Territories of Meaning: Cultural Sovereignty in a Networked Age, part I.

The Bliss wallpaper.

My theory is that the map we currently have in our heads no longer matches the territory we are in. We’re waiting for someone to draw a new map, and until then, we’re just going to witter away to each other on podcasts. - Adam Curtis, 2024

Abstract:

Networks are giving rise to new online-offline enclaves and as a result new expressions and understandings of sovereignty. These networks are not simply platforms or infrastructures for social interactions but have become the primary environment where meaning is created, identities are formed, and communities are imagined. “Semioscapes”–landscapes of meaning formed within these networks–can be viewed as new forms of virtual territory.

In this context, this essay argues that control over a network’s semioscape—its associative networks, flows of meaning, and membership—has become a new form of cultural sovereignty. Autonomy within networks is maintained by regulating who participates and what information flows, giving rise to new territories of meaning that are shaped as much by members’ co-curation as by external actors like corporations or governments. This hypothesis not only reframes how one thinks about territory and sovereignty in the networked age but also suggests that these networked semioscapes are now the primary fields of contest for individual and collective autonomy, identity formation, and cultural power.

Introduction

In Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour provocatively claims: “I can now state the aim of this sociology of associations more precisely: there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations.” For Latour, the notion of translation itself takes on a particular meaning: “a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting. If some causality appears to be transported in a predictable and routine way, then it’s the proof that other mediators have been put in place to render such a displacement smooth and predictable” (Latour, 2005, p. 119). For Latour, the world is rendered in terms of networks of relations. And in the midst of this, ‘the social’ becomes viewed as “a circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of society.” (Latour, 2005, p. 139)

This “circulating entity” positions the social as a “flow:” “what gets highlighted now are all the mediators whose proliferation generates, among many other entities, what could be called quasi-objects and quasi-subjects.” (Latour, 2005, p. 249) Latour’s social is a fluid network of mediators: social relations themselves are expressions of intermediation of the quasi-objects and quasi-subjects: “Things, quasi-objects, and attachments are the real center of the social world, not the agent, person, member, or participant—nor is it society or its avatars.” (Latour, 2005, p. 249) As the social becomes increasingly mediated by digital networks (itself a term that’s highly contested, that we’ll explore in greater detail further on), we must look at the shifting nature of the mediators. These “quasi-objects” are now found in the realm of digital representation: hyperlinked media, digital images, videos (often short clips), and so on, the common staples of online experience, act as mediators and also affordances for the social. In this sense, digital networks–and their manifold modalities of representation–become the ground for the translational work between mediators. Just as “[a] good text elicits networks of actors when it allows the writer to trace a set of relations defined as so many translations,” (Latour, 2005, p. 140), so does a digital network elicit its own network of actors: on the same representational surface can be found a person, a photograph, a memory, a poem, even a meme.

The social is comprised of these mediators, structured in what Latour might describe as “flows of translations” (Latour, 2005, 132). This is what Latour calls a network. Yet as we’ve already begun to see, networks are as well digital systems as they are flow of translations. And increasingly, for the purposes of how humans experience the social, the two are becoming indistinguishable. Here I point to a kind of coevolution: as the social has increasingly moved into digital networks, so have these networks become the ground of reality by which the social is experienced. No longer are digital networks, including social media sites, simply representations of the social—they are the very mediators and translators that make “it” possible. Manuel Castells, who coined the term “network society” puts it as follows: “hypertext constitutes the backbone of a new culture, the culture of real virtuality, in which virtuality becomes a fundamental component of our symbolic environment, and thus of our experience as communicating beings.” (Castells, 2000, p. 694) In this sense, we might think of virtuality–being online, interfacing with one another through digital systems and their affordances–as a crucial component of the “symbolic environment” that is ground to the social.

If these digital networks were simply “maps” of the social, inert vessels in which the social world would “flow” then it would suggest that no new kinds of organization would be enabled by virtuality. We would simply have digital “platforms” that enacted a simulacrum of the existing social relations. And yet while that may well be how they initially started out, these “maps” are now a large portion of the “territory” upon which the social world flows. We experience the social as virtuality itself and this representational “collapse” has widespread implications for how we think of territory.

Even at the turn of the century, Castells noticed the immediate impacts of virtualization: “With the diffusion of electronically based communication technologies, territorial contiguity ceases to be a precondition for the simultaneity of interactive social practices.” (Castells, 2000, p. 696) Indeed as the social flows virtualized, the “flows of translation” could span across geographic areas and align based on the unique affordances of the symbolic environment–the specific interface properties–offered by a digital network: for instance, Facebook, with its abstraction of “groups” could create new patterns of affinity through the affordances of its interface. Pinterest, with its mood boards, could create new kinds of ambient meaning through its ability to facilitate networked curation. As the social, Latour’s “circulating entity,” increasingly became virtualized flows could span geographies, be algorithmically mediated, and take on intrinsically digital dynamics. The symbolic environment of virtuality–digital networks–became part of the territory upon which the social flows.

By invoking the metaphor of “territory” I’m describing it as follows: the bounded (geographic or virtual) area that is the ground to experience, social interaction, and meaning-making. By ground to experience, I mean to say that the “territory” is indicative of the domain on which reality is constructed and unfolds. By calling something territory, I’m saying it’s not representational (like a map) but rather the substrate that mediates experience. Why call it “territory”? It’s not simply about indicating something as “real” or “the real” vs. “symbolic”, but rather territory indicates that it is a bounded area upon which experience can unfold. This taps into the longer tradition of conceptualizing territories as geographic areas on which individuals or groups exercise control. Take Sack’s robust definition of territory: “the attempt by an individual or group (x) to influence, affect, or control objects, people, and relationships (y) by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.” (Sack, 1983, p. 56)

Likewise, by indicating something as “territory” I’m asserting that some individual or group (x) influence, affects, or controls objects, people, and relationships (y) by delimiting and asserting control over a bounded area (note, not geographic, as territories can be virtual, that is, exist largely within information systems). In this sense, we can say that a territory is contested because its boundaries and what asserts control over it may be contested. By invoking the dual meaning of territory: 1) ground of experience, reality and 2) bounded zone of control—I’m asserting that the ground of experience is a “zone” that elements of societies assert control over and is a contested domain. By claiming the network is the territory, we’re then asserting the dual claim that 1) digital networks are now also the ground of experience (in addition to traditional geographic area) and 2) control over this ground is bounded and contested.

How does control work on networks? How does a network become a territory–in the dual meaning of ground of experience and bounded zone of control? Here we look to the literature of territorialization and specifically to Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on the subject. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish a territory from a milieu: “There is a territory precisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimensional instead, when they cease to be functional to become expressive.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) This notion of expressivity is central to their understanding of territory: they speak of “matters of expression” as “qualities,” drawing on the natural order for inspiration: “What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities). Take the example of color in birds or fish: color is a membrane state associated with interior hormonal states, but it remains functional and transitory as long as it is tied to a type of action (sexuality, aggressiveness, flight).” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) These matters of expression, or “qualities”, refer to the representational ground of territories. “[T]he component under consideration has become expressive and that its meaning, from this standpoint, is to mark a territory.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) What is implied is the inexorable relationship with expression, meaning, and the marking of a territory.

For Deleuze and Guattari “it is the mark that makes the territory”—semiotic categories arise as marks, like colors among flocks of birds, that produce the territory out of a milieu–that is, territorialization: “In this sense, the territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of territorialization.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) In elaborating on the natural world’s instances of territorialization they refer to the excrement of rabbits and the brightly colored sexual organs of monkeys that “that marks the limits of the territory.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) The becoming of the territory is a matter of the immediacy of delimited zones of expression: immediate grounds where meaning and signal-making establish the boundaries of the territory. They comment on the “rapidity” of this process: “It has been remarked how quick this becoming is in many cases, the rapidity with which a territory is constituted at the same time as expressive qualities are selected or produced.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337)

Understanding territory as a function of expressive qualities lends us a critical insight: territories are upheld not only by acts of control, as Sack implies, but by the signals that evoke the very potential for control. In this sense, there is already a representational exchange implied in the act of territorialization: one of boundary-making through the “expressive qualities” of those upholding the territory. In this sense the territory is inseparable from the representations that indicate it, and this inseparability might be the very same way it becomes the ground for experience in the same breath as a bounded zone of control. Because for a milieu to become a ground of experience presupposes territorialization: “Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) In other words, when milieu components become qualitative, they become representational, with their own codes and logics, that enable them to act as the ground of qualitative expression. We might thus see expression as starting from the territory’s border: indicative that within the territory is a “milieu of components become qualitative” with their own special representational regime and symbolic order.

As we start to ask questions of networks as territories, and territories as sovereign entities, we can begin our analysis at the border: asking what representational regimes set the stage for the internal representational logics of the territory and for its boundary conditions? What regimes of control are implied at the border and through what expressions or qualities? Such as the rattle of the snake suggests danger, but also a (albeit small) territory that is being penetrated, so we might ask how networks signal their territorial boundaries and the territorial, qualitative order that it implies once one has penetrated the network. What we are likely to find is a patchworked landscape of territories of meaning: representational regimes, each with their own border conditions that are manufactured and upheld from scales ranging from the individual to the national and beyond. How are these territories governed from within and at their borders? And how are new online social formations–emerging networks–showing the emergence of new kinds of “cultural sovereignty” over their territories of meaning?

How should we conceptualize “sovereignty” as it relates to digital networks and territories of meaning? A classic definition of sovereignty might define it as “the authority of a state to rule over its territory and the people within its borders, without external interference.” (Storey, 2017, p. 118). But as we move away from classical definitions of territory as geographical areas to territories of meaning, we might say that sovereignty also lies in an entity (why only the state?) to rule over its territory–these territories might be conceptualized as the ground of experience as well as a bounded zone of control–and so this means sovereignty over territories of meaning might be conceived as a kind of “cultural sovereignty.” That is, the right of an entity to govern the flows of meaning and the symbolic environment within its borders. Increasingly, as digital networks become the territories upon which meaning is made (as we’ll explore in greater detail throughout the essay) we find that cultural sovereignty becomes the right for networks to determine their own internal norms and modes of qualitative expression.

Terms

Emergent Sovereignty in the context of network sovereignty refers to the gradual and decentralized development of political authority and decision-making power within a virtual enclave or network. As individuals and groups come together online to form self-governing networks, they collectively establish norms, rules, and structures that govern their interactions and shared resources. This process of ‘emergent’ sovereignty is characterized by the bottom-up, organic, and adaptive nature of the political systems that arise, in contrast to traditional top-down, centralized models of state power. Examples of this could include decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that manage shared assets, online-offline communities that collectively determine their own policies, or online platforms that enable peer-to-peer governance of digital spaces. (Co-created on Semioscape.org)

This essay reclaims existing language and forges new terms to advance the core concept: the network is the territory. I introduce some neologisms to capture fluid, dynamical entities and processes that elude our existing lexicon. In other cases, I take existing words but use them with a specific, technical slant.

What is a network? In this essay, I use the word network to describe associations of social relationships that exist online and offline, mediated by (often corporately owned) digital infrastructure. A network is an organized system that gives rise to a structure within which social relationships can be carried out–such as through acts of communication and other forms of association enabled by the network. Examples include Web 2.0 social networks like Facebook, decentralized networks like Bluesky, offline networks like the Rotary International, content networks like Are.na, and online-offline networks like Trust. Each relies on its infrastructure–be it social, digital, or both–to create new possibilities of associating human relationships. In essence, networks are both infrastructure and a structure of social relationships.

Latour comments on the difficulty of using this word: “The word network is so ambiguous that we should have abandoned it long ago.” (Latour, 2005, p. 140). Its ambiguity lies in the multiple meanings of the word: “technical networks” like electrical, sewage, and communications networks; the sociological use of the term where “network represents one informal way of associating together human agents” (Latour, 2005, p. 140). When citing Castells (Castells, 2000), Latour notes how the boundaries blur: “since network becomes a privileged mode of organization thanks to the very extension of information technology. ” (Latour, 2005, p. 140)

Recently, the term “network” has been used by Balaji Srinivasan in his book, and subsequent conferences, “The Network State.” He summarizes the overall purpose of this movement as: “A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.” (Srinivasan, 2022) Here the term “network” is acting as a proxy for the digital connectivity that brings the “state” together but also the networks of associations between individuals, mediated by those digital systems, that allows for the possibility of collective action. This shows an evolution in the understanding of digital networks as one uses technical infrastructure–such as “an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census” (Srinivasan, 2022) to create new possibilities of social organization and even, as Srinivasan speculates, statehood.

I also introduce the concept of an associational network to describe the system of interconnected cultural objects, concepts, ideas, or memories that are linked together based on their relationships or associations. Associational networks can form in the mind, as networks of associations in semantic memory^[1]; they can be formed by large language models, such as the associative networks generated by the Semioscape.org tool; they can form as a result of curation: the act of putting elements together in a collection, such as an exhibition, playlist, social media feed, moodboard, or shopping basket.

This understanding of network aligns spiritually more closely with how Latour conceives of a network: a “Network is a concept, not a thing out there. It is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described. It has the same relationship with the topic at hand as a perspective grid to a traditional single point perspective painting: drawn first, the lines might allow one to project a three dimensional object onto a flat piece of linen; but they are not what is to be painted, only what has allowed the painter to give the impression of depth before they are erased.” (Latour, 2005, p. 142) In the same sense, invocation an “associative network” is not to say that it exists as a “thing out there” as much as a descriptive character to the structure of relations between objects and pairwise associations that arise between them when they’re organized and placed in a collection. It’s a way of describing an underlying mechanic of connotative reason by drawing attention to the network of relationships and associations that objects, when placed together in a collection, give rise to.

Images from a Cottagecore Are.na channel by aurum que.

Within a collection, an observer can form associations. Simply put, the observer looks for patterns even if ambiently. This gives rise to associational connections within the collection. These connections, when sufficiently repeated and iterated upon, can be regarded as a kind of style, aesthetic, or “core.” For instance, the repetition and curation of certain images, clothing styles, and ideas on networks like Pinterest, Etsy, Tumblr, and Instagram gave rise to “cottagecore” as an aesthetic and lifestyle trend. Curation and repetition are essential processes to the creation of robust associative networks. Curation creates the possibility for new, meaningful patterns to arise, while repetition strengthens the connection and makes what might be a fleeting association, a glancing observation of a pattern, one that’s enduring and robust through its repetition.

A SOOT visualization of 5,000 Air Jordans organized by “Color Way.”

These associational networks can combine to form wider “landscapes of meaning”–semioscapes. In their most literal form, semioscapes can include the spatial arrangement of semiotic material–such as moodboards, or SOOT visualizations. In their higher dimensional form, they might include semantic structures such as genres, styles, collections, aesthetics, etc. ranging from global scopes (flags as a semiotic genre) to hyper-local scopes (the particular set of custom reactions used by a Discord server). Invoking the metaphor of the “landscape” to describe these structures is to convey how they’re constantly in flux, naturally, on account of social processes and artificially, on account of learning algorithms.

We might think of semioscapes as a kind of semantic “milieu.” Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of milieu: “A milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 336) In this sense, semioscapes exist as associational networks that form through repetition and curation—semantic structures like genres or aesthetics—whose associations also “produce a difference” through associations that get excluded, for instance, that create a difference and thus a kind of representational boundary where one milieu passes into another. Each semioscape draws on its own internal flows of translation and association, creating representational logics that might be seen most starkly at the border: take the genre of French Bulldogs, whose difference is produced most strongly when juxtaposed with other breeds. Each breed is its own semioscape, that perhaps exists within the larger semioscape of “dog.”

The network that collective meaning-making is embedded within plays a role in the formation and maintenance of semioscapes. This makes semioscapes a hybrid entity, resulting at once from social activity and the directed channeling and (de)amplification of that activity by the network (“network effects”). Network effects refers to the emergent dynamics that arise when the structure of a network acts back on itself, amplifying or influencing behavior within the network. These effects can result from structural interventions, like updates to algorithms, which may create new filter bubbles, or from organic phenomena, such as particular media going viral. For instance, an Are.na moodboard (like the one featured above) reflects both individual or collective expression (what images are curated), but what media is accessible to be curated is a result of the participants’ location in the network (a network effect).

A Dall-E generated image of apples from “happy” (left) to “sad” (right).

Semioscapes can also be artificialized, such as latent spaces in generative AI models, that encode what are perhaps vast associational spaces (Wolfram calls these “Interconcept spaces”^[2]). I call the vast, submerged associational structures that form within models latentsemioscapes. The prefix ‘latent-’ is intended to connote that the model’s submerged, inner workings–its neural pathways and learned associations–there is a vast, untapped network of potential meanings, connections, and associations waiting to be activated through interaction. The latentsemioscape represents the internal, underlying structure of meaning within the model, a network that is not immediately visible but becomes accessible through interaction (much like how human thought draws on subconscious or hidden knowledge). In this sense, the latentsemioscape is social in that it is only accessed through interactions either with humans or other AI. Indeed, future writing will explore this particular –scape in greater depth.

Discourse as a system: the sociosemioscape. Source

One last neologism I have found useful is the sociosemioscape. This is the aggregate system of online and offline social communication and circulation of symbols. This resonates with Latour’s conceptualization of the social as a “circulating entity.” (Latour, 2005, p. 139) Local instances of the sociosemioscape at work include a conversation, a letter, a text message, a group discussion, acts of curation like making a playlist, and so on. This has emergent effects that can be perceived on a global level: political identities, national discourse, zeitgeists, cultural trends, and even the text corpus on which LLMs are trained (a kind of palimpsest of the sociosemioscape). We might think of the sociosemioscape as a vast interconnected associational network that spans micro (mind, conversation), meso (discourse, zeitgeist), and macro (cultural) scales. By gathering these three neologisms, we see that landscapes of meaning can occur socially (sociosemioscape), synthetically (latentsemioscape), and through a hybridization of the two (semioscape).

The flux of Wikipedia editing captured in History Flow (2003).

The sociosemioscape can be thought of as a subset, or mediating layer, of the noosphere. Conceptualized by Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920s, the noosphere refers to the sphere of human thought, encompassing the collective consciousness and intellectual activities of humanity. It is the “thinking layer” of the Earth, involving the totality of human intellectual and cultural activity that influences the biosphere and the planet. The sociosemioscape represents the social processes of cultural and symbolic exchange within the noosphere. It models collective meaning making on Earth as a process of minds, social structures, and ongoing, mediated symbolic exchange. Whereas the noosphere is the totality of human thought, among all disciplines, the sociosemioscape focuses on the social processes of semiotic exchange–from collective identity formation, linguistic processes, art and cultural production, and other cultural processes. The sociosemioscape, often captured by digital networks, can be considered the social activity harbored within networks that gives rise to network effects (like virality, popularity, trends, etc.) and local semioscapes (like individual or localized aesthetics).

The network is the territory

Algorithmic Territoriality refers to the ways in which algorithms and automated systems create, maintain, and enforce digital territories. This can be seen in how search engine algorithms prioritize certain websites over others, how social media platforms curate content and interactions, and how recommendation systems shape the informational landscapes and experiences users are exposed to. These algorithmic processes effectively carve out digital spaces and boundaries, influencing what users see, engage with, and have access to online. For example, the personalized search results and news feeds users receive are a form of algorithmic territoriality, as the algorithms determine the semioscapes–the digital ‘territory’–each individual navigates. These can be considered ‘individual semioscapes’, often formed on the backend by collective patterns and more diffuse, ambient meaning. (Co-created with Semioscape.org)

Networks often try to model, capture, and direct the activity of the sociosemioscape. For instance in classical social networks, an online “friend” or “follower” (on networks such as Instagram or Facebook) is a model of a social relation (that may or may not exist offline). Social behavior, such as discourse, is also intermediated by the network–both on the local level of one-to-one conversations–and the more emergent, aggregate sociosemioscape dynamics of virality, mass movements, political identity formation, fame, and so on. In common parlance, the term “platform” is used to describe these social media networks. I believe this is misguided. The term “platform” implies that the networks are acting as infrastructural backdrops upon which social dynamics can unfold. That the platforms are merely tools instrumentalized by people to conduct their social activity. This perspective overlooks the fact that networks are not inert vessels containing the social sphere; rather, they are actively contested territories that shape, capture, and direct the flow of social interaction.

The phrase “the network is the territory” captures the idea that the associative connections and relationships within a network—whether digital or physical—define how meaning is generated, interpreted, and circulated. In this sense, the network becomes the ground of meaning itself, shaping the sociosemioscape rather than merely reflecting it. Networks, through their curatorial structures, dictate what cultural artifacts, symbols, or semiotic objects become visible, relevant, or influential. As these networks grow more complex and intertwined, they increasingly influence our experience of the sociosemioscape, the broader cultural environment where meaning is produced and exchanged.

Just as a territory consists of physical landmarks and bounded geographies, a network consists of symbolic associations, social dynamics, and flows of attention. Traditional landscapes and territories were charactarized by their borders, whether fenced plots of land and entire country’s borders. The landscape of networks is defined by the arrangement of nodes and their connections in a network. The boundary of a network might be considered to be boundary nodes and dynamics that link to other networks–for instance gatekeepers who stem the flow of members and information into and out of the network, norms and conventions that pre-determine who feels at home in the network, and markers of collective identity from initiation rituals to access to offline relationships. Content moderation might also enforce boundaries for what discourse is permissible and is able to flow within the network.

These borders might appear vague, fuzzy, or ill defined. To trace the contours of the borders of networks is to understand the boundary zones where networks meet one another. It is in these boundary zones where we can understand how processes of territorialization are at work to define bounded zones of control that are simultaneously grounds of meaning-making. As we saw with Deleuze and Guattari, “it is the mark that makes the territory,” a pithy way of suggesting that the “the territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of territorialization” where territorialization is entailed by the marks that limit the territory. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1989, p. 337) As stated earlier, these marks suggest the regime of control that is effected within the territory. This includes the translations of associations and flows of meaning–the unique affordances for how the social is enacted within the bounds of the territory. The boundary zones, while fuzzy, mark thresholds where the underlying translational regimes change and differ in some way. Questions of sovereignty and cultural sovereignty, then, rely on an understanding of territory enabled by boundary zones that are characterized by marks of difference that are themselves upheld and produced by ongoing processes of territorialization.

In general we might understand the boundaries of networks as producing a difference with other networks. As we saw earlier on, the boundary signals might be indicators of the internal symbolic order of the network: the interface of a digital network shows a threshold and point of entrance and egress–a surface upon which a certain representational order applies. At first it might appear to offer analogs of existing social relations: “liking” something, for instance, might appear to model the affective enjoyment of a piece of media, and yet, on each network that offers the ability to “like” something, it has particular algorithmic meanings that influence the wider social flows of the network. In this way digital networks create a kind of boundary to their internal symbolic environment through the production of the interface. This gets more complex as we move away from purely digital networks to online–offline networks, yet the base principle of producing a difference with other networks, or milieus, stands.

To understand how networks maintain their territories of meaning, we can take the example of affinity-based networks. These are ones where members gather because of shared interests and affinities. They might develop shared norms and rules, common (if informal) governance structures, and engage in collective action to pursue a common vision. As they begin to co-curate, they not only begin to create an idiosyncratic aesthetic language but an emergent political identity. This results in a co-evolution of emergent network effects (such as virality) and individual and collective agency of members of the network (such as common projects and governance, manifestos, influencers, etc.).

We find here a productive tension between the kinds of emergent group behaviors that are enabled by the network and its affordances and the intentional, organized activities that are pursued by individuals or groups in the network. These are often complimentary. Take, for instance, a “devirtualization” event where members of a network that are mostly offline come together in person. This is a result of both the sustained, planned activity of the event’s organizers and the network effects–group flocking behaviors–that determine who actually attends. Of course there is interplay between the two, and the organizers may try to leverage their agency in the network to influence the network effects. This might occur by way of patterns of association which align with the network’s internal regimes of signification: using certain aesthetics, inviting prominent members of the network, etc.

Notable examples of networks that have grown in influence seem to balance these two dynamics, containing members who achieve high agency in the network and thereby are better able to leverage network effects. Within networks there is the ongoing tension between emergent, collective network effects which might, for example, result in trends, norms, neologisms, viral media, and the influence exhibited by those with high networked agency (“influencers”) who are mostly at the behest of emergent network effects as well.

It seems network effects have the upper hand over the influencers. Even Elon Musk, who not only has a large following on his network but indeed owns the network and controls its infrastructure, another form of influence and networked agency, appears to have relatively moderate sway over the network’s semioscape (at least, relative to his own desire for power and control). Indeed, Musk can tinker at the margins, changing the feed’s parameters, removing blocking as a feature, and make other infrastructural changes, but this does not fundamentally shift the primacy of network effects in the network: the collective intelligence that determines what material goes viral, what memes become canonized, what political identities form on the network, and so on. These are primarily emergent effects of the sociosemioscape that are partially captured by Musk’s network, and yet even though he controls the mediation, the network continues to operate semi-autonomously of any single actor. This might be due to the fact that the network’s core architecture relies upon algorithmic curation–in the form of personalized feeds. Given the highly connected and non-linear nature of the network’s architecture, it’s far from clear that human influence over the feed algorithms can result in intended network effects.

This raises a crucial question of the governability of semioscapes. If they arise as a result of network effects that are themselves flows and translational patterns that circulate through the network, then can they be governed? What kinds of control do individuals or groups even have about the terms by which meaning is produced and reproduced within the context of a network? In the regulatory sense, can a governing body dictate the way in which meaning flows? What would this look like, and to what end? Or are semioscapes fundamentally ungovernable from without? Instead their equilibrium and self-maintenance might be an emergent quality. For if semioscapes are themselves autopoietic–self-creating and self-maintaining–then we might see them more as autonomous cultural forces that exist in relation to individual human agency without necessarily being at the behest of it. Nevertheless, they are still internally governed by their intrinsic operative logics–patterns of association–that are the terms of the symbolic environment created by the semioscape. For instance, a cottagecore moodboard has tacit “rules” that govern “what is cottagecore” that operate on a purely associative basis (does media X associatively cohere with media set S). The curation of such a semioscape might be controlled at its borders by a person, and yet the associative patterns that dictate the direction of the semioscape itself might be more a result of the media and the patterns that arise from it than by any predetermined curatorial rule set.

In networks that feature algorithmic curation–such as networks that contain personalized feeds or algorithmic playlists–the network’s members may have lessened agency over network effects, as access to the network’s semioscape is constantly being mediated and revised by the algorithms. Designers of networks should carefully consider networked agency–the ability of individuals to leverage network effects, such as by exploiting curation algorithms and network effects intrinsic to the system. This delicate dance between network effects and individual agency, and how the two mutually shape each other, gets only more complex and non-linear with the insertion of algorithmic curation. A network’s sovereignty may partially rest in how it manages this interplay: can a network that’s dominated by its network effects (and those who exploit them) claim to have autonomy? What should networks do with individuals with disproportionate networked agency? This includes the network’s operators, whose networked agency is often exercised in the form of algorithmic control. People whose networks are intermediated by algorithms may wish to ask who has networked agency in their network and how does that affect their autonomy?

As the semioscapes we have access to are increasingly determined by networks, whether algorithmically or people-created, meaning becomes ambient. Networks form vibes, and these become important attractors to which networks people join. Vibes, the ambient meaning of a network’s semioscape, become an important force for driving network effects and growing the network. If a vibe has resonance, it may attract more members and thus continue to shape the ambient meaning possible in the network. Vibes are as fluid as the networks they exist within, and are upheld by the ongoing processes of curation–algorithmic or otherwise–that creates the underlying associative networks that give rise to vibes themselves. As meaning becomes ambient, it no longer emerges from individual objects or media (indeed, individual cultural or political objects may lose all meaning and relevance) but from how they are situated within these networks. The network is not simply a tool for navigating the cultural sphere; it is the cultural sphere, as it defines the relational structures through which meaning is both created and experienced.

Networked Identities

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A 1940’s newspaper stand.

As we increasingly find our social lives intermediated by networks, network effects increasingly start to shape identities–how we self-identify to ourselves and others, the signals and symbols we use to communicate this identity, the political networks, information and norms we have access to, and thus the material we have access to to continually reinvent ourselves in response to a changing world. Prior to digital networks, communities imagined themselves using other mass media models. These large-scale purveyors of meaning could create nation-scale semioscapes, thus creating the informational basis for collective identities: I am an American, I am a Houstonian, I am a Swiftie. These are also known as “anonymous identities” because you can’t know each individual who adopts this identity (as we’ll see this is a fundamental requirement for sociality). Institutions are often architected to support and maintain large-scale semioscapes and their anonymous identities–from national mythmaking through institutions like museums, to the educational system reinforcing a sense of national history, to corporations that leverage a star’s networked agency to reproduce a cohesive fandom.

Benedict Anderson draws attention to this aspect, without explicitly naming the semioscape. In Imagined Communities, he defines a nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” A nation “is imagined, because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet, in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Therefore, the ability to uphold anonymous identities exists because there is a shared imagination of the community. This shared imagination is the community’s semioscape, which is both experienced individually and collectively.

In the era of print media, there was greater alignment between the collective and individual semioscapes, because of the “mass ceremonies” that members of the nation state participated in, such as reading the newspaper. Anderson writes about this astutely: “It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” (35) The newspaper was itself a semioscape, a territory for meaning making, that intervened in the offline social processes of the sociosemioscape. A story could shape discourse among members of a community all reading the same article, creating a shared reference frame against which anonymous identities could form and therefore maintain a sense of nationhood.

In the networked age, this “mass” ceremony might be reading a Substack, subscribing to a podcast, scrolling in a curated feed, a popular playlist, or lurking in a Discord channel. Each of these streams have different levels of intermediation and algorithmic curation. It’s possible that the more aligned the common media is with a given network, the more it has the ability to create a cohesive semioscape (shared ambient meaning, or vibes). For example, if a diffuse group of people who don’t know each other or don’t have a shared anonymous identity are listening to the same playlist that’s less likely to create an active and vibrant semioscape than if a network of people are sharing and curating music together (as is the case with the crate coalition, whose motto is “Curation is Care”). In other words, it’s the ability for a network to co-curate meaning around a cultural happening that matters, not the fact they’re on a shared list. Which public has a more robust semioscape–the one with 100 members in dialogue? Or that with 10,000 “followers” who parasocially engage with a channel but do not speak with one another?

This extends to political identities. Channels of media (such as a podcast or a Substack, or a network thereof) that create shared discourses might have a more vibrant and active semioscape. Notably, this transition to virtual enclaves wrests control from the large institutions and nation-scale semioscapes. Now anyone can be a cultural producer, in effect creating a “cambrian explosion” of semioscapes proliferating alongside different networks and epistemic gatherings. This incipient model of media engagement, happening still (mostly) within the container of the state, creates a patchwork of overlapping and intersecting publics, organized largely by where in the broader macro-network individuals and groups find themselves.

Networked Sovereignties

Virtual Enclaves refer to the digital spaces or online communities that individuals or groups create and claim as their own within the broader digital landscape. These enclaves can take various forms, such as private online forums, specialized social media groups, or even virtual worlds like online gaming environments. Within these enclaves, users establish a sense of digital territoriality, where they can express their identities, share common interests, and engage in exclusive interactions, often with a heightened sense of privacy and control over the digital space. (Semioscape.org)

Wikipedia defines Westphalian sovereignty as “a principle in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory.^[3]” Traditionally, a territory is a geographical area of land belonging to a country. The word territory has emerged from the Latin word terra (‘earth, land’) and later the Latin word territorium (‘land around a town’)^[4]. Indeed, the notion of territory is deeply connected to the structures of sociality–townhood. The territory, as conceived by Westphalianism, comprised landmasses and borders. Historically, these are the ground upon which social organization and the processes of the sociosemioscape unfolded: political identities such as nationality were a result of land-bounded proximity and imagined^[5], anonymous^[6] identities. This is because the territory upon which offline social networks could prosper were equivalent to territorial boundaries of governance and community-ship: the village, town, city, nation, etc. were themselves as much social units as governance units, tied to geographic land. The unit of nationhood was therefore tied to the territory that was around the imagined community, itself an offline network and host to a geographically bounded sociosemioscape.

However as communities have moved to online networks, their social processes are no longer bound by geographical constraints. Once online, the network becomes the territory in which meaning is made, communities are imagined, and political identities are formed. In today’s online landscape, it’s not uncommon for individuals to affiliate with multiple networks and their attendant subcultures. For example, while it might be unusual to be part of a “national” network (e.g. a Facebook group for Danes) one might be a part of a more specific affinity-based network (e.g. a Discord server for FKA Twigs fans “Twigscord”). Indeed, such networks often traverse Westphalian borders and create new, specific identities because of the cultural material they curate and repeat, and therefore the kinds of specific semioscapes that are allowed to form within the network. These semioscapes can be as political as they’re aesthetic or epistemic.^[7]

As networks become the virtual home to social formations, the question of autonomy and sovereignty comes to the fore. Given that networks often span geographical boundaries, their sovereignty is not tied up in geographic territory, so what is it? The answer to this question rests in a constellation of interacting layers. Organizations like Dweb, are pursuing decentralized infrastructures to create networks that are “private, reliable, secure and open.” A panoply of organizations are experimenting with new governance systems to enable the self-governance of virtual enclaves. Online networks that center around “objects-of-affection,” like wiki and open source communities, may try to establish their sovereignty in relation to larger corporate actors. However, when it comes to the cultural sovereignty of networks, the territory is semioscapes.

A network’s autonomy depends on the free flow of meaning within the network, allowing for convergent and divergent processes of meaning making without interference from state or corporate actors. In order to secure their semioscapes, communities have increasingly retreated to the “cozy web”^[8]–Discord servers and federated networks that allow them to self-govern, determine their identities, and sense-make without external interference. The “borders” of such “cozy” networks are secured by controlling who can participate in the network and therefore what information flows into and out of it. Instances include Resonet, Do Not Research, Trust, and New Models Discord networks. For example, Resonet has an admissions form that prospective participants must complete to get admitted to the network. Then within the network, it has additional automated mechanisms for determining who can participate in what discourse channels.

To recap, virtual territories are networks and the semioscapes that form within them. The population is the nodes in the network (including people, cultural objects) and the links are their relationships (be they social and parasocial relationships or connotative and associative relationships). The borders can be thought of as both hard and soft borders. Hard borders include nodes that control the flow of people and information, ingress and egress protocols, and structural borders such as what relationships exist between nodes (the connectivity of the network). For instance, Resonet (an emerging online-offline network) uses AI agents to determine what information leaves its network. Soft borders often rely on the property of resonance, tacit norms and behaviors that include and exclude members, aesthetic choices that may attract or put off members, and political and value alignments within the network and its semioscape that create affinity and difference. In the case study that follows, we’ll see the use of slurs acting as a “soft border” that intentionally puts off people with certain political alignments. These virtual, hard borders can be enforced through digital means, such as blockchain-based governance systems or decentralized applications with sophisticated protocols, rather than traditional geographic or national boundaries. Others, especially soft borders, may leverage the ambient meaning of the network via curation and repetition to uphold the boundaries of the network’s semioscape.

Within this regime, the sovereignty of networks can be thought of as virtual territory, population, borders, and the authority thereof. The network’s semioscape becomes a core site of contest for determining the network’s collective identity situated in shared aspirations, values, and culture.^[9] Networks’ participants ability to form any collective identity is rooted in their ability to form imagined, anonymous identities–identities that are imagined because they are constructed in the mind of the participant and upheld by the social order of the network and its semioscape, and anonymous because people are not “identified by their individual names, but by symbolic markers of group identity, such as race, nationality, tribe, class, sexuality, profession, membership in a club or guild, political party, and so on.”^[10] These symbolic markers themselves belong to the network’s semioscape and are contested sites of action, as we well know.

Thinkers about sovereignty have identified the property of functional sovereignty: “a practical capacity to operate effectively alongside or outside of existing state structures.”^[11] This idea can be extended to the semioscape. The functional sovereignty of the semioscape suggests that means of meaning making operate in parallel to existing state structure. Indeed the semioscape of the state is upheld by institutions such as the educational system, museums and certain galleries, as we earlier noted, but also institutions that impose anonymous identities. Blaise Agüera y Arcas gives a lucid analysis, citing James C. Scott, in how state functions create anonymous identities:

Anonymous identities often don’t emerge as an organic, bottom-up social phenomenon, though. Rather, they tend to be imposed from above, as detailed by political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott. In his 1998 book Seeing Like a State, Scott describes the social machinery required by any government to perform its usual functions: taxation, military conscription, representation (maybe), and prevention of rebellion (as needed). To exert power over its people, the state must first render those people “legible,” meaning that they must be identified, counted, classified, and quantified. The state will want to know where you live; this is why, once sedentary farming has made statehood possible, and an aspiring state has marked out its borders, life within those borders becomes increasingly difficult for wanderers, nomads, travelers, gypsies, and the houseless—anyone whose coordinates (not to mention allegiances, property rights, and obligations) can’t be pinned down.

Yet as networks increasingly move towards connotative and associative modes of reasoning, people also are now rendered “legible” by their location in the network and the symbolic associations they adopt. This might be classic countercultural identifiers (think punk leather jacket) or highly networked, connotative identifiers (such as who you follow and who follows you). These kinds of symbolic, associative identifiers increasingly exist outside what is legible to the state, but what can be highly legible to the algorithmic platforms and recommender systems that are host to the networks and communities. In this sense, I agree with Blaise that anonymous identities are not “an organic, bottom-up social”. But, increasingly, the associative symbolic identities we adopt are formed on the basis of network-level phenomena: resonance, position in the network, and so on. This is itself the result of the tension between network effects (including algorithms) and individuals with high networked agency. The nation states in Blaise’s account want to know where you live in their territory. Meanwhile, networked entities will want to know where its members exist in its semioscape (whether that be political alignment, aesthetic subculture, “core”, sexual identity, and so on)–largely for the purposes of administering targeted advertisement.

In the age of semioscapes, sovereignty, then, can be conceptualized not only as operating effectively outside state structure but outside the influence of corporations and their networks that seek to control or influence a network’s semioscape. Rather than the unit of sovereignty being massive nation-states, the sovereign unit is a million little sovereignties (or none). This rupturing renders sovereignty at the (virtual, or not) neighborhood/network level. Networks might achieve this ‘neighborhood’ sovereignty by moving their members to less algorithmically mediated digital environments, like Discord or Telegram channels, or federated, distributed environments. Others may move offline entirely–using zines, happenings, physical proximity, and other tried and tested modes of meaning making. While networks widely recognize that algorithmic intervention and centralized content moderation affect their sovereignty, the ability to “exit” entirely has been hampered by slow innovation, structural lock-in, and a lack of viable alternatives.

Conclusion

Perhaps a more robust understanding of how semioscapes form on networks can help us cultivate community norms, infrastructures, and governance models that prioritize the integrity of a network’s semioscape. We can learn from emerging and established networks that are already doing so. Sonically, like Crate Coalition and Resonate Coop. Visually, like Are.na. Textually, like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and Distributed Press. In games, the wikis operated by Weird Gloop. With offline localities, like Cabin and P2P.Net Works. Online-offline enclaves with cohesive intellectual and aesthetic semioscapes like Resonet, Trust and Do Not Research. And infrastructurally, like Dweb.

This article has covered wide theoretical and practical terrain to make the argument that the network is the territory. We’ve uncovered new terms like semioscape, sociosemioscape, and associational network to better understand how meaning forms in networks. We looked at how network identities form through “mass ceremonies” like reading Substacks or listening to podcasts. We then surfaced the tension between the networked agency of individuals and emergent, collective network effects in driving the dynamics of network behavior and their semioscapes. We explored the notion of network sovereignty in the context of semioscapes, and looked at how the notion of anonymous identity can help us interpret the role of semioscapes in how online-offline communities can pursue functional sovereignty over the creation and reproduction of anonymous, political identities.

In the networked age, ambient meaning, associational/connotative reasoning, and the vibes they give rise to have become core drivers of how networked media is produced and consumed. Vibes act as attractors for identities to coalesce and form online. Crucially, these social dynamics have been captured and amplified by networks and individuals with high networked agency. A network’s sovereignty will partially rest in how it reclaims agency over its semioscape.

Questions

Creating networks in the digital age is to create new cultural spheres. Ambient meaning arises from networks in the form of semioscapes. The terrain of semioscapes put together might map out the noosphere itself. These are big questions and ones still under investigation. For now, the important questions for network maintainers and operators to consider are:

• What are the nodes in my network? This could be people, but also cultural objects, aesthetics, and
• What are the links in my network? For instance, this could be social relations, parasocial relations, acts of curation that put nodes together (forming associative links between them), and so on.
• What are the boundaries of my network?
  • Both considering the flow of information into and out of the network, how your network connects with and brushes up against other networks.
  • What are the boundaries of my network’s semioscape? This might be upheld through social norms (what kind of content is permissible to include and what gets intentionally left out) and curation (what kinds of collections exist within the network: playlists, channels, feeds, aggregators, etc.)
• How do I ensure the sovereignty of my network?
  • This might be in maintaining and upholding the hard and soft borders of the network. Protecting the semioscape of the network, for example, by determining who can participate and who has agency over what ambient meaning gets established.

Territories of Meaning pt. II coming soon.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to SOAM and its curatorial team. My gratitude to Felix Beer, Virginia Zangs, Judd Smith, and Jing Yi Teo for their collaboration. To Blaise Agüera y Arcas for inspiration. To Mar for reviewing and eyebrow raising. To Steve Jackson, Malte Jung, and Chris Csíkszentmihályi for their advisorship and institutional support.

Bibliography
Castells, Manuel. 2000. ‘Toward a Sociology of the Network Society’. Contemporary Sociology 29 (5): 693–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/2655234.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Srinivasan, Balaji. 2022. The Network State: How To Start a New Country. Amazon Kindle. https://thenetworkstate.com/