Nations. Corporations. People.

Weekend excursion to the NYC for the 06' Romanian Festival with The Bogdan Bunch. Plenty of adventures there, but on the way home we get debating about where our society is headed in an era where governments are growing increasingly incapable of providing for their people, as new challenges from corporations and technology slowly blur the line between public and private, citizens and stakeholders.

Now I don't consider myself political, but Bo's thesis on the rise of international corporations and coming collapse of the nation-state is something I've heard more than once. Graduate business classes are flush with talk on the exponential rise in power of international corporations.

This is not our parents' planet plan. E-commerce has grown up. Global markets are in full-effect. And the Internet is rapidly evolving into the global human connector it always promised it would be from day one.

The power of governments weilding the mantle of large-scale standing armies, geographic borders, and nationalist trade alliances are already in rapid decline. A decent 12 year old hacker with a T1 and an agenda wields more power to bring down a nation than an army of green suits and M16s.

I believe the MBA classes are wrong. The transition from nation-state to international corporations is just the beginning. IC's represent merely the most logical bridge from the nation-state to the virtual-state. In the true virtual-state, we'll understand that a global network of ubiquitiously-connected, geographically-impartial, and highly-informed global citizens are more powerful than even the most nimble, armed, or wealthy government or corporate entity. It is the power of true democracy incarnate. When everyone has a voice, the precepts of power change. When everyone's connected, the rules of profit and exploitation fall apart.

Doubt not. The writing's on the wall. The intersection of nations and corporations is old news. The struggle for power between corporations and individuals has now begun. Examples...

• Wars on individuals over copyright infringement.
• Wars on time through expectations of longer hours at the office.
• Outsourcing of employer-directed defined-benefit to employee-directed defined-contribution retirement plans.
• Liberation of citizens from corporations as their only source of income/wealth.
• Immiment collapse of the social security system as a fall-back or lifestyle.
• Unplugging of workers from corporate office infrastructures in favor of Starbucks, Kinkos, and high-speed, ubiquitious mobile networks.
  
• Retirement of the physical for the virtual space as one's community one-stop (ie: the MySpace/Facebook phenomenon).
  

The power of corporation in the virtual world represents the ability to establish and enhance human connectivity. Those vying to squeeze lemonade out of the proverbial command and control model have a lot to discover about their role in The New World...

Connect now.
Profit later.
People first.