Telecommunications, Politics, Economics, and National Sovereignty. A New Game

Technology--the societal process for the production and operation of artifacts, both tangible and intangible--impacts virtually every other societal structure and process and is, in turn, influenced by them. From its inception at the early emergence of humans as a distinct species, technology was the instrument that extended our biological capabilities, eventually making possible increasingly large human aggregates. The emergence of a complex sociotechnological system, the polis a Greek word for city-state, gave its name to the process we call politics. The polis was a territorial entity, and politics to this day remains eminently a territorial phenomenon. In the words of the late Speaker of the House Thomas P. Tip ONeill, all politics is local as it is wedded to the people living in a given geographical region. So is sovereignty itself-the phenomenon defining the sphere of power of an entity, whether it be a polis, a nation, or an empire, or whether it be politically democratic or not. Economics, as an emanation of the polis, also can be viewed as having a territorial substratum. In its broad acception of consideration of costs and returns, however, it becomes a nonterritorial abstraction.