Humor, Railroads and the Internet Have Changed Who "We" Are (or what technology has to do with nationalism and globalism)

Technology – from humor to railroads to the internet - changes our definition of “us.”

Germany became a nation-state in 1871, the same year as Italy and only one year after the United States.

In 1865, the American Civil War ended. By 1870, three constitutional amendments would change the United States from a collection of states into a nation-state, literally changing the label we gave to the United States from plural to singular. Before Lincoln, people said, “The United States are” in references to the many states. After Lincoln people said, “The United State is,” in reference to the one nation. The historian Eric Foner calls these three amendments that ended slavery, defined American citizenship and protected the right of citizens to vote “the second founding,” because they so changed our notion of who we were.

Among other things, these amendments gave congress the right to enforce them. These rights gave the national government power to protect citizens from states, making individual rights more important than state law. The nation became more important than the state.

So, is it just a coincidence that Italy was consolidated from a collection of kingdoms and Germany a collection of states at the same time as the United States? I don’t think so. I blame the railroad and telegraph.

Between 1840 and 1860, the miles of railways in the US grew from 3,000 to 30,000. This web of interconnections changed who we were. New factories sold goods across states lines. Goods, contracts, communication and corporations spilled across state borders as easily as clouds. Laws and governance that did not travel with this exchange of goods and ideas were increasingly ineffective. The Republicans who led this second founding were capitalists who needed national governance to properly manage the scope of their new, industrial economy.

Which brings us to this 21st century.

The war from 1860 to 1865 was between folks who wanted their world to remain a collection of states to those who wanted the world to merge into nations. The war today is between nationalists and globalists.

Once again, a confluence of technologies has made us bigger. The world wide web sort of gives itself away in its name. It has become a hotbed for nationalists all across the world but they are reliant on the very technology that undermines their nationalism. The notion of nationalists – BREXIT folks in the UK, Le Pen’s National Front (now National Rally) folks in France and Trumpbros in the US, among others – connecting around the globe to fight globalism tells you a great deal about how futile is their battle. Everything is global now. Why? In no small part because of the technology. A container ship has dropped the cost of transporting a can of beer or soda across an ocean to one cent. When transportation and communication costs near zero, national borders become less meaningful.


Robin Dunbar has studied the groups we feel part of. Other primates spend hours grooming one another to sustain the bonds that make them feel like an “us” who cooperate and interact to create a community of chimps, bonobos or gorillas. Grooming releases the endorphins that connect them. One of Dunbar’s theories is that as the number of humans in a group expanded to 150, grooming was no longer sustainable. It simply took too long to do this with 149 other humans. So, humor emerged as a way to do the same thing. Grooming gave way to comedy. And to this day memes are a big part of the online communication within groups.

Technological innovations change our community and our notion of self has to keep up. Whether it is humor, railroads or the internet, as our world is made bigger so must our sense of us. Benedict Anderson called a nation “an imagined political community.” In some sense, so is a family, a tribe, nation, or even a world. But the technology we have changes our ability to make real what we can imagine.