Scaling up: Estonian e-Residency and the Pursuit of a Digital Diaspora

On December 1, 2014, anyone, living anywhere in the world, became eligible for Estonian e-residency. Though e-Estonians are not entitled to physical residency or social services, in exchange for biometric data and a 100€ fee, they receive digital access to many of the more than 600 online services Estonia already provides its 1.3 million residents. By co-operating with the private sector to “create value” for digital residents, the state hopes to recruit at least 10 million e-Estonians by 2025. “You don’t have to live in Estonia to be part of our country,” says Taavi Kotka, Estonia’s Chief Information Officer. Estonia is the first country in the world to offer digital residency, and the program is often explained as a creative response to the country’s shrinking birth rate and rising out-migration. Attracting e-resident “e-Estonians,” the Prime Minister Taavi Rõivas once joked, is a faster way to become a “superpower” in the world than passing a law requiring all families to have at least 5 children. In this talk, I consider e-Residency as a response to the “crisis” of demographic decline. I argue that e-Residency can be understood as an effort to create a national economy that is scaleable, i.e. capable of infinite expansion without any undesired concomitant impacts on Estonia's population, demography, politics, or cultural sphere.