60 Million Americans Can't Be Wrong
Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Annika Kuhlmann
The nation-state is a relatively recent innovation, one that tethers belonging to borders and leaves the non-citizen out in the cold. Markets and property have propped up these fixed alliances, but as even they become increasingly immaterial, perhaps citizenship too can become more diffuse. If digital belonging takes not the shape of the earth, but rather of a cloud, might our living situations come to resemble the networks we project ourselves into? In this new technological age, the home rather than the now automated factory is increasingly a central site of production and borders become fraught sites of renegotiation.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Annika Kuhlmann propose a new domesticity through a long-term project to develop a form of distributed home. Instead of either renting or owning, we could instead have a subscription model of housing to fit a world of constant nomadism. This new liquid citizenship, where homes are streamable and nationality unmoored, promises a revised kind of belonging beyond the constraints of government’s geography.