Tech is the new geopolitics, and there’s nothing new about that
Australia has banned children from using social media, Microsoft has been accused – by a civil rights group – of facilitating wartime surveillance, the US has taken aim at European regulators, and Ireland has been experiencing intrusions by drones. If it wasn’t already clear, tech is now the battleground of tomorrow.
The last few weeks have been nothing if not interesting. In fact, I started writing this column last week but was forced to set it aside until I had some time to think seriously about the threads I appeared to be weaving.
Australia’s social media ban for under-16s is likely to be met with approval in much of the world, Silicon Valley aside. It won’t work, not fully, but no-one is under any illusions about this and, recognising this, Australia has decided to add a little friction to children’s ability to drink from the Internet firehose. You can expect it to spread, and this will be tricky for Ireland, as the European home to the social media giants.
More immediately, a major test lies ahead for the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) in the form of a surveillance complaint issued by civil rights group the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), which has asked Ireland’s DPC to look into use of the company’s cloud platform by the Israeli military in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
As Ireland is home to Microsoft’s European operations, the country is also the relevant jurisdiction for their oversight, which, if the allegations are true, is also tricky because the country has already gone out on a limb to criticise the ongoing conflict while, at the same time, being home to massive US investment.
At the same time, we also saw an extraordinary intrusion into European politics by US president Donald Trump in the form of a speech that depicted the continent, falsely, as “decaying”.
Beneath the surface, and, forgive me for temporarily bracketing out the ‘great replacement’ rhetoric that was deployed, all the complaint actually amounts to is an attempt to put manners on Europe for the crime of Europe itself attempting to put manners on US technology businesses. With the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), this pressure will only intensify.
On one level, this is nothing new. To give just one example, in 1993 the US government tried to push encryption on voice data providers, complete with a secret backdoor. The so-called ‘Clipper’ chip was introduced in 1993, long before most people were online, and had failed by 1996, but it was nonetheless an early indication that the Internet was going to be a site for power struggles. There are dozens, hundreds even, of other examples of tech as politics, from the development of semiconductors to tabulating machines and ironclad warships or even Archimedes’ heat ray. If you squint a bit there really is nothing new under the sun. History is just what humans do.
Realpolitik
Ireland has rarely been brave. Its neutrality, which may indeed be a morally correct position, was driven by contingency: not being drawn into Britain’s wars post-independence, grinding poverty and a total lack of materiel. It later became a formal stance, and a popular one at that. At the same time, though, it has left the country reliant on others, including Britain, for defence. Its carefully staked-out foreign policy positions can legitimately read as standing firm on what is right or empty grandstanding, a hurler on the ditch.
When it comes to technology this probably matters more than with traditional geopolitics. The truth is, Ireland doesn’t really matter as a military force, but it does matter as a home for US technology in Europe. That was fine when the times were fine. Are the times fine today?
It may sound unduly cynical to say that the ‘rules based order’ was always a fantasy, but at the very least it was always backed by force, economic or otherwise, and the threat of force is increasingly open in today’s more obviously fractured West. That said, anyone in Western Sahara, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Peru, China or Vietnam could be forgiven for laughing at the idea that today’s world is uniquely rough.
There probably is no pure position to take on questions this large, this messy, and this human, but it would be a start to acknowledge that the questions are real. Anyone who says they have the one true position also probably only has one eye. Even they, though, need to recognise when we are faced with questions to which there are no easy answers. I myself have my blindspots, driven by barely examined commitments to universalism, republicanism and all that good stuff. Knowing ourselves is at least a start, I suppose.
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