Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnographic engagement with an Estonian government initiative, this paper considers the techno-legal work necessary to produce subjects capable of accessing debt/relations online.

Paper long abstract:

Launched in late 2014, e-Residency is an Estonian state initiative that aims to "unlock the entrepreneurial potential of every world citizen" by allowing almost anyone to become an Estonian e-resident. Though they cannot live or work in Estonia, e-residents receive a digital ID from the Estonian state and can remotely found and operate Estonian limited liability firms. By relying on Estonia's digital identity authentication infrastructure, it is hoped, e-residents around the world can sidestep the discriminatory protocols and limited service landscapes that limit their capacity to engage in online entrepreneurship.This paper draws on my extended institutional ethnography with the e-Residency team to argue that the service the program offers e-residents is effectively the ability to achieve the requisite individuality for credit/debt relations online. This argument unfolds in three parts. First, I summarize the critical literature and show that many authors consider a self-contained individual subject characterized by a unity of body and mind as a necessary pre-condition for debt/credit relations. Second, I review the literature on personhood in cyberspace and show that scholars have historically conceptualized the Internet as a space that elicits highly-relational modes of being and complicates the process of identification. Finally, I describe how both the individuality necessary for commerce and the difficulty of enacting it online are discursively constructed in the context of Estonian e-Residency. I argue that e-Residency is a set of laws, technologies, and commercial contracts that enables entrepreneurs to achieve the individuality necessary for Internet-mediated debt/credit and exchange relations.