Amazon is eating the world, one industry at a time. Last Friday, the gargantuan retailer paid $13.7bn (£10.7bn) to buy Whole Foods Market in the US, an acquisition that threw the global grocery business into a fit of nerves. After the deal was announced, Amazon’s stock price rose by more than the price it is paying for Whole Foods; meanwhile, Walmart’s dropped by 5%, as did Tesco’s. Wall Street can see the writing on the wall: Amazon is taking over.
It’s not just supermarkets that Amazon is coming for. The technology company accounts for 43% of online sales in the US, yet in today’s winner-takes-all economy it likely won’t be happy until it accounts for 100% of all sales, everywhere. Earlier this year, Amazon launched seven private-label clothing brands in a push to grow its fashion presence and there have been rumours swirling that the company is planning a significant move into the pharmacy market.
Then there is Amazon’s significant cloud computing business. The cloud is a network of servers which the modern world is increasingly reliant on. As Tom Simonite, of MIT Technology Review, wrote last year: “You depend on Amazon, Microsoft and Google much more than you know. As businesses and governments move more of their underpinnings into the cloud, the three leading cloud providers are becoming the invisible foundation of daily life.” Take the future of transportation, for example, which seems increasingly likely to be dominated by autonomous vehicle technology, AKA self-driving cars. This technology will be underpinned by cloud computing networks; the cars will need to be able to quickly tap into enormous amounts of stored data in order to function. As Simonite points out, cloud giants such as Amazon are “positioning themselves to power the public infrastructure that keeps the world running”.
We have seen private companies slowly seize control of public infrastructure for decades now and overtake nation states when it comes to power and influence. In Jihad vs McWorld, first published in 1995, Benjamin Barber writes, “By many measures, corporations are more central players in global affairs than nations. We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as postnational, transnational or even anti-national. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space.” That was the state of affairs in 1995; since then, corporations have only grown in power.
We live in a world where we are consumers first and citizens second. We may have seen a resurgence of nationalism with Brexit and Trump but it is looking likely that the nation state’s day will soon be done and we will move towards organising ourselves in communities centered around corporations. Technology giants, whose business is built on data, know far more about us than our governments do and are gradually making themselves an indispensable part of our lives. They are even taking on the role of the welfare state in certain respects: it was recently reported that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is spending is around $30m to provide short-term, prefab housing for 300 of its employees because Silicon Valley housing is in such short supply. Tech giants helped cause a housing crisis in Silicon Valley, now it seems they are becoming landlords. It’s feudalism 2.0.
While Britain is focused on reclaiming a nationalist past, some countries are looking towards a postnational future. Take Estonia’s e-residency initiative, for example. In 2014, the republic became the first country in the world to – as its website explains – “offer a transnational digital identity available to anyone in the world interested in administering a location-independent business online … Estonia is proudly pioneering the idea of a country without borders”. Simply pay €100 (£88) and you can become a digital resident of Estonia without ever going there. You are able to do business there but you won’t receive offline residency or voting rights.
Tech titans are also busy rethinking the role of the nation state. Take libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel’s Seasteading Institute, an organisation that aims to create new government-free societies in the ocean. This may sound crazy, but it looks as if it’s well on its way to becoming a reality. Earlier this year, the French Polynesian government signed an agreement with the institute to create a “Special Economic SeaZone” near the islands of Tahiti. “The SeaZone will combine the advantages of French Polynesia’s geopolitical location with unique regulatory opportunities specifically designed to attract investors,” says Randolph Hencken, executive director of the Seasteading Institute. The institute also recently announced Blue Frontiers, a new company “that will administer the seazone and build floating islands designed to adapt organically to sea level change, by 2020”.
If you’re interested in reading more about Seasteading, there’s a new book out explaining “how floating nations will restore the environment, enrich the poor, cure the sick and liberate humanity from politicians”. Available, of course, on Amazon.