The difference between the United States and Britain can be summed up in a word: frontiers. Where Americans see a frontier as a promise, as the hope of a brighter tomorrow, of a virgin land waiting to be marked with the wheel print of a covered wagon, the British see it as a line with the French on the other side. The American cries, "Roll 'em!" and charges towards the horizon; his British cousin peers out from behind the net curtains, mutters, "wogs start at Calais", then turns back to his copy of the Sun.
This is all, of course, a question of history. The steady westward march of the "wild frontier" is the defining American experience. The British equivalent is a kind of grudging contraction, Albion's grumpy withdrawal from the world behind its impregnable walls of water. Both outlooks present problems, especially when dealing with cyberspace. Cyberspace has no borders. It routes round attempts to erect them. So both insular parochialism and rampant expansionism seem rather silly.
Defensiveness brings with it an obvious misunderstanding of the Net - an unwillingness to go outside and play. Expansionism seems just as ludicrous, though it should be remarked that it's not just an American problem. Historically, the British have also been quite good at invading places, a fact which never ceases to amaze me. As someone who is a (half-Indian, half-English) product of colonialism, it's a central mystery of my existence how the British managed to colonise any place where they had to eat the local food and found it hard to get their favourite brand of fags.
In the real world, expansion is no simple matter. When you have reached the Pacific Ocean, you are forced to turn your attention to unsatisfying adventures like flattening parts of the Middle East. With no sense of progression - no narrative - this is a fast-food kind of colonialism: ten minutes after you order one missile strike you feel like another. So cyberspace is a godsend for that aspect of the American psyche which had remained unsatisfied since the first coast-to-coast rail journey. The wild-west rhetoric of US cyberpundits is a kind of sigh of relief.
Trouble is, cyberspace is infinite. There aren't any frontiers, wild or otherwise. There's certainly no way of shutting the castle doors and defending your patch against all comers. Borders begin in the mind. The rhetoric of aggression and defence, of expansion and colonisation, has no place in this placeless space.
Hari Kunzru is associate editor of Wired.