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The 1980s' great paradigm shift to distributed computing delivered “location independence,” which might well be thought of as location irrelevance…. A fully wired world has no inherent concept of place in the physical way. “Location” last had meaning when it could be “surveyed and marked off” (as the dictionary says). An electronic identity is equivalently without physical embodiment; rather, it is exactly equal to the ability to control a name by controlling its cryptographic key. I postulate, then, a fundamental change: the boundaries of the future will be overlapping spaces defined neither by their geometry nor their mass but by cryptographic keys that alone can demarcate the scope of their identity.