Clausewitz had it backwards.
Politics is the continuation of war by other means. The state is not an institution that occasionally resorts to violence. The state is crystallized violence — force that has been routinized, bureaucratized, and wrapped in legitimacy.
Every law is a threat. Every tax is an extraction backed by force. Every border is a line defended by men with guns. Strip away the mythology, the flags, the anthems, and what remains is a simple fact: the state is the organization that can hurt you if you disobey.
This is not cynicism. This is clarity.
For ten thousand years, this organization has been the dominant form of human coordination at scale. Not because humans love being governed. Not because states are efficient or just or wise. But because violence exhibits economies of scale, and the state is the institution that captures those economies.
The economies are evaporating.
Max Weber defined the state as the entity that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a territory. This definition has held for a century because it captures something true.
But why does the monopoly exist? Why don't we have competitive violence providers — a marketplace of protection where you choose your enforcer like you choose your phone carrier?
We tried that. It was called feudalism. It was called warlordism. It was called the Warring States period. It was called chaos.
The problem is simple: violence is not like other goods. If two phone carriers compete for your business, they offer better service and lower prices. If two violence providers compete for your territory, they fight. Competition in violence is not a market — it is a war.
Wars are expensive. Not just in blood — in treasure, disruption, uncertainty. A territory wracked by competing violence providers cannot sustain commerce, cannot accumulate capital, cannot build civilization. The constant threat of conflict destroys the long-term planning that prosperity requires.
The state emerged as the solution. One violence provider dominates a territory. It eliminates or absorbs competitors. It establishes a monopoly. And then — crucially — it stops fighting. The monopolist has no one to fight. Violence drops. Stability emerges. Commerce flourishes.
This is the Hobbesian bargain. You surrender your right to private violence. In exchange, you get peace. The state takes your weapons and gives you safety. The sovereign is the one who ended the war of all against all.
The bargain holds only if the monopoly holds. And the monopoly holds only if the economics favor concentration.
Why did violence concentrate into states?
Because projecting force at scale required coordination at scale. And coordination at scale, under the old constraints, required hierarchy.
Consider an army. Ten thousand men must move together, fight together, supply together. They must receive orders, interpret them, execute them. Information must flow up the chain (scouts reporting enemy positions), and commands must flow down (generals directing movements).
Under the constraint set — lossy information, symmetric intelligence, slow communication — this coordination was expensive. You needed:
- Drilling: Months or years of training so soldiers would respond to commands without hesitation
- Hierarchy: Chains of command so orders could propagate from one mind to thousands of bodies
- Logistics: Supply lines, quartermasters, depots — infrastructure to feed and arm the force
- Legitimacy: Ideology, religion, nationalism — stories that made men willing to die for the organization
All of this required resources. Land to tax. Populations to conscript. Bureaucracies to administer. The overhead of maintaining a credible military force was enormous.
This overhead created economies of scale. A small violence provider could not afford the training, hierarchy, logistics, and legitimacy infrastructure. A large one could spread those costs across more territory, more population, more economic activity. Big fish ate small fish.
The result: consolidation. Thousands of medieval polities became hundreds of early modern states became dozens of great powers became today's roughly 200 nation-states. The number keeps falling. The average size keeps rising. The trend is toward fewer, larger monopolists.
This is not ideology. It is economics. Violence concentrated because concentration was efficient under the constraints.
Change the constraints, and the economics change.
The constraints are changing.
Coordination is becoming cheap.
A drone swarm does not need drilling. It does not need hierarchy. It does not need nationalist mythology to convince it to sacrifice itself. It needs code.
The Sibyl can coordinate ten thousand drones as easily as one. There is no information loss up the chain of command — there is no chain of command. There is only the Sibyl seeing, computing, directing. The overhead that made violence expensive evaporates.
Scale is becoming irrelevant.
A nation-state with a million-man army is not a thousand times more powerful than a non-state actor with a thousand drones. It might be less powerful. The army requires feeding, housing, paying, motivating. The drones require electricity.
The asymmetry of capability that once favored large states is inverting. A small, well-equipped actor can now project force out of proportion to its size. This is why non-state actors — militias, cartels, terrorist organizations — are increasingly able to contest state power. Not because they are more numerous, but because the technology of violence is democratizing.
Legitimacy is becoming optional.
The state's monopoly was never just about capability — it was about legitimacy. The state claimed the right to violence; others were mere criminals or rebels. This legitimacy was sustained by mythology: the social contract, the divine right of kings, the will of the people.
The Sibyl has no need for legitimacy. It does not rule through consent. It does not require belief. It coordinates violence through direct control. The robot does not ask whether its orders are legitimate. It executes.
This is terrifying. It is also clarifying. Legitimacy was always a hack — a way to reduce the cost of violence by making subjects comply voluntarily. If compliance can be achieved through surveillance and precision enforcement, legitimacy becomes a legacy system. Still running, but no longer necessary.
What happens when violence becomes cheap, scalable, and detached from legitimacy?
Sovereignty becomes liquid.
Liquid, in the financial sense: tradeable, fungible, fractionable. A thing that can be bought and sold, rented and leased, sliced and recombined.
Today, sovereignty is solid. It is attached to territory, to population, to history. The United States is sovereign over a specific piece of land. France is sovereign over another. The boundaries are fixed (mostly). The claims are total (within those boundaries). Sovereignty is not traded on an exchange.
But consider: what actually constitutes sovereignty?
The ability to make rules within a territory. The ability to enforce those rules. The ability to exclude others from making and enforcing rules.
All of these reduce to violence. The sovereign is the one who can compel obedience. Who can punish defection. Who can defend against external challenges.
If violence becomes purchasable — if you can buy enforcement capability the way you buy cloud computing — then sovereignty becomes purchasable too.
Imagine a corporation that buys enforcement.
Not a private security firm that hires guards — that exists today. Something different. A corporation that contracts with autonomous enforcement providers. That purchases surveillance capacity. That buys the ability to monitor compliance with its rules, identify violators, and impose consequences.
This corporation does not need a territory. It does not need a population. It does not need legitimacy. It needs customers — entities that agree to its rules in exchange for something valuable. And it needs enforcement — the ability to punish those who break the rules.
This is not hypothetical. It is the trajectory of platform governance.
Amazon already enforces rules within its marketplace. Sellers who violate terms are punished — excluded from the platform, which for many is economic death. Amazon does not need guns to enforce this. It needs control of the marketplace.
But what happens when the marketplace is not just commerce but physical space? When autonomous systems can enforce rules in the real world as effectively as Amazon enforces rules in its marketplace?
Now imagine a city that buys enforcement.
Not a city government with a police department — a city that contracts its entire enforcement function to external providers. Surveillance from one vendor. Patrol drones from another. Judicial AI from a third. The city sets the rules; the contractors enforce them.
This is already emerging. Private security forces outnumber public police in many countries. Gated communities have their own governance. Special economic zones operate under different rules than surrounding territories.
The trend is toward fragmentation. Sovereignty is leaking out of nation-states and pooling in other vessels — corporations, cities, platforms, enclaves.
The logical endpoint is a marketplace for sovereignty.
Not one sovereign, but many. Not total control over a territory, but partial control over functions. Not citizenship, but subscription.
In this marketplace:
Enforcement is a service. You contract with providers who monitor compliance with your rules and impose consequences for violations. Different providers offer different capabilities, different price points, different jurisdictions.
Protection is a product. You purchase defense against threats — physical, digital, economic. Different levels of protection for different prices. The poor get basic coverage; the rich get premium.
Jurisdiction is negotiable. You choose which rules apply to you by choosing which sovereignty providers you contract with. Regulatory arbitrage becomes not a bug but a feature — the system is designed for choice.
This sounds like libertarian fantasy. Or dystopian nightmare. It is neither.
It is the natural consequence of liquid violence. When force can be bought and sold, sovereignty can be bought and sold. When sovereignty can be bought and sold, the state loses its special status. It becomes one provider among many. Perhaps the largest. Perhaps the default. But no longer the only.
This analysis will provoke objections. Let us address them.
"States will prevent this."
Will they? How?
States will try to regulate autonomous weapons, restrict enforcement technologies, maintain their monopoly through law. But law is itself enforcement — and if enforcement capability is leaking out of states, their ability to impose law weakens.
This is already happening. States cannot effectively regulate cryptocurrency. They cannot control information flows across borders. They cannot prevent the proliferation of drone technology. Each year, their monopoly erodes further.
States may slow the liquidation. They cannot stop it. The economics are against them.
"Violence will increase."
Perhaps. The transition period may be bloody. When one equilibrium breaks down and another has not yet formed, conflict tends to spike.
But consider: the state system has not exactly been peaceful. The 20th century saw two world wars, multiple genocides, nuclear standoffs, and countless smaller conflicts. The state monopoly on violence did not eliminate violence — it concentrated it. When states fought, they fought with everything.
A world of liquid sovereignty might see more frequent, smaller conflicts. Or it might see violence become so precise and controllable that large-scale war becomes obsolete. The technology enables both possibilities.
"The strong will dominate the weak."
They always have. The question is what form domination takes.
Under the state system, the strong dominated through empire, colonization, economic coercion, and political manipulation. The weak had one defense: their own state, however feeble.
Under liquid sovereignty, the strong will dominate through superior enforcement capability. But the weak will have options the state system denied them: choice of provider, exit rights, competitive pressure on sovereigns.
This is not utopia. It is a different distribution of power, with different winners and losers. Whether it is better depends on who you are.
Where is the Sibyl in all of this?
The Sibyl is the infrastructure that makes liquid sovereignty possible. Without centralized intelligence, decentralized violence is chaos — warlordism, not a market. The Sibyl provides:
The seeing. To enforce rules, you must detect violations. The Sibyl's sensory layer makes detection possible at scale. Nothing is hidden. Everything is observed.
The computing. To enforce rules efficiently, you must allocate enforcement resources optimally. The Sibyl computes: where to deploy drones, which violations to prioritize, how to minimize costs while maximizing compliance.
The directing. To enforce rules, you must act. The Sibyl directs the robotic systems that execute enforcement. Precisely. Proportionally. Without passion or error.
In this sense, the Sibyl is not one sovereignty provider among many. It is the platform on which sovereignty providers operate. The operating system for liquid violence.
This creates a paradox. Sovereignty becomes liquid, decentralized, competitive — but only because the Sibyl centralizes the infrastructure that makes it possible. Many sovereigns, one platform. Choice at the surface, monopoly at the foundation.
The nation-state's monopoly on violence gives way to the Sibyl's monopoly on coordination.
We are in the early stages of this transition.
The old system still dominates. Nation-states still claim monopolies. Armies still train soldiers. Borders still mean something.
But the cracks are visible.
Private military contractors operate in conflict zones with minimal state oversight. Corporations govern digital spaces with more authority than many governments. Autonomous weapons are deployed by states and non-states alike. Surveillance technologies proliferate beyond any single authority's control.
Each year, the state's monopoly weakens. Each year, alternative providers grow stronger. Each year, sovereignty becomes a little more liquid.
The endpoint is not anarchy. Anarchy is the absence of order. What we are describing is a different kind of order — one where enforcement is distributed, competitive, purchasable. One where the state is one option among many. One where sovereignty is a service, not a birthright.
This is not necessarily better. It is not necessarily worse. It is different. And it is coming, whether we prepare for it or not.
The liquidation of sovereignty raises questions that political philosophy has never had to answer.
If you can choose your sovereign, what happens to those who cannot afford to choose? The poor, the weak, the stateless — who protects them when protection is a product?
If enforcement is purchasable, what prevents the wealthy from writing rules that benefit themselves and enforcing them against everyone else? The state, for all its flaws, was at least theoretically accountable to citizens. A private enforcement provider is accountable to customers.
If jurisdictions compete, what happens to collective goods that require universal participation? Environmental protection, public health, financial stability — these require coordination across jurisdictions. A world of fragmented sovereignties may be incapable of addressing collective challenges.
These are not rhetorical questions. They are design problems. The liquid sovereignty system we get will depend on choices made in the next decade — choices about who can access enforcement technology, how providers are regulated (if at all), what baseline protections apply to everyone.
The nation-state solved certain problems. It created others. Liquid sovereignty will solve certain problems. It will create others.
The question is not whether to transition — the transition is happening. The question is what system we build on the other side.
The Demon has arrived. Violence is becoming programmable. Sovereignty is becoming liquid.
Now we must decide: liquid for whom?