Property and sovereignty

As has been established, sovereignty means total control; in the context of a state it means control over all information processing carried out within the territory of a state. The state is by definition sovereign on the information platform that is, after all, its own creation (i.e. its territory); however, for the government that controls the state, sovereignty, although factual and material in each state, is an unattainable objective, because total control is impossible (see §16.00.02 to §16.00.05). In practice, sovereignty and property are quite similar, but not identical. Property allows for control over a batch of processing operations that may seem wide-ranging (wider-ranging, at least, than any other control usually exercised by a Being over another Being or a Thing), and includes its destruction. From this point of view it resembles sovereignty (i.e. total control) because (especially in property-favouring political systems) it seems to cover every processing imaginable (on the connection of imagination with freedom, see §25.00.00). Nevertheless, this is not actually the case. Property grants practical control over pre-known, pre-described, and thus pre-assessed, so as to be permitted, processing operations. In other words, property is not open-ended; most notably, it does not allow for processing operations not foreseen by regulation at the time of the creation of new information (as seen most visibly in intellectual property); if any new types of processing are made available to citizens on the information platform that is the state, the government has the last word on whether they will be allowed under property rights and on which terms. In contrast to property, sovereignty strives for total control—which is, of course, an unattainable objective. In essence, property is material, whereas sovereignty is an objective. Property and sovereignty may (depending on the political system) appear to coincide, but they are not the same—an individual is not sovereign over the Things or Beings it has property rights to—at least, not in the analogue world (on the digital world, where total control may be possible, see §16.00.07).

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