What is a Virtual Principality and Who Are Its Citizens?
The Virtual Prince II: The Spectrum of Online Organizations and the Dilemma of Organized Online Power
What is a Virtual Principality and Who Are Its Citizens?
“All states and all dominions that have had and continue to have power over men have been, and still are, either republics or principalities.” The Prince, p. 7
Machiavelli begins The Prince with a dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de Medici and some housekeeping, noting that he will deal with Republics in another work (his Discourses on Livy) and focusing here purely on the various types of principalities.
Similarly, I will be focusing purely on the creation and operation of virtual principalities with a central locus of power, rather than virtual organizations with more diffuse power structures such as council or committee structures, which in my personal experience have tended to get subjugated, co-opted, or driven from the field by more the more competitive virtual principalities.
The most obvious examples of virtual principalities are found in massively multiplayer online games where very large internet-based organizations with thousands of virtual citizens compete for territory and resources. Online political organizations and fully remote-work businesses also share characteristics of a virtual principality.
A Virtual Principality is a kind of online pseudo-state, engaged in organizational competition with other similar online pseudo-states; that competition is mediated through metaphorical warfare and rhetorical competition. The more humans involved, the more complex and state-like the virtual principality will become, particularly if the principality leverages mass mobilization for advantage.
The Online Citizenry of a Virtual Principality
Each citizen of the virtual principality, and the virtual prince himself, is subject to the laws of the actual physical real-world states, which means that having your enemies imprisoned and strangled to remove them from the chessboard a la Cesare Borgia, Machiavelli’s exemplar Prince, is not an option.
Due to the virtual and online nature of these pseudo-states, their relationship with their member-citizens is very different from true states. In the real world, one can occupy a town and oppress and conquer its citizens, levying taxes and imposing your order, but online those ‘conquered citizens’ will just log off and quit if burdened too much.
Thus, at the line membership level, each citizen of a virtual principality ultimately chooses his own membership. Perhaps it is difficult to join a particular virtual principality - a high status organization with competitive admissions - but due to the fundamentally virtual nature of these organizations, a citizen/member of a virtual principality can always quit, temporarily or permanently, at their whim.
Therefore, a virtual prince must convince, soothe, and entice current and prospective future citizens to view following his leadership as worthwhile and valid, being unable to oppress, exploit, police, or burden the people quite like a true state does.
So, in order to both maintain one’s own forces and thrive as an organization, a virtual state must continually attempt to refresh, invigorate, and maintain its citizenry. This is where the virtual principality begins to take on hybrid characteristics, something akin to a political party or a remote work corporation in the real world.
The necessity of maintaining a citizenry in a virtual principality by positive internal means also opens up lines of attack against competing virtual principalities; that is, to demoralize, divide, frustrate and poach the citizens of hostile or competing virtual principalities.
All in the virtual principality are also subject to the opportunities, risks, and limitations that come from being online. Due to the fundamentally immaterial nature of metaphorical warfare, competitions between virtual principalities are reliable producers of intense internet drama, weaponized and leveraged to gain advantage.
For example, let us say two virtual principalities engage in a massive battle, and one side wins decisively. The losing side is not actually dead and scattered except in virtuality; they can and will immediately begin posting about their loss to re-characterize it, to minimize it, or to spin it as a victory in disguise. Variations of this abound: “We won the isk war!” “We won the strategic objective!” “We didn’t want that region anyway!”
Thus, a victorious virtual prince must both win his battles, and then immediately win the meta-battles to cement the victory in the minds of both his citizens and his competitors. The victorious citizenry must be reminded that they are victorious; the losers must be convinced that they have lost, despite their attempts at rationalization, and the cycle continues until the next point of direct conflict.
Perhaps we could imagine a Virtual Borgia, as Machiavelli’s hero of The Prince adapts his tactics and means to the challenges of a virtual principality. Our Virtual Borgia cannot have his enemies arrested and strangled in a prison cell, however he can ratio his enemies on Twitter, defeat them in formal public competitions for status and resources, and de-fang his rivals by relentless propaganda across multiple platforms.
A key aspect to understand about human political nature is the ability of one citizen to wear many identities in different contexts, and no small part of the art of politics is to activate the correct identity of the audience you are attempting to influence.
A member of a virtual principality is also probably a citizen of their country of origin, a member of a political party, perhaps has a favorite sports team, a religious affiliation, and a corporate identity based on their occupation. Any of these identities can be activated depending on the circumstances.
When you have thousands of people across the world calling in sick to work for an alarm clock op in a video game war, that virtual principality is currently their more overriding identity than their corporate identity. We change our masks, and with our masks our behaviors and responsibilities; getting people to wear the correct mask is a key part of creating and managing human institutions.
What isn’t a Virtual Principality
I would like to briefly touch on what is not a virtual principality.
The core thesis of this project is that at a sufficient level of social and organizational complexity, online pseudo-states behave in ways similar to real states in some situations, and that thus it is worthwhile for leaders to examine the real-world guidance on statecraft such as The Prince and see what can be reasonably applied to the strategies of modern online proto-state organizations. But not every group of nerds playing games together - or online crypto startup, or DSA chapter - is sufficiently state-like in its structure and complexity to make these parallels useful.
There is a continuum of organizational complexity online, where at one end of the spectrum we might put ‘30 dudes in a Discord’ and on the other end of the proto-state continuum we see a fully-fledged power bloc in Eve Online, comprising tens of thousands of real people organized into complex bureaucracies and politics that make the Italian Wars of the 16th century feel relatable.
We are working with novel concepts here; the internet is still a new thing in human history. When I was first becoming infamous online for my internet spaceship hijinks, there was no verbiage like ‘influencer’ or ‘content creator’ to describe my situation.
I feel this is the same way with virtual principalities; perhaps in a few years there will be a ubiquitous, pithy way to describe an online society of sufficient complexity, bureaucracy, and competitiveness to take on proto-state-like characteristics.
But for now, in 2024, we are left with mouthful definitions, and attempting to better describe Whatever These Things Are by pointing out examples of What They Are Not.
Ultimately, it is up to the reader to take into account their own organization’s place on the continuum of organizational complexity and decide for themselves if any of the advice and counsel offered here applies usefully.
I write from the perspective of a leader on the extreme end of the proto-state continuum, from a virtual principality of tens of thousands of citizens, so please be cautious considering my advice for groups with only hundreds of members.
I have a back-of-the-napkin theory about Dunbar’s Number (~150 humans) being an important break-point for organizational complexity and politics, and cannot speak accurately to the validity of my commentary when it comes to organizations smaller than 150 members.
The Spectrum of Online Organizations
Certain environmental conditions online lend to the creation of virtual pseudo-states, while other environments never create higher-order social organizations at all.
Because we are groping towards a ‘you know it when you see it’ concept of what a virtual principality is in the first place, I would like to highlight the following attributes of an environment that contributes to the development of these types of online organizations.
Complexity: Humans begin to work together for a number of reasons, and one of the most important is to solve problems too complicated for one person to manage themselves. If an environment is too simple and the challenges not intense, there is no reason for a virtual state to evolve. By contrast, if the environment is exceedingly complex and the challenges require hundreds or thousands of people to be coordinated to solve them, organization follows rapidly.
Territory: Virtual territory, regions of space, the Next Farm Over; something about the presence of territory in online games activates a seemingly primal human need to conquer, claim, and raise a flag.
Conflict Drivers: Resources that are not only worth fighting over, but are directly contestable between competing virtual organizations. The classic example from Eve Online is a type of fancy, wealth-producing moon, like a virtual oil field. The existence of a point of organizational conflict creates an escalation ladder, where organizations increase their complexity and competitiveness to own the conflict driver.
Persistence: The internet doesn’t turn off, but some online environments do, which makes them poor grounds for a 24/7 pseudo-state. Both Eve and Foxhole are famous for the length of their wars, requiring constant round-the-clock effort.
Timezone Coordination: To be increasingly competitive in online wars, organizations with a sufficient number of members will logically begin to coordinate internally across time zones. This usually requires a degree of social complexity, infrastructure and organization that pushes the org further along the continuum towards becoming a proto-state, because each timezone of operations needs a chain of command and effective staffing, and systems to get goals accomplished while the leader sleeps.
Vulnerability / Need for Protection: If the individual or their efforts are vulnerable, grouping together for protection and organizing that protection leads to more complex groupings.
Large Scale / Number of Players / Concentration / Population Density: More primates jammed together in a competitive space makes for more complexity, the most obvious indicator. If your organization hopes to operate effectively above Dunbar’s Number, bureaucracies and institutions are almost required to advance.
The Dilemma of Organized Online Power
While online multiplayer games like Eve Online, Foxhole, and New World spring to mind as the most obvious examples of environments with enough complexity and scale to give rise to a virtual principality in the gaming space, astute readers will note that the above characteristics also apply to corporate structures, online political movements, activist groups, and more.
As the world changes and more humans find themselves working in groups online, we must look to the past for examples of what we might expect in the future, using what we now know about human organizational behavior to sketch out pathways to autonomy and power.
We must also consider the implications of online leadership and mass manipulation. What happens when you toss difficult-to-anticipate wildcards into the mix, such as the rise of deception-capable agentic AI?
If a three letter agency decided to hook such an entity up with the data of a Cambridge Analytica - something almost certainly already being worked on by who knows how many actors - we could find ourselves in serious trouble.
Perhaps for our own survival, we must define and understand how humans organize their virtual groups and achieve their goals. The levers of online power must be defined, even if you don’t intend to use them yourself, such that you can identify when they are being utilized against you and yours.