The commissioning of this Treatise has two goals: describe the concept of the National Intranet as it is applicable to the Work-Standard and determine how it would operate in a nation relying on the Work-Standard. The National Intranet was understood in earlier Treatises as comprising the entirety of a nation’s digital infrastructure. The Self, Totality, and State interact with the digital realm by means of the National Intranet, their usage governed by the Intents which compel them to access it. However, the National Intranet is not the only aspect of the digital realm. Coexisting alongside the National Intranets of every nation is the concept of the International Internet, a buffer zone that enables people in different countries to visit and browse the National Intranet of another country.
The digital realm, despite its widespread adoption throughout the 1990s, could not have been made possible without past decades of technological innovations and the philosophical underpinnings which conceptualized it into what it is in the 21st century. Its continued existence and growing influence within the everyday lives of Totalities and their States have led to new questions on how to govern the digital realm. Obviously, the concerns of people who rely on the digital realm for their information and those who have created their livelihoods from it should carry ample weight in the legislations of national governments concerning the digital realm. The problem with the digital realm, however, is that it is difficult to envisage any conceivable governance in its current form.
The World Wide Web (WWW), the current incarnation of the digital realm, came into being as a way for scientists and researchers to relay information across vast distances. Later, the Market/Mixed Economies and Fractional-Reserve Banking Systems of Neoliberalism found in the WWW their chance to achieve worldwide reach as the spatial distances between nations continued to shrink after the Death of Bretton Woods. The problem with the WWW is that because entire portions cannot be governed on grounds of National Sovereignty, it becomes difficult for any nation to enforce its own laws online. At the same time, it is also difficult to truly speak of nations ensuring that the personal privacy of their Totalities will be recognized and enforced as personal information online continues to be treated as a Commodity.
The inevitable response to these trends has been to establish National Intranets, essentially asserting sovereign control over a portion of the digital realm. Since a National Intranet is smaller than that of the International Internet that it is connected to, States can reapply their Constitutions and Legal Codes to the digital realm, ensuring that their Totalities will uphold them as they normally would in the Real World. The idea of the digital realm as a lawless, untamed and uncharted area was only applicable prior to the 1990s. It is senseless to continue perpetuating such thinking as more nations and peoples become increasingly proactive in the affairs of the digital realm.
By contributing to the existing body of literature that began in the 1990s, I am also envisaging a different pattern of historical development for the digital realm in the 2000s. This current body of literature concerning the digital realm is far from complete and the rest of the 21st century presents ample Intents for States and Totalities alike to reevaluate their relationships with the digital realm. It is my hope that I will be able to reconceptualize the digital realm. For unlike the WWW, which on its own is unaccountable and ungovernable, the National Intranet presents an entirely different approach to the digital realm.
Categories: Digital Realm
The Fourth Estate 
Leave a Reply