Globalisation and Digitisation - The Exponential Spread of Infectious Information and its Possible Containment

Abstract

There is a fundamental difference between the human migration movements of the past and those of the beginning of the 21st century. The latter impose the need for a cultural assimilation of the migrants which they cannot master within one generation. This cultural transformation includes the necessity to adapt to the compression of humans into a new living space, into technology-based megapolises, which altogether represent the equivalent of an artificial planet. This new planet does not provide new resources nor additional free spaces for an overall growth of material wealth. On the contrary, it asks for a drastic reduction of individual freedoms. The stability, even the survival of these mega centres, is at stake without consistent subdivisions of an overall shrinking of spaces needed for all kinds of movements and of a consistent restriction of the exploding communicative interference within and between these mega centres. This essay aims at a first-hand analysis of a possible introduction of digital borders without which adequate legal spaces appear infeasible as the constituting framework of “our“ artificial new planet.