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Minimum Viable State: Building a Nomad Internet Country
The nation-state model is outdated. It’s time to create the infrastructure for a borderless world.
This essay was originally published at lraz.io/minimum-viable-state. Follow me @LaurenRazavi on Twitter and sign up for my Counterflows newsletter about borderless living to stay in touch.
At the end of 2020, an interesting invitation arrived in my inbox. The email came from SafetyWing, a health insurance company for travelers with the ambition to take Norway’s social safety net global. The team was bringing together a group of remote workers and digital nomads to work on a project. It was called Plumia, and they wanted me to join the founding team. The goal? To build the infrastructure of a country on the internet.
The internet has made the experience of finance, shopping, socializing, lending, and borrowing seamless and intuitive. But participation as a citizen? That’s much less attractive. As the democracy activist Pia Mancini summarises in her 2014 TED Talk:
“We are 21st-century citizens doing our very best to interact with 19th century-designed institutions built with an information technology of the 15th century. It is up to us to design the political and economic systems for the internet generation.”
