Stateless

Meme

There is no carryover of the state at one time to the state at a later time.

People

Hannah Arendt was consistently attuned to the question of “the right to have rights,” and how such legal standing rested precariously on the whims of the state. The legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron, in a 2007 essay, remarked on her abiding concern for those banished to a realm beyond the law: “She would have been appalled by the ‘legal black hole’ at Guantánamo Bay.

Technology

Representational state transfer ([[REST]) claims to be Stateless, meaning each message is complete in itself and doesn't depend on prior messages. This is not the way the web work, however. The following show how state is imposed on a Stateless protocol.

1. The HTTP protocol is piggybacked on top of TCP or TLS which maintains state.
2. HTTP/3 - version 3 is a rewrite of HTTP that uses the QUIC protocol instead of TCP, and also comes with built-in TLS (encryption) support.
3. The application layer sends cookies in the HTTP header which is used to contain state data.

"Stateless" in mathematics refers to systems or functions that don't retain memory of past inputs/outputs, relying purely on current inputs for results (like pure functions in programming), but the term also appears in advanced contexts like Quantum Mechanics (seeking state-free descriptions) and discussions around Gödel's theorems, suggesting classical math's inherent contradictions with continuous reality might point towards a need for discrete, stateless-like foundational structures for computability and reality. Essentially, it's about functions/systems where history doesn't matter versus those where it does.

Comparison

Comparing a nation to a protocol involves viewing the nation as the complex entity (people, land, government) and the protocol as its essential, underlying rules of behavior, diplomacy, and digital interaction, highlighting how both need shared understanding, order, and adaptation to function, whether through diplomacy (state protocol) or technology (network protocols) to manage interactions and maintain coherence. A nation's "state" is its physical and political reality (sovereignty, territory, people), while a protocol is the rules defining correct interaction, like diplomatic courtesy or TCP/IP, ensuring predictability, though modern "network states" blur lines, using code as law.