Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt for almost 30 years until he was swept from power in a wave of mass protests in February 2011.

In 2011, we had the Arab Spring which refers to the democratic uprisings that arose independently and spread across the Arab world in 2011.

“It has been speculated by both proponents of globalization and various science fiction writers that the concept of a nation state may disappear with the ever-increasingly interconnected nature of the world.”

I’m neither necessarily a proponent of globalization or a science fiction writer, well maybe a little bit of a science fiction writer.

Mostly, I believe there will come a situation before the period of a globalized world government, where what I will refer to as Virtual Regionalism, will prevail.

Regionalism is the theory or practice of regional rather than central systems of administration or economic, cultural, or political affiliation. And this has already begun in the United States when State Governments openly disregard Federal Law (Colorado and others with Legalization of marijuana and Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico taking Boarder Security into their own hands on their own terms). Both issues are ones where the Federal Government is already in authority and in both situations the Feds aren’t upholding their end of the bargain.

These issues aside, the ever expanding gaps between people groups (rich and poor, racial tensions, et al.) will coalesce these groups to be more tightly connected although not geographically because geography no longer exists.

So in Egypt in 2011 during the Arab Spring, something interesting took place as part of the revolution. Later in 2013, Eric Schmidt executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., formerly Google, had this conversation with Julian Assange :

Here is part of the transcript of the “secret meeting”:

JA“ Bitcoin is something that evolved out of the cypherpunks a couple of years ago, and it is an alternative… it is a stateless currency.”

JA “dealing with Egypt we saw the Mubarak government cut off the internet and we saw only one — there was one ISP that quite few of us were involved in trying to keep its connections open, it had maybe 6% of the market. Eventually they cut.. eventually the Mubarak government also cut off the mobile phone system. And why is it that that can be done?”

JA “So you can throw these things up and make your own networks with conventional mobile phones pretty quickly. In fact this is what is done to spy, to keep spying on mobile phones. You set up a fake base station. And there’s vans now, you can buy these in bulk on the commercial spy market, to set up a van and intercept mobile phone calls. During these revolutionary periods the people involved in the revolution need to be able to communicate. They need to be able to communicate in order to plan quickly and also to communicate information about what is happening in their environment quickly so that they can dynamically adapt to it and produce the next strategy. Where you only have the security services being able to do this, and you turn the mobile phone system off, the security services have such an tremendous advantage compared to people that are trying to oppose them. If you have a system where individuals are able to communicate securely and robustly despite what security services are doing, then security services have to give more ground. It’s not that the government is necessarily going to be overthrown, but rather they have to make more concessions.”

And this is being noticed by others also…

From Chris Herd in his article The Reason our Future is Ruined had this to say:

“Mass migration will eventually pave way to a world without borders, no amount of Razor Wire and immigration controls will be able to stem the flow of migrants which will inevitably increase as climate changes ravage countries on the breadline. This new Utopian world where all boundaries have eroded and disintegrated, or Dystopia dependent on your world view, will enable unprecedented collaboration and cultural advancement. Technology will be the remnant which ensures nationality, where those with a propensity to remain part of their nation can still benefit from being part of it.Nations will become platforms and individuals will be able to contribute by paying taxes virtually, enabling them to cling to a sense of national identity. Or they won’t and the world will benefit from the collective sense of being which will arise. Adversarial lines will be erased which are historical remnants from the distant past. A line on a map where one country begins and another ends.

Or they won’t and the world will benefit from the collective sense of being which will arise. Adversarial lines, which are historical remnants from the distant past and only act to perpetuate war, will be erased. A line on a map where one country begins and another ends ignores the truth that people are people and are unconcerned by where they are from: your quality of life shouldn’t be decided by the lottery of where you are born.”

Tribes

Jeff Goins describes them as “A tribe isn’t a fan club. It’s a group of people who care about something.”

James Altucher had this to say on tribes:
“A tribe is like a family. With a family you learn personally who to trust and who not to trust. You learn to care for their individual problems. You know everything about the people in your tribe.”

Seth Godin even wrote a book on it: “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us”.

And Rahaf Harfoush wrote: “Tribes, Flocks, and Single Servings — The Evolution of Digital Behavior”

However the best, because it is easy to ingest, way that I have heard the Tribe broken down and described is by David Logan in his TED Talk on Tribal Leadership.

The theme here is leadership.

Tribes need leaders.

And as we increasingly turn to Virtual Regionalism we will have Virtual Tribalism and at the helm these new digital leaders.

Scott Adams has said “Social Media is the New Government”.

And with new governments, old governments shall pass away.

So say goodbye to Nation States.