The University of Oxford is home to the Oxford Internet Institute. Behind the blue door of a townhouse, too many researchers from around the world scramble for desks as they try to makes sense of life in the digital era. In his room on the third floor, Vili Lehdonvirta saw something in the data that gave him an idea he couldn’t shake. So, he did what academics do, he wrote a book about it.

Lehdonvirta is Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research, and we spoke about his book, Cloud Empires, which, as of 27 September 2022, can be picked from shelves of bookstores and clicked from the warehouses of empires.

Vili traces the cyberlibertarian endeavours of using technology to free us from the shackles of coercive states. He shows how moving fast, breaking things, and with constant in-flight fixes, platforms like eBay, Silk Road, Upwork, Uber, Amazon, Apple App Store and others ended up becoming the very thing they set out to escape: states; often coercive ones at that.

He shows how these platforms now have more in common with 13th and 14th century empires than with the libertarian utopias their founders sought to create. They are states based not on territorial jurisdiction but on membership.

We discuss if earthly governments can still reign in these empires, or whether they might become virtual democracies one day.