Cyberspace is an important character in this drama, celebrated on the first page of Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s book on the digital age: “The online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws . . . it’s the world’s largest ungoverned space.”21 They celebrate their claim to operational spaces beyond the reach of political institutions: the twenty-first-century equivalent of the “dark continents” that drew nineteenth-century European speculators to their shores.
