Becoming a virtual citizen
Hello to all the witizens out there.
A witizen, in case you aren’t one/didn’t know, is a citizen of Wirtland. Founded in 2008, it claims to be the world’s first internet-based sovereign country. Wirtland thinks of itself as a real country with real people, where the only thing that is virtual is the soil. It is not correct to interpret Wirtland as an imaginary virtual world, witizens say.
But why not? Why couldn’t citizenship be entirely virtual and independent of location? Why should nationality and geography be so closely tied? The answer, of course, is that they are that way purely because we’ve never had the means for it to be any other way. But now we do. In the future, switching nationality could be like switching bank accounts.
In 1933, when the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States was written, the delegates came up with four qualifications for being a nation; a permanent population, a defined territory, government, and capacity to enter into relations with the other states. It’s really only the second criteria, having a defined territory, that poses a problem for purely virtual nations. There was no internet in 1933 so no one at the convention could even imagine a nation without land, but since then micronations have been started on abandoned oil rigs and artificial floating islands. So perhaps nations don’t need land after all, and virtual nations start to look like more of a reality.
In fact, virtual nations are nothing new. Estonia offers e-residency, a kind of digital citizenship that allows entrepreneurs to set up and run a company entirely online. So that’s a start. But when sovereign nation states talk about becoming virtual they think of it as the online version of the offline nation. They miss the point. Virtual nationality has so much more potential.
Let’s make this vision of the future of virtual nationality a little easier to comprehend, let’s use the countries we’re familiar with today.
You might live in Brazil but you’re not happy with the policies of the Brazilian government. You don’t like how much they spend on healthcare, so choose to virtually emigrate to Bulgaria which has policies you agree with more. As a Bulgarian citizen (who just happens to physically live in Brazil) you pay your taxes to Bulgaria and Bulgaria purchases public services such as policing, waste collection and healthcare on your behalf to enact their policies on Brazilian soil. If you want better healthcare whilst living in Brazil, and Bulgaria has committed to providing it, why shouldn’t become a Bulgarian citizen.
In this future, all governments are split between the virtual and the physical. Virtual government decides on it’s nations policies. Physical government manages the real world public services which are made available to all virtual nations. So, in our example the part of Brazilian government that is responsible for providing services in the real world is incentivised to provide high quality public services so they can sell them for higher value to other governments. Any virtual nation can purchase services from any physical nation and provide them to their citizens.
Citizens get better services. Nations get more taxes. Nationality-as-a-service, over the internet. Everybody wins… right?
But what about all those people who don’t have high paying jobs who can be charged taxes, do they still get to switch nationality? What would incentivise governments to accept them? What would incentivise governments to offer better health care if they thought it would mean an influx of citizens unable to pay towards it?
Nationality should be virtual. And it almost certainly will be in the not too distant future, but we need to wary of creating it in the way that doesn’t work for everyone. Markets only work for those with buying power. They don’t treat those without it in the same way, and often exclude them all together. Creating a marketplace for nationality, or free speech, or anything necessary to participate in the life of a citizen, will always result in unequal power. That’s the nature of markets. They don’t work for managing nations.
If nations exist to improve the lives of their citizens, then that should include all their citizens, whether the nations are virtual or not.
Retrospective April 2022
This month’s lesson: I need a lot of space for my thoughts to soar, without it they get stuck and it’s the exploring of ideas that is important to me.
Contributing to the digital transformation of the non-profit sector
Working at a national non-profit organisation to embed product thinking and practice
It’s been an interesting month. I’ve made more progress in some areas and much less than I’d like in others. Some things I thought I understood I found out I didn’t, and some things I assumed to be a given actually aren’t. But I’m still reflecting on what I can learn from it.
Participating in online communities for social good, innovation, product and digital
Nothing. Zip. Nada. Still haven’t figured out what I can do towards this goal.
Continually developing my knowledge, skills and practice
Formal education
Didn’t do anything on my BSL course. I did a little on the Gitlab Remote Working course but not enough
Informal learning
A started a few new projects: timeline of modern work, ambigoality, superpowered, dividual me, and the app-ification of work.
Reflective practice
Irregular Ideas is going well and has 33 subscribers. It’s a good opportunity to explore some of the more far-out ideas I have along with helping me practice writing and sticking to a schedule.
I wrote weeknotes on schedule every week.
Leading an intentional life
My nomadic life along the coastline was on pause. Back soon.
I’m still not doing enough to improve my physical health.
Financial independence
Runaway at 51 months.
Defining a product
How do you define what ‘a product’ is?
The short answer is: “a product is a means of facilitating a value exchange between a user and an organisation”.
The long answer is:
A product is a means of facilitating a value exchange. It takes organisational resources and makes them available to a user, typically in a way that aims to create a behaviour change for the user and return greater benefits to the organisation than it took to produce it.
So, a bag is a product. An organisation uses it’s resources, consisting of raw materials, knowledge, infrastructure & machinery, etc., to produce the (in this case physical) product. The organisation sells the bag for more than it cost to produce and distribute the bag. The customer buying the bag can use it to carry things, which is behaviour change the bag manufacturer and customer both want because it signals that the product is meeting a need.
A product is successful where the value exchange results in both parties getting something more valuable than it cost them. For the organisation this could be money (in the case of selling a bag) or it could be some other outcome such as brand exposure. For the user, they get to carry stuff around in a more convenient way, which they value over the money they paid for it. The important thing about value exchanges is that they are never like for like. The customer values being able to carry things more than they value some money, and the organisation values that money more than the time and resources it took to produce the bag.
We could also go into ‘potential value’, where the customer buys the bag but doesn’t use it, but the bag retains its value because the customer could use it but they haven’t, either for reasons outside the product’s influence or because the product didn’t meet their needs.
The same value exchange exists for digital products. You might be reading this in a browser that you use without having to pay money because the company providing it values the data they get from your usage more than the small amount of money they could charge. You get to read random things random people write on the internet, and the company gets the data you generate by doing so. That’s the value exchange.
A charity product is no different. It takes the charity’s resources (knowledge, website, hosting, etc.) outside of the organisation in a way that is useful to the user. The value return the charity is/should be looking for is in the social change using the product creates.
Where products and services differ is in the ‘means’ of exchanging value. A service is only exists and is of use at the time the user interacts with it, whereas a product exists and retains utility even when it isn’t being used. The best bus service in the world is of no use to you unless you’re using it, but owning the best car in the world is useful even if you aren’t driving it right now (because could sell it, for example), but both can achieve the same outcome for you of transporting you to the best beach in the world.
How I picture services and products interacting is almost like a service blueprint where the user experience happens over a length of time and is expressed horizontally, and the product is expressed vertically as the value chain of taking those organisational resources (CRM, API, website page, etc.) from within the organisation to outside where the value exchange can take place, which is shown as where the two (horizontal and vertical) intersect.
So, in deciding whether a user is interacting with a service, for example being on the phone with a knowledgeable advisor, or a product, for example reading the same information on a web page, we should think about which maximises the value for the user and the organisation. Both provide the same information but a phone service is likely to be more costly to the organisation because people have to be employed to work on it, but if the information would be applied in lots of complicated scenarios which aren’t easy to explain in text on a web page then the service is also likely to be more valuable to the organisation as more people will act on the information.
Products and services are successful where both the users and the organisation get more out of them than they put in.