Trailer 1: “Your passport, please!” Vili Lehdonvirta on border controls in Cloud Empires

Cloud Empires are states and citizenship is restricted.
Elvis: “One of the biggest aha-moments was at the end of this chapter, chapter 5, was this idea that, okay you have this idea of a Flat World, and borders are actually not a remnant of an older time.”
Vili: “That’s right. They’re a constitutive feature of modern institutions. So the fact that we have institutional boundaries to say who is, who belongs under this system of rule, that’s not a physical problem that we can overcome when we all move online. But that’s actually a feature of how we maintain social order with modern institutions. Because you need to have a clear idea of okay who is subject to this authority and who is not. And eventually the people who are in there, in order not to push the labour prices down, like in the case of Upwork, they’re actually going to be in favour of setting up these virtual boundaries. So you have this reemergence, we’ve escaped to some extent, physical boundaries, only to reinvent them in the virtual world. And all of these platforms, you know, also platforms like Amazon or Apple App Store, who are providing opportuniteis for SMEs, they also do immigration control, in terms of who are they willing to let into their platform, as a supplier, who gets access to the consumers within their virtual border.”