Barring the rise of an unexpected new military enemy, the battleground of an anarchic world moves from the war room to the board room, as military clashes become economic clashes. The informationalization of the world economy is forcing states to re-evaluate the ways they identify themselves; in digital space, the boundaries (arbitrary or not) which once allowed states to delimit themselves from one another terrestrially no longer exist; further, the economic organization of the world economy already precludes any cut and dried system of classifying whether or not corporations are ‘American’ or ‘British’ or ‘Japanese’ — making these distinctions in digital space is much harder.

As a result, the meaning of sovereignty has begun to change. Instead of the statist orientation which the International Relations of Morgenthau and Waltz which were ideally, some would argue, suited to analog spaces, we begin to find states defining their sovereignty with a spatial orientation, which is more aptly suited to digital spaces. But sovereignty has not only changed for the discipline of International Relations; it has also changed for states themselves.

In seeking to understand new perspectives on sovereignty, we need to focus not on the arbitrary terrestrial boundaries which have delimited states in the past, but instead on the even more arbitrary boundaries of digital spaces, which can be written and rewritten infinitely. The work of Lefebrve and Foucault, with their more and less explicit understandings of the disciplinary nature of spatial constructions helps us to understand the acts of information infrastructuring advocated by the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council as acts aimed at the extension and legitimation of analog sovereignty into and over digital spaces. These actions enact disciplinarity not only in the traditionally coercive sense that social theorists have understood for generations, but in a new economizing way, as well. The shift of the very rules of existence which occurs in the move from analog to digital spaces is crucial to the expansion of disciplinarity which is occurring: no longer is existence itself free (as it was, at a basic level, in analog space), instead, existence in digital spaces must be bought, leased, or stolen from the private sector. As a result, the rights of free assembly and speech are history; only a quaint anachronism is the idea of ‘free information’.

Christopher E. Couples, The National Information Infrastructure Initiative: Space, Discipline, War Machine