The only memorable line is a catchphrase: “a Britain truly built for all.” It stands out not just for being repeated, but also for begging two crucial questions. Obviously, it seems to say, we all agree on the answer to the question: what is “Britain”? And clearly we all agree who’s included in “all”, as in “a Britain truly built for all”? Except we don’t. Especially since Brexit, how we define Britain, and who should be included in it, is so intractable a dispute that it appears to have swallowed our entire ability to do politics. Nothing could be less settled than what Britain is, or who is included in “all”.

And the irony is that the digital platforms Starmer (or KeithGPT, or whatever) is embracing (he’s also recently joined TikTok) are a key reason we’re having these arguments. TikTok is Chinese; Substack is based in San Francisco; both are used all over the globe. And this de-materialized, post-geographic quality maps strangely onto our struggles over what a nation is, and who’s included.

The explanation Starmer gives for embracing Substack is as bland as the rest of his writing: “People have a right to know how decisions that affect them are taken and why. And I believe all politicians should explore innovative new ways to do that.” But at least in relatively recent history, a “nation” has implied both a defined geography and its occupation by a defined group. And the paradox of a national leader leaning so heavily into the internet is that this medium is so post-geographic in its effect as to make nation-states as such appear increasingly quaint: an impression the most radical tech elites are now embracing as the future of politics.

In the interminable online culture wars over how we define nations, what often gets overlooked is their historical, technological catalyst: the invention and spread of printing. European nation-states, as the historian Carlton Hayes showed, were never tight-knit tribes but instead “agglomerations of peoples with diverse languages and dialects”. These emerged out of a medieval plurality of sometimes tiny polities, across which an elite of scholars, merchants, and politicians communicated using the lingua franca inherited from ancient Rome: Latin.

Wherever printing centers took root, from 1450 onward, the dialect in that particular area would become gradually more widespread, fixed and culturally dominant. These print-powered dialects morphed over time into the “official” languages of much larger polities, while other dialects lost status or disappeared. The circulation of printed books and newspapers in these newly standardized vernacular languages in turn forged “nations” into self-conscious political units: the print historian Elizabeth Eisenstein shows how the idea of a “public” as such derives from “publishing”, offering a new, printed mirror within which these publics saw themselves reflected, for the first time, as “imagined communities”.

It wasn’t just print, of course. But print helped to fuse geography, language and power into modern nation-states, in which, as Hayes puts it, “a particular nationality […] constituted the core and furnished the governing class and the official language” along with other minority peoples, in a form “more akin to small empires than large tribes”. In time, many of these “small empires” became large ones — such as, perhaps most notably of all, Britain. Over the same period, too, Latin began to wither as a living lingua franca, replaced by now-competing “national” vernaculars.

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What does any of this have to do with Britain now? And what does it have to do with Substack? Well, it’s not a coincidence that elites around the world began dreaming bigger than nations or even empires, just as new broadcast media emerged to challenge print for the public’s attention. You don’t have to be Marshall McLuhan to wonder whether being able to beam TV images around the world might, in time, affect who we imagine our “communities” to be, and how widely we cast that net. Nor is it a coincidence that the TV era also saw Britain dislodged as “Top Nation” by our own imperial progeny, the USA.

Of course, as critics have noted, American hegemony came cloaked in the neutral utopianism of “rules-based international order”. This bait-and-switch was perhaps less obvious to the English than some other cultures, because the “official” language of this order was a variant of our own: the modern-day equivalent of medieval Latin, American English, or latterly “International Business English”.

This is the flat register in which the Starmerstack is written: “But, as I argued above, it’s also impossible to look at poverty and not see the visible impact of the cost-of-living crisis.” It’s hard even to choose an illustrative quote: it all feels equally lump-free, like the verbal equivalent of mechanically recovered meat. But the fact that he’s felt obliged to start a Starmerstack, instead of just going on TV, points to the still more disruptive recent triumph of the internet over broadcast: a shift that’s now shoving even Starmer out of the internationalist 20th-century dream, into a far more fractious and fragmented world.

Why? Well, print created the idea of a “public”, and forged language-communities into geographic and political ones. In other words: it massively affected political form. Broadcast allowed us to dream of uniting the world as one giant community. Another massive effect. It stands to reason the internet might change things again; but how? Perhaps the most optimistic exposition to date of how this might look comes from US tech investor Balaji Srinivasan, in his 2022 ebook The Network State. Here, Srinivasan set out a vision for a new kind of digital-age political entity, not defined by geography but shared vision and values, and beginning as internet-only entities. Once cohesive and well-established, he suggests, such entities could then realize themselves in the material world by crowdfunding real-world holdings, gaining political clout, and ultimately pursuing diplomatic recognition as a “network state”.

Examples of real-world projects with a “network state” flavor include Peter Thiel’s (as yet fruitless) “seasteading” vision, and also the Praxis group, which occasionally makes headlines by attempting to buy Greenland and such audacious stunts. Other proposals to create assorted forms of either pop-up or permanent startup city-state exist, in various states, such as the Próspera “startup zone” in Honduras.

What these have in common is that they recognize the radical new potential afforded by digital for transforming politics, and want to experiment — for example by forming polities that dispense with geography, or central banking, or (often) democracy. They share public ideas on platforms such as Substack, and hatch private plans in closed spaces such as Urbit. They tend to be, like the tech scene itself, both Anglophone and international (Substack’s founders are an American, an Indian-American, and a New Zealander) but, unlike the 20th-century globalist dream, highly exclusive. Like the 20th-century globalists, Srinivasan envisions opt-in, ethnically pluralist, secular polities. But while pluralist and secular, there’s nothing inclusive about “network states”. If you don’t like it, you can leave; by extension if the founders don’t like you, you can be expelled.

Srinivasan’s vision was first ignored by the mainstream. But more recently, especially since the Trump victory brought wealthy figures such as Srinivasan and Thiel closer to the White House, network states have inspired a slew of increasingly unnerved mainstream coverage. Such articles tend to fret about the openly anti-democratic worldview expressed by advocates such as Patri Friedman, who invests in “startup cities” and is frank about his firm funding companies “starting non-democratic cities”.

What if these post-democratic elite innovators really do end up setting the tone for the polities of the future? It doesn’t bode well for the little guy. To this we might reply that the dubiously democratic nature of even self-identified democracies, especially since Covid, somewhat blunts the moral force of this critique. A more substantive challenge is perhaps that in being digital-first, such polities are parasitic on goods provided by traditional nation-states. It’s all very well having Bitcoin, but as long as you’re dependent on an old-world nation-state for reliable roads, telecoms, waste management, power, sewerage, public order, and enforceable property laws backed by a (nation) state monopoly on violence, your claims to statehood are still acutely vulnerable. You’re also radically dependent on the viability of the system you claim to be trying to replace.

Against this, we might argue that these are transitional issues that can be resolved either (for tech-optimists) by more automation, or through gaining physical capabilities as network-states become more established. But to my eye, the hardest challenge to the tech-bro model for new countries is the oldest: where does your cohesion come from? Srinivasan grasps this in theory, emphasizing the need for unity in cultural, moral, and identity issues. But as expected from a tech-libertarian, The Network State stops short of advocating religious or ethnic homogeneity as a basis for such states.

This does not bode well. Anyone who has spent time in online communities knows how fissiparous they are. Meanwhile the 20th century is littered with attempts at secular utopias that turned into sex cults, or suicide cults, or just had huge rows and fell apart. But what if Srinivasan is just not seeing the wood for the trees? If we borrow the broad “network state” formula, but discard the “grey tribe” distaste for racial and religious identitarianism, we only need to glance about to see that germinal “network states” already exist — it’s just that the groups driving them aren’t Silicon Valley elites.

Americans, for example, were recently shocked by the revelation that organized Somali-heritage communities in Minnesota have been methodically defrauding the state government, funneling vast sums of money out of America toward co-ethnic communities overseas. And though their relation to state funding doubtless varies a great deal, I suspect comparable low-tech networked “nations” are now increasingly common across the West, as a byproduct of 20th-century utopianism.

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Could this represent at least one possible future template for post-national political solidarity? Seen dispassionately, a resource-extraction network of the kind documented in Minnesota appears highly cohesive and internally solidaristic. It leverages existing infrastructure. It’s spread over a distributed geographic area, and using digital tools to network. It’s focused on increasing real-world holdings. What actually distinguishes this from a “network state”, apart from the lack of interest in blockchain?

Those still attached to nation-states may well harrumph about deportations, or even (like Trump) actually do some. But none of that changes the internet’s power to convene post-geographic networked polities. Like other digital platforms, Substack’s popular readership communities are post-national; as long as such digital platforms exist, whether on Substack or elsewhere people will go on forging post-national, geographically distributed communities. In light of this, nation-state nostalgists may need to accept that the globalists are right to view such entities as obsolete.

But the internationalists may also need to accept that their “one world” model is obsolete as well. The decentralized, de-materialized, many-to-many environment enabled by the internet doesn’t deliver a united planet of peace and harmony. Rather, it delivers McLuhan’s real “global village”: a chaotic place of competing digital tribes, each hoarding their store of resources and competing to extract whatever they can for their own, from what’s left of the commons.

Whether wealthy, secular and high-tech, or tribal, religious and low-tech, these are the real “post-liberal” successor entities to nation-states. In their world Starmer’s “all” doesn’t exist; there is only the in-group. And whatever (or even whether) KeithGPT himself thinks, to the extent that network nations on this model become a template here, the nation-state “Britain” of his catchphrase will be nothing more than a carcass for them to loot.

As in personal life, so too in business and civil society. Each year hundreds of thousands of businesses cease trading. In 2019, even before the pandemic, there were 336,000 business “deaths” — 11% of all British businesses. Factories and workshops close, while industries decline and sometimes vanish completely. Once-vibrant clubs and churches gradually dwindle.

Even at the level of states and governments, nothing lasts forever. Countries and languages and whole peoples disappear with tragic regularity. Over lockdown, I read Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms, a series of elegies for various European states, or statelets, that are no more. Some are widely known, like the Soviet Union or the Byzantine Empire. Others are much less celebrated, even among history buffs. Davies includes a chapter dealing with the Visigothic state that existed in eastern France in the century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. It lasted less than a century before being subsumed into the Kingdom of the Franks. But perhaps his most obscure case study is the Republic of Rusyn, a short-lived attempt by Carpatho-Ukrainians to carve out an independent nation from the ruins of Czechoslovakia, as it was being dismembered by Nazi Germany, Hungary and Poland in March 1939.

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As I read about these statelets struggling to survive, Covid-19 was causing human suffering and misery on a massive scale — not simply deaths, but strain on medical staff, family separations and ongoing disruption to normal life and health system operation. The Government and the health service were making serious and repeated mistakes. Vital organs of the state were hesitant and sclerotic, highly susceptible to groupthink. It was easy to think: this is how a nation collapses.

Indeed, there has been a widespread sense that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining event, that the world has changed irrevocably, that we must re-examine our assumptions about numerous aspects of modern life. The giant consulting firm McKinsey produced a report called “The future of work after Covid-19”, while its rival EY issued one focusing on the changes to globalised supply chains. The Economics Observatory asked “What is the future of commuting?” The Centre For Cities think tank investigated whether cities themselves have a future anymore.

But Vanished Kingdoms — I hesitate to use the dread phrase “putting in perspective”, because that sounds glib — made me reflect on what it takes, really, to destroy a way of life. Not to trivialise people’s grim experiences, but when you read about, say, the Russian invasion of East Prussia in the last year of the Second World War — invasion is almost too antiseptic a word; destruction would meet the case — it does inevitably offer a new baseline for the consideration of terrible events.

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Obviously, its’s little or no comfort to someone who has lost a family member to Covid — or a job or a home — that it could be worse: they could be living in a chaotic post-Roman kingdom menaced by enemies on all sides. But when we come to reflect on the specific political-historical-civilisational questions raised by the pandemic — the future of work, of the health service, of global trade — it’s important to have some kind of benchmark. Particularly because, in the modern West, there is a prevailing sense that we have little to learn from history, because we are so advanced. My generation grew up during the 1990s “holiday from history”, when the power of liberal democracy was unchallenged and its future seemingly secure. No wonder Covid-19 feels like the end of the world.

But one very obvious lesson of history is that we are fortunate, even during a plague, to live in Europe in the early twenty-first century. We are lucky to have strong nation-states, able and willing to look after their people, and well-established norms of diplomacy and international co-operation. However badly her Majesty’s Government has failed in its responsibilities, the nation has not yet been annexed by neighbouring powers, as happened to the venerable Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the late eighteenth century, weakened by infighting and loss of trust in government.

That said, it is worth noting that Davies, writing in 2011, does argue that the United Kingdom in its current form is not long for this world — mainly because of the loss of confidence in the shared beliefs and institutions that held its four nations together: Crown, Empire, and Protestant Christianity.

Covid, by itself, is not going to bring an end to the largely orderly and peaceable Europe of 2021, in the way that — for example — the World Wars were catastrophic for so many of the peoples of central and eastern Europe featured in Vanished Kingdoms. The disease remains a serious problem, but most continental nations have now reached high levels of double vaccination — and cut their death rates accordingly. Seven European nations were added to the British government green list over the weekend, meaning that travellers from them do not need to quarantine. The suggestion by UnHerd’s Ed West, at the very start of the pandemic, that the long-term consequences might not be very severe, now seems very prescient.

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Possibly, of course, I am too optimistic. One of Davies’ subjects is the Byzantine Empire, which endured for more than a thousand years, but whose long-term fortunes were seriously affected by recurring outbreaks of plague from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Those plagues, of course, were much deadlier than Covid-19, and spread through populations without access to modern medicine; but perhaps the pessimists are right that we can expect more globalised outbreaks of serious disease. It is entirely possible that not all such diseases will be as treatable and relatively non-deadly as our current foe.

And optimism can be dangerous if it tips into arrogance. Vanished Kingdoms carries a dedication to i’r anghofiedig, a Welsh phrase which Davies translates loosely as “those whom historians tend to forget”. He explicitly frames the book as dealing with our collective tendency to absent-mindedness, our complacency in looking back on our ancestors.

It has been argued that some of the misjudgements made by the British public health establishment in the early weeks and months of the pandemic stemmed from a kind of instinctive resistance among highly educated, high-status people to solutions that were redolent of historical responses to disease outbreaks. Why did it take so long to impose any kind of meaningful border restrictions? Why did it take the best part of a year for masking and good ventilation, rather than mostly pointless hand-washing and surface cleaning, to be strongly prioritised in advice to the public and to hospitals, schools and shops?

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The answer to these questions, perhaps, is that closing the borders and emphasising the importance of fresh, clean air sounded too simple to be true. It’s what people did in the age of the plague — when our allegedly simple-minded forebears still believed in dirty foreigners, miasma theory and bodily humours — so it must be rejected by sophisticated moderns. As the great Theodore Dalrymple has noted, intellectuals are incentivised to avoid obvious conclusions, because their status depends on the elucidation of non-obvious truths. And liberal modernity encourages us to throw out the baby with the bathwater: to reject the wisdom of past ages, as well as the unscientific mistakes and prejudices.

Davies would, I fancy, dislike such disdain, even if held unconsciously or instinctively. He is a humane writer, concerned not with ideology, but with truth and historical drama — and with helping us know what the past was really like. At a time when the public square is full of rancour and misinformation, inflamed by people’s understandable fears and concerns about the spread of disease and the undoubted, if unavoidable, downsides of our chosen anti-Covid strategies, his proposal is tempting. We must focus on the lessons of history, and so prioritise truth and fact — and proportion.