Rethinking Nationality and Borders in a Connected World
🗺️ Is the concept of nationality outdated in our hyper-connected world? 💥
I’m typing this from above the Atlantic Ocean, 12 km up, flying at 1000 km/h, while watching a live feed from a camera beneath the plane… When you take a step back, it’s clear we live in an insane world! What exists now would have been unimaginable just 100 years ago. They would have never believed it.
Over the past century, our lives and societies have undergone massive changes, accelerating even more in the last 30 years. Yet, I often feel that many things are now lagging behind. Thanks to technology, we live in a world of almost endless possibilities, and some embrace these possibilities more than others. However, our regulations and administrations seem not to keep pace.
As a nomad, I frequently encounter roadblocks because "the world isn't ready" for people who live like me. Nearly everything requires you to state a country of residence... but why do we need to be tied to a location for everything? We hardly use mail anymore; in a digital world, a physical residence seems obsolete.
I don’t really feel like a French resident anymore, nor do I feel a resident of any particular place. Yet, there's no box to check for that. An individual must reside somewhere to get anything—a phone number, a bank account—and a company has to be registered in a country and pay taxes there. But what if I live nowhere or everywhere? What if all my business and revenue are online, coming from around the globe? Paying taxes in a specific country no longer makes sense when I don’t use any of the services funded by that tax money.
I can't wait for all this to be heavily disrupted somehow. Could someone create an online country? Could the world agree on a global passport or citizenship?
I’m not sure what the solution is; it seems like an impossible task, especially as it involves governments that are famously slow, self-centered, and short-term in their thinking. But I’m confident it will happen eventually.