That is ironically fitting. As the late Benedict Anderson pointed out, the nation-state came about as a result of technology: The printing press created the mass market of vernacular literature, including (thanks to the likes of Martin Luther, the first best-selling writer) translations of the Holy Bible. Marketing directly to speakers of French, English and German created a new kind of language and cultural consciousness that hadn’t existed before. Over time, that turned into the ideas of a nation and a people. No Gutenberg, no nations.

The new borderless technologies appear to be having much the same effect, at lightning speed. Bitcoin, the currency backed by no government, creates a belief in a kind of transnational society of Bitcoin holders. Google Translate collapses the barrier of language, so a Finnish and a Chinese speaker can converse with just a smartphone between them. Facebook’s 10-year plan to put enough bandwidth in the world for virtual reality anywhere indicates that even cultural gestures will be shared with everyone.

At first pass, the spread of these seemingly limitless freedoms seems akin to the spread of American products like Hollywood movies and rock ’n’ roll across much of the world (much to the consternation of many governmental, cultural and religious leaders.) Or maybe they seem like the less-remarked-on spread of Western democratic tropes after World War II, so that even a totalitarian state like North Korea holds sham elections to declare its government the people’s will.

That seems to be the case, since places like Europe worry about the big computers of Google and Amazon, but not so much about similarly sized systems inside the Chinese giants Alibaba and Tencent. The Chinese companies tend to stay inside China.

In fact, it may be something newer and more threatening to the state: the triumph not of American values but of algorithmic ones, designed to engage the largest audience, to understand the most about a person and to infer the greatest number of patterns in nature and society in order to exploit them.