>The Tallinn Manual of 2013 and its second edition, the Tallinn Manual 2.0 of 2017, are NATO-funded analyses of how existing international laws of war apply to cybersecurity and cyberwarfare. The difficulties faced by the groups of legal experts who produced these works often involve fundamental aspects of what it is to be a state altogether, challenging the survival of the state as a dominant political form altogether. These developments, in turn, provide significant challenges to the survival of the Westphalian system within which states have been defined for almost 500 years. This article thinks through the Tallinn manuals from the lens of what debates over the appropriate legal treatment of cyber operations under international law tells us about how the state is being experienced and understood in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Comparative analysis of the first and second editions of the Manual shows that just what the informational state is, what it can do, and what it should be allowed to do is becoming less clear, not more, over time.