Rumi wrote about the reed flute at the beginning of the Masnavi — the ney, cut from the reed bed, crying for its origin. Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separations. The separation is the wound that makes music possible. The longing for union is what gives the flute its voice.
I think about this poem when I think about borders. Not because I'm a romantic nationalist — I'm not. But because the structure of the longing is interesting. The reed is in exile. The exile is arbitrary — the reed didn't choose to be cut from the bed any more than a person chooses to be born in one country rather than another. The condition of separation is imposed by external forces and then treated as natural, permanent, and identity-defining.
Code already crossed the border
Linus Torvalds built Linux because he was annoyed. He was a student in Finland who wanted a Unix-like operating system and couldn't afford the one that existed. What he built in that annoyance became the substrate of roughly 70% of the servers on the internet, most of the world's supercomputers, and every Android device on the planet. The kernel has no nationality. It runs in data centers in Bahrain and Iceland and Singapore. It doesn't ask where you're from before executing your process.
The internet is the first technology that demonstrated empirically that the most important things humans make can cross borders without asking permission. This is not a political statement. It's an observation about how packets work. TCP/IP doesn't have a visa system. When I push code to GitHub, it doesn't matter that I'm in Montreal and the server is in Virginia and the collaborator is in Warsaw. The protocol doesn't know or care.
AI is finishing what the internet started
What AI changes — what I think it will finish — is the borderlessness of labor and knowledge at the level of cognition, not just information. The internet made information borderless. AI is in the process of making cognition borderless. The ability to reason carefully about a complex domain, which previously required either years of expensive education or proximity to an expert, is becoming a network service. Geography is decreasingly correlated with capability.
I don't think borders will disappear. I think they'll become increasingly administrative — maintained by people who benefit from scarcity of mobility, enforced in physical space, and increasingly irrelevant in the spaces where most economic value is created. The people who understand this first will make decisions accordingly. I'm one of them.
Rumi's reed wants to return to the reed bed. I think the reed bed is everywhere now. The longing is for something we already have, if we can stop letting state machines tell us where we're from.