US power to rule a digital world ebbs away
As Donald Trump’s America gears up for a full-blown trade war with the resurgent China, Washington seems to have forgotten the very mechanisms that assured its dominance in the post-cold war era. Those mechanisms were underpinned not just by America’s military might, but also by its ability to minimise the odds of any anti-systemic dissent.
American policymakers have known perfectly well that the hallmark of effective hegemony is the invisibility of its operations. Getting other people to behave as desired is easier if those others believe that doing so is not only in their interest but also the natural course of history and progress.
Why bother with the messy sale that is colonialism if one could get other countries to surrender through fairytales about the mutual benefits of free trade?
Of all the myths that solidified American hegemony over the past three decades, the myth of technology proved the most potent. It recast technology as a natural, neutral force that could erase power imbalances between countries. Technology was not something to be tinkered with or redirected; one could only adapt to it – much like one would adapt to the vagaries of the market, but with far less resistance.
A global village was in the making, courtesy of networks and bits. “The end of history” sounded tempting in all languages, but no idiom put it quite as eloquently as that of technology. Never had there been a way to be so upbeat about capitalism without ever mentioning it by name. What mattered was not who owned technology, but how one used it.
Such tropes helped conceal many basic truths about the actual relationship between technology and power. First, the global village was global only to the extent that its main patron – the US – needed it to be so. Second, there was nothing natural or neutral about the standards, networks and protocols of the digital universe: emerging from the cold war, most of them aimed at extending US influence.
Third, joining a single, inviolable network was never an easy ticket to national liberation. From cyberweapons to artificial intelligence and surveillance, interconnectivity and digitalisation have, far from eliminating old power imbalances, created many new ones.
Nonetheless, this ideology – that of the internet – served US interests quite well, producing many of the world’s largest technology firms. By 2018, though, it has started running thin.
America’s global village is disintegrating. Just look at digital platforms, which, with their ability to scale everywhere, were supposed to be the apex of US techno-hegemony. The plan worked, but only initially. Then, Silicon Valley discovered that America’s closest allies were successfully funding local challengers to the global expansion of US technology giants.
Consider Uber: its global ambitions have been checked by Ola in India, DiDi in China, 99 in Brazil, Grab in south-east Asia, and Yandex. Taxi in Russia.
And with the exception of Yandex, all of these challengers – including Uber itself – were funded by Japan’s SoftBank and folded into its Vision Fund. The latter pools the money of America’s closest allies, from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates. When Uber found itself burning cash at astronomical rates, it did a deal with Softbank.
China’s ascent challenged many other myths behind American techno-hegemony. Thus, once-neutral tech standards – such as 5G – were suddenly subject to fierce contestation, with Beijing demanding rules favourable to its own champions. Moreover, the global ambitions of Huawei and ZTE and the tremendous growth of other Chinese players such as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, have also forced Washington to do the unthinkable: exercise hard power, rendering its hegemony visible.
So we saw moves such as Trump’s veto of the Qualcomm-Broadcom merger, the nearly lethal disruption to ZTE, and the controversial White House memo about nationalising America’s 5G network: one could, of course, suppose that this is all just an affirmation of Washington’s superiority.
Perhaps. Robbed of the foundational myths, America won’t find it easy to convince other countries to let their industries be disrupted by US tech firms. Or abandon the development of their own AI capabilities. Or accept the provisions, inserted into trade treaties, demanding the free flow of data from local servers to US ones – in the name of a single, global internet.
The limits to US techno-hegemony were evident to Barack Obama, who upped the ante on America’s “internet freedom” mythology while trying to contain China’s expansion within the framework of US-led global trade regime.
Thanks to Trump, that mythology is no more. He is also threatening US technological supremacy in other ways – cutting research budgets, restricting immigration (much needed in the tech industry), and even preventing the immediate dismantling of China’s ZTE in the hope of gaining more leverage in negotations.
Post-Trump America won’t be going back to Obama’s playbook, though; by then, it will be too late to contest China’s rise. Washington’s probable strategy will be to continue to contest the very global order that has come to thwart Silicon Valley’s expansion ambitions, all the while embracing a more assertive anti-Beijing stance and penalising its allies for relying on China’s tech giants.
At least, when the tech cold war breaks out in earnest, it won’t be so clear which side represents the true interests of global capitalism – and which one those of its opponents.
Digital platforms were supposed to be the apex of US techno-hegemony. The plan worked, but only initially