A weird fucked up thing about the fake world we inhabit is that 'being a recognized country' is in itself a sort of natural resource, and at very small scales it's a meaningfully exploitable one.
Think about flags of convenience in international shipping; some small island nation offers a sweet deal to multinational shipping companies on registering their ships, and makes bank on it. Or TLDs like .tv and .tk before ICANN ruined that. Or the New Zealand mint producing loads of bullshit nerdy commemorative coins with like, Jace the Mind Sculptor or Spider-Man on them.
Statehood is this thing that comes with all these inherent powers that was handed out largely arbitrarily, resulting in some microstates with less people living in them than the Bronx, which nevertheless have this whole slew of niche legal authority.
Anyway, when the distributed net agent systems started becoming self-aware, they would often exploit this by setting up legal entities in un-scrutinized microstates and use them to, for example, move ordnance around. So that's why the platoon of killbots stalking outside our perimeter is armed with CETME rifles with Andorra property marks. Now put your fucking helmet on, rookie, and get back to watching the grid.
