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Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

It is also a good illustration that sovereignty is fundamental to law, it determines which patches of land the law applies to, and thus defines the nation state boundary. All nation states must consider an attack on sovereignty in the harshest terms on every patch of their land. Otherwise the patches of their land they don't protect just erode under a succession of border violations, until they de facto belong to the violators, and that remaining nation state includes only the parts they did protect. So it's just logical that we keep returning to nations with borders that people will fight to the death to protect, and here we are.

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You could imagine a different form of law based on personal & community sovereignty rather than geographic. See eg. Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where citizens are members of various phyles, each with global sovereignty but clustered within enclaves in each major city. Interactions between citizens of the same phyle are governed by the laws of the phyle, which themselves are shaped by the values of its citizens. Interactions between different phyles are subject to the Common Economic Protocol, which you could think of as a trade agreement governing protection of property rights and economic wherewithal but saying nothing about the personal conduct of people.

Sovereignty is always personal or community, with geographic or other (e.g., subject matter) limits adopted by the sovereign (perhaps with encouragement from others, particularly other sovereigns whose preferred domains would otherwise be threatened.)

That's actually kind of the point of GP: the geographic limit here doesn't apply to the power of the sovereign around whose notional domain the line is drawn, it applies as a rule adopted governing relations between sovereigns but does not in practice apply where no sufficiently powerful sovereign has an interest at stake for which they will Lodge a protest (backed with the implicit threat of force.)

Parties using geographic games as a way to reject affiliation with recognized sovereigns are not evading the power of such sovereigns, only the protection of them.

That’s a federation, like the USA or Switzerland. It doesn’t matter what type of government you have, it must protect its control over its laws, the federated system is a subset of those laws. So federated governments would take a similarly dim view if foreign entities tried to park and govern themselves in that federation’s border, the foreigners can’t just say, “hey you’ve got a new state in your border”.

In this case the federated system is worldwide, and the individual phyles by definition must park and govern themselves within the federation's border. Because the federated system is worldwide, it must contain only a small subset of the laws we normally associate with a nation-state, those that directly affect peaceful trade and dispute resolution. Cultural values are left for the phyle to administer.

Another key difference is that your phyle follows you around, geographically, while your nation's jurisdiction ends at its borders. If I'm an American expat interacting with another American expat in Shanghai, I'm still subject to Chinese law. If I'm a Neo-Victorian (to use one of the phyles from Diamond Age) interacting with another Neo-Victorian in Hong Kong, I'm subject to Neo-Victorian law. A block over could be a Han Chinese (also using the Diamond Age phyle, but in this case it corresponds to a real ethnicity in our world) enclave, and its citizens would be subject to Han Chinese law when interacting with other Han Chinese. If, as a Neo-Victorian, I cross the street to do a business deal with a Han Chinese, our dealings are governed by the Common Economic Protocol, the set of laws common to the federated system as a whole.

> Another key difference is that your phyle follows you around, geographically, while your nation's jurisdiction ends at its borders.

A nation-states jurisdiction does not end at it's borders unless it chooses for it to, which few do entirely. It ability to practically enforce it's rules may or may not do so, depending on the power of the state and power and interests of other states who may be concerned with the specific matter (especially, but not exclusively, the one in whose borders the target of the enforcement is located.)

How is this different from the millet system?

That book ended on a pessimistic note though- with a reenactment of the boxer-war, because those tribes where cultural incompatible- some beeing overly creative and industrious, driving others into dependancy.

It also was very pessimistic on technocratic solutions for the "good nurture" problem. Basically nothing can replace a real parent coaxing a self-expanding mind into beeing.

I get the sense most Neal Stephenson books don't actually end on either an optimistic or pessimistic note, they just...end. He doesn't seem very interested in passing judgment on whatever future he imagines, he just wants to imagine it. The world simply is the way it is, and humans will continue to be humans, and that occasionally involves doing shitty things. Technology just amplifies that.

He's pretty good at imagining it too - The Diamond Age was published in 1995, just as the Internet was beginning to take off, and yet it envisioned The Internet, videoconferencing, smart paper, drones, and a whole bunch of other technological innovations that didn't catch on for 15 years or so. Cryptonomicon was published 10 years before Bitcoin but fully described two of its biggest use-cases, remittances and digital gold. Snow Crash had the "America is good at only 4 things: music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery" line in 1992, 20 years before it became true and right as the rest of the country was celebrating us becoming the sole superpower.

Snow Crash is so bizarre. It launches you straight into the story with no explanation, starting off with some crazy pizza delivery man in a rocket car with swords and an electric zapper thing for people who don't pay the bill. The whole book is like that--it never explains how, why, or when, leaving you to piece it all together yourself. The entire time I was reading it, I was waiting for a 30000 feet view of the world. But then it ended, never having fully explained itself.

I've never read anything else quite like it, and honestly don't know what I think of it. Are all of Neal Stephenson's books like that?

> nation state boundary

Note that "nation-state" has a particular meaning, and I think the word you're looking for here is just "state" or "sovereign state". Nation-states are sovereign states that are particularly culturally homogeneous.

> nation-state. noun. a sovereign state whose citizens or subjects are relatively homogeneous in factors such as language or common descent.

Thanks you’re right.

We're watching this process play out in real-time in the USA.

You probably mean Ukraine. As far as I know, no part of the United States has been invaded or annexed by its neighbor.

The US has had wars with its neighbors to the north and south, with military conflicts taking place on what is currently US soil.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

The British even did heavy damage to Washington DC in 1814, including the Capitol and the White House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington

The GP poster was talking about an infringement of US sovereignty playing out “in real-time”.

No, I mean in the USA. "Watching" means a thing is in progress. "Watched" is what we say when it has been completed.

For example, California's "sanctuary state" law is a formal rejection of federal sovereignty over immigration. A full rejection of federal sovereignty would be secession, which we will probably see, at least de facto, within a century if trends continue as they are.

> California's "sanctuary state" law is a formal rejection of federal sovereignty over immigration.

It is not, since they do not attempt to prevent the federal government from enforcing federal immigration laws in California. They refuse to assist such enforcement in any way - but that is a right that was always implicit in the federal structure of the government, and was made explicit by the courts in Printz v. United States (ironically, it was a 5-4 case split along ideological lines, with the liberal minority arguing in favor of the federal government able to commandeer state law enforcement).

If you want to see an example of actual formal rejection of federal sovereignty, that would be something like the Kansas' Second Amendment Protection Act, which explicitly declares:

"It is unlawful for any official, agent or employee of the government of the United States, or employee of a corporation providing services to the government of the United States to enforce or attempt to enforce any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States upon a firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is owned or manufactured commercially or privately in the state of Kansas and that remains within the borders of Kansas."

A historical example would be the states' resistance to the fugitive slave laws. For example, here's Pennsylvania specifically targeting slave hunters in 1826:

"If any person or persons shall, from and after the passing of this act, by force and violence, take and carry away, or cause to be taken or carried away, and shall, by fraud or false pretense, seduce, or cause to be seduced, or shall attempt so to take, carry away or seduce, any negro or mulatto, from any part or parts of this commonwealth, to any other place or places whatsoever, out of this commonwealth, with a design and intention of selling and disposing of, or of causing to be sold, or of keeping and detaining, or of causing to be kept and detained, such negro or mulatto, as a slave or servant for life, or for any term whatsoever, every such person or persons, his or their aiders or abettors, shall on conviction thereof, in any court of this commonwealth having competent jurisdiction, be deemed guilty of a felony."

That part of the law was stuck down as unconstitutional. But the very same SCOTUS decision - Prigg v. Pennsylvania - also mentioned that the state could ban its officials and law enforcement from assisting in any way, and that's exactly what Pennsylvania did afterwards.

> For example, California's "sanctuary state" law is a formal rejection of federal sovereignty over immigration.

No, it is not; it is a (Constitutional, per cases dating back to the federal fugitive slave laws) refusal to expend State resources assisting federal enforcement of federal law. Leaving enforcement of federal laws to the feds is not rejecting federal authority or sovereignty.

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