Robert Scoble discusses whether nations will disappear, arguing national identity is deeply rooted and unlikely to vanish except after extreme failures (e.g., genocide or severe misgovernance). He suggests technology—real-time voting/feedback, digital payments, and e-commerce—will disrupt aspects of governance and taxation but that states will still be needed for infrastructure, education, and social services.
Okay, let's discuss about your vision. What will happen to nations? You asked me about nations. I don't see nations going away unless they do something wrong. And wrong could be like genocide. Wrong could be over taxation generally. You know, humans hate change. And the idea of your. Of your belonging to a country or a state is part of your identity, it's really hard to rip that out of people's heads. And so I can't dream of a world where there's not a California, you know, that there's just you're part of the world or you're not an American or you're not a German or you're not Chinese. So much money. I mean, I was just at the Olympics, right? So much money is spent in marketing and reinforcing the idea of your country. We have songs, we have cultural music, we have movies made about your countries. We have dance about if, you know, we all know the cagnom styles from South Korea, Right. How do we unhook the idea that you belong to a nation or a country or a state or a city? Wow. I can't imagine that kind of world. I could imagine a world where one nation goes away and changes leadership, or it gets joined with another nation through war, through whatever, or particularly if that nation does something really bad. I can see California government getting not overthrown. But right now we're bankrupt, right? We don't have enough money. And there will be changes, but the idea that nations go away completely is. I can't imagine. I can't even dream about such a world. Such a world would be like an alien world to me. Maybe a science fiction author can bring me there, but I can't imagine that. I could imagine a world where the importance of government gets disrupted a bit because we have the ability to vote in real time. I mean, I was sitting next to Randy Zuckerberg at the World Economic Forum, and she was listening to. I forget the speaker. Speaker at the time, maybe President Clinton. And she was asking everybody on Facebook questions and seeing hundreds of thousands of answers in real time within seconds come back. Is that a new kind of governance? Couldn't a government govern this way and be able to hear from its constituency what people want in real time? And everybody could see it. And everybody could. You know, on gopulgo, this company that started up that ABC News is using, you can click on a city and see how that city voted versus New York or versus Dublin or versus Munich or versus Shanghai. Right. So you could see difference in people's behavior patterns. I could see that leading to a new kind of governance. Certainly taxation is going to change because money, you know, when I was growing up, money was paper you put your pocket or coins you put in your pocket. And then we got credit cards, a piece of plastic, and now we're using Uber, which I could pay for a taxi without even passing anything to the driver, right? I just buy. Just the mere fact that I'm in the taxi means that the taxi driver gets paid and I, and I something from my accounts goes to his son. So taxation could radically change and will radically change because the payment systems are changing the way, you know, when you're out here, by the way, on a day when like the iPhones get delivered, you see FedEx truck, FedEx truck, FedEx truck or UPS truck, UPS truck all day long just delivering these things from Amazon and from Apple. And you can tell the world has changed. We don't go shopping at malls anymore. We're buying more and more every day on our screens and asking it to get delivered to us. That's radically changing what a government, what a state is. Because states used to get sales tax from the store when you went to buy a vcr, right? Now that VCR comes from out of state and they're not able to collect the taxes easily. And there's new laws being written as we speak about that. What else would it. Okay, I mean, you know, there's still gonna be needs to be somebody to pave the road and teach the kids and take care of the poor and, you know, build hospitals and build infrastructure for our lives. And government is still gonna be the most efficient way to do that. I don't see that changing. So I, I don't know, you gotta ask somebody with a more futuristic mind than mine about where the future of the nation or future of the state or future of the city's going to.
