The older I get the more I can't stand "countries" as a concept. Especially this notion that somehow countries own their citizens. It's quite gross to me...

Countries do not own their citizens, citizens own their countries. Countries are a technology - albeit an old and sometimes useful technology, but a technology. This is like an iPhone requiring your permission to leave it on the counter for a day.

This idea that you're not allowed to travel without a permit is a perverse inversion of reality. People are not property and the idea that a "country" can feed human beings into one meat-grinder or another at will in order to preserve itself is the very thing that the AI safety people are panicked about. It's the paperclip maximizer, but instead of making paperclips it tries to grow and expand it's influence into all aspects of the human experience. Increasingly this disgusts me at a cellular level.