We are accustomed to think of the “cloud” as a place-less, formless mass of data floating “out there.” It has even been argued that new computer technologies and the movement of companies’ data “to the cloud” might so transform our inherited notions of time, space, and power that it could mean the end of history, geography, and power. The case of “e-Estonia,” however, challenges this notion: Estonia is a country which, unlike people and companies going “to the cloud,” hopes to actually move itself “into the cloud,” with profound implications for how we understand both the cloud metaphor and geopolitics in the digital age. e-Estonia Estonia is a small former Soviet Republic in northern Europe, with a territory of only 45 thousand square kilometers and population of just 1.3 million. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it has made a number of moves towards building a digital state, or, as it is often referred to, an “e-Estonia.” As a Research Fellow with the Centre for Science and Technology Studies of the European University at St. Petersburg, I have been studying how with e-Estonia the “the cloud” actually becomes a new type of space, the contours of which affect other concrete spaces and feed into a new type of nation-building project. (read more...)