What does it mean for the Self to be a citizen? A person becomes a citizen when they swear a sacred oath of allegiance to the nation, their loyalty rewarded in kind by dint of their own citizenship. Through their overall participation in the political-economic and socio-cultural life of the Totality, they become entitled to education, housing, healthcare, employment and the various basic essentials that are recognized by everyone as necessary for self-development. There is more to the Self than just someone who votes or buys in this or that direction. They are formal participants in the Council Democratic process from the workspace, collaborating with their comrades and family as part of a larger community.
The Work-Standard illustrates these relationships all too well. The Self contributes to the nation their Life-Energy in return for Arbeit and Geld from the Totality and the State. The Totality and the State both work in unison to ensure that the Self gets what they rightfully deserve. Taxation is secondary to the ongoing conversions of Arbeit-into-Geld and Geld-into-Arbeit, reduced to an instrument of the State’s ability to uphold beneficial behaviors under the rule of law.
Citizenship cannot be reduced to simplistic Roman Law questions of jus sanguinis and jus soli, of blood and soil. Being born in a particular nation to the right set of parents does not guarantee either the Totality or the State that somebody will truly become a genuine National. Either their soul resonates with the National Consciousness of the Totality or it does not. When the cease to exist as economic questions relative to Work-Productivity (WP) and Total Economic Potential (TEP), immigration and emigration become the means of fulfilling a personal Vocation in Life or as a means of one nation to maintain the Totality’s ancestral bonds in another nation as a people’s community. After all, mass immigration represents an expropriation that impoverishes the Totalities involved.
Assuming the Self is capable of being the citizen of a given nation in the Real World, is their citizenship extended to the National Intranet within the Digital Realm?
In the Real World, the Totality owns all of the lands and buildings within the nation and entrusts their State to care for them on grounds of National Sovereignty. These lands and buildings constitute the Productive Property-as-Power, enabling them to contribute Arbeit and Geld to the Life-Energy Reserve. When a Self decides to acquire land or the buildings on top of the land from the State, it becomes their Personal Property-as-Power.
In the Digital Realm, an inverse relationship occurs between the Totality and the State on the National Intranet. Here, the State owns the digital infrastructure required to facilitate the National Intranet, entrusting the Totality to maintain the digital infrastructure on grounds of National Sovereignty. Websites, servers, networks and systems also exist as Productive Properties-as-Power that can be converted into Personal Properties-as-Power if a Self decides to obtain them for themselves.
Just like in the Real World, in the Digital Realm, the Self’s citizenship is also recognized by the State and Totality. As a “Netizen” of their nation’s National Intranet, the Self is bound to the same Legal Rights and Legal Duties and the same Constitutional Obligations and Constitutional Intents. The Self participates in the Social Forums as they normally would in the Councils, regardless of whether their Vocation happens to be situated in the National Intranet. They work with the Totality in unison to govern the National Intranet on behalf of the State.
Such a model of political-economic governance, as one ought to recall from The Digital Realm (1st Ed.), is incapable of existing in the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW may offer a plethora of Social Networking sites, chatrooms, gaming servers, discussion boards and the comments sections of blogs, but none of them are guaranteed to last. What passes as a “community” are people who have no direct participation in their everyday affairs. Sure, they may be participants in the sharing of trivial information, but it is too far-fetched to insinuate that they would be considered as Netizens. At best, they are only passive spectators, the “Users,” of a website or server in the vein of Production for Utility and perhaps even Production for Profit.
A User differs from that of the Netizen insofar as the latter actually has a vested interest in the affairs of what I might be inclined to refer to as a “Virtual Community.” The Virtual Community is a group or organization of people with common interests, beliefs, and values and are guided by a shared set of norms, traditions, and culture. The longevity of any Virtual Community is dependent on the willingness of its members to contribute to the discussion. When information is shared, it is done to develop interpersonal social relations and generate ideas that could be brought into the Real World. The Virtual Community, not bound by physical geospatial boundaries, can serve as a rallying point for active participants in the Real World.
True Virtual Communities do not exist solely for the purposes of relaying information and encouraging reactionary sentimentalism. There are visible governance structures and people elected to run the day-to-day affairs alongside the Administrators. Digital Enterprises may be established in a Virtual Community to provide digital goods and services to its members. People could transfer Geld as payments to others and contribute to the creations of Digital Arbeit and Digital Geld. There are plenty of social activities for members to instill a sense of camaraderie and opportunities to meet new people. Another feature that can never be facilitated by the usual Social Networking sites on the World Wide Web is the ability to host Digital Tourism, where Foreign Netizens visit them from other parts of the Digital Realm.
As one could probably surmise from these descriptions, it would seem that the Virtual Community concept is similar to the concept of the Social Forum from The Digital Realm. Granted, the Social Forum operates as part of a National Intranet, which in turn is owned by the State and operated by the Totality. Where the Virtual Community differs from the Social Forum is that the former tends to be too anonymous that it can be hard to develop mutual rapport among its members. What passes as a “community” is only limited to what it was founded on; it is sometimes incapable of becoming part of a larger body, like the Totality for instance. Also, there are no guarantees that the members are genuinely responsible for what becomes of the Virtual Community. They are not necessarily bound to a nation to the Social Forums are integrated into the National Intranet due to their inherent design philosophy.
Yet why would one consider it as a precursor to the Social Forums, in spite of its own limitations? Those Social Networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord and so forth) are not places where people actually start Virtual Communities because they are not owned and controlled by their members nor are capable of enabling the members from becoming active participants. They are great sites for finding worthless drivel amid the soullessness and meaninglessness, hence the ongoing trend of people abandoning them in favor of either focusing more on the Real World or searching for viable alternatives to them. It may not seem like it, but there has been a steady trickle of people leaving the platforms for a variety of reasons.
For those still committed to the possibility of the Self being a Netizen of the National Intranet in the Digital Realm, developing genuine Virtual Communities in platforms where the members actually run and operate them is the best option. It is also the only option, however, as long as the National Intranet remains elusive in most countries. Whatever the Virtual Community happens to be about, it has to go beyond all notions of the members being passive spectators whose sole purpose is to share information. They should be active participants with vested interests in the affairs of the Virtual Community.
Categories: Digital Realm
The Fourth Estate 
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