such a played-out ethos as nationalism and the ethnic chauvinism that frequently accompanies it. The biggest surprise is that so many technologists have apparently supported it.

jakeogh 9y ago
People having self-determinism is the most important feature of having sovereign countries. It's a market of competing ideas. The internet makes it possible for someone in (insert country with less freedom of expression) to see what someone in (insert country with more) has. Making it out as a "some kind of alien" us vs them thing misses the point. People immigrate, and many countries (including my country) let that happen, and they get the benefits of that. It's pretty rare to even hear about the countries that don't allow others to become citizens, although they are pretty major players.