Left to its own devices, thermodynamics will revert us and everything we built back to the state of nature. Left to our own, we humans seem increasingly oblivious and willing to conform to a state of unrighteous and insurgent disorder – the war of each against all where only the very few evolve and thrive, hostile and divorced from the common wealth. One year is enough, we now understand, to upset and rewrite and even destroy the fragile covenants that hold our cities and our networks together.
The definition of sovereignty holds both the promise of supreme power and the horizon of virtuous autonomy, each one in turn defined by its relation to some form of collective body. We are able to rule over or to be autonomous from: our communities, our neighbors, our ideas, our actions. For both meanings of the word, one year was enough to demonstrate the extent to which a greater, benevolent force might be required for the sustainable and peaceful management of our global and cybernetic affairs – as well as the extent to which such force might already be influent in our world.
That elusive and prophetic creature remains unannounced.