Virtual States and Symbolic Markets of Identity

The author analyzes virtual states in the contexts of identity markets. There is assumed that virtual states can play the role of both subjects and objects of modern symbolic exchange. The article shows that virtual states do not have a common definition, and those who study them offer different approaches ranging from economic to cultural, from social to anthropological. On the one hand, virtual states can sell their identities. The author presumes that markets can be defined as cultures, and cultures as markets. On the other hand, the virtual states’ “products” that actualize their identity can also be goods. There is assumed that the processes of globalization and virtualization significantly changed the vectors and trajectories of identities development, turning them into a part of the market economy. The article assumes that the nation-state is gradually losing its monopoly right to represent the identity of the nation, and new actors are trying to challenge this right by proposing their own projects for identity development. The author believes that the emergence of virtual states in identity markets was the result of a performative turn and a craft revolution, for virtual states appeared as the consequences of economy craftivization, offering various mechanisms to monetize identities and turn them into sacred and symbolic political products. The author believes that the virtual state was caused by the craftivization of the serial mass identities proposed in the 19th century as in the age of nationalism. There is assumed that the virtual states were the attempts to challenge the regular state’s monopoly inherited from the modern era to construct national identities. Therefore, the article analyzes the virtual states as attempts to revise the modern nation-state in the contexts of a cultural turn in the economy, which turned it into a sphere of production of meanings and identities. In general, the author considers virtual states as a new and alternative form of economic functioning, where the sense-making and meaning-generating constructs that invent and imagine new types and forms of identities become goods.