“Technopolarity” Is Not a Thing
By Daniel Drezner, Professor of International Politics at The Fletcher School
Elon Musk has had a busy month. He’s acquired and disrupted Twitter. He’s opined on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, threatened to cut Starlink access to Ukrainians, and weighed in on the China/Taiwan issue. He keeps weighing in on geopolitical conflicts in which his understanding is, how you say, pretty thin.
As Musk continues to be the main character day after day, some believe his thoughts and deeds augur a shift in the distribution of power. According to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, it’s a new era:
Experts have a term for this development: “Technopolarity.” The idea is that big tech companies have become their own sovereigns, on a par with nation-states. The result: an increasingly unchecked level of influence over international affairs that will demand a new kind of political response.
“It’s one of the most important issues playing out on the geopolitical stage,” Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, told me.
As it turns out the expert Sargent hyperlinks to in the quote above is none other than… Ian Bremmer, who wrote a Foreign Affairs essay last year entitled “The Technopolar Moment.” Bremmer’s argument:
States have been the primary actors in global affairs for nearly 400 years. That is starting to change, as a handful of large technology companies rival them for geopolitical influence. The aftermath of the January 6 riot serves as the latest proof that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are no longer merely large companies; they have taken control of aspects of society, the economy, and national security that were long the exclusive preserve of the state. The same goes for Chinese technology companies, such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent. Nonstate actors are increasingly shaping geopolitics, with technology companies in the lead….
Most of the analysis of U.S.-Chinese technological competition, however, is stuck in a statist paradigm. It depicts technology companies as foot soldiers in a conflict between hostile countries. But technology companies are not mere tools in the hands of governments. None of their actions in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, for instance, came at the behest of the government or law enforcement. These were private decisions made by for-profit companies exercising power over code, servers, and regulations under their control. These companies are increasingly shaping the global environment in which governments operate. They have huge influence over the technologies and services that will drive the next industrial revolution, determine how countries project economic and military power, shape the future of work, and redefine social contracts.
It is time to start thinking of the biggest technology companies as similar to states.
My take on this suggestion is: no, no it’s not.
I get the impulse to go in this direction, I really do. There have been crisis moments in 21st century world politics when it seems like tech is the critical intervening variable. When a social movement is on the brink of forcing regime change, or when a close election could tip one way or the other from a small shift in undecided voters, it might seem as though what happens on Twitter or Telegram will generate tipping-point dynamics that lead to huge shifts in outcomes.
That said, even a cursory glance at the past year’s worth of news suggests that corporate power in world politics is perhaps more cabined and ephemeral than either Bremmer or Sargent believe.
The most obvious example is in China, where the Chinese government has exerted an ever-heavier hand in the tech sector to ensure its cyberpower. The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and Elizabeth Dwoskin recently wrote about how China’s government asserted control over TikTok to prevent its sale to a U.S. firm during the Trump administration. As one TikTok insider put it to Harwell and Dwoskin, the Chinese government “would rather have the company die than have it sold. They are not going to let the United States have one of their crown jewels — their algorithms. They would rather destroy it.”
Meanwhile, the United States is also exerting ever more state control over big tech firms. The Commerce Department’s recent announcements regarding semiconductor chips demonstrates a renewed bipartisan enthusiasm for using state power to restrict the exposure of U.S. tech firms to China. Various aspects of that order harm the interest of what Bremmer would characterize as “globalist” firms such as Apple and Intel. That did not stop it from happening, however. Indeed, even Bremmer acknowledges, firms are likely to adapt their business strategies to changes in the political winds: “as the United States and China decouple, companies that can recast themselves as national champions are rewarded.”
That doesn’t sound very technopolar to me! It sounds a lot like traditional great power politics playing out in a different venue, and it ain’t the first time that’s happened.
In fairness to Bremmer, he divides tech actors into globalists (like Apple), nationalists (like Tencent) and “techno-utopians.”1 It’s the last category that Bremmer and Sargent think is truly distinctive. These are the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, the ones who believe in cryptocurrencies, the ones who, according to Bremmer, “look to a future in which the nation-state paradigm that has dominated geopolitics since the seventeenth century has been replaced by something different altogether.”
The thing is, as bad as it’s been for cryptocurrencies, it’s been even worse for Zuckerberg and Musk. If it wasn’t for Elon’s clusterfuck of a takeover of Twitter, this year’s biggest tech story would be the harbingers of doom for Meta. As the Pew Research Center noted back in August, Facebook is not doing well with the young people.
Little wonder that shares of Meta have plummeted in 2022 and mass layoffs are on the horizon..
As for Musk, well, he has obviously struggled to manage Twitter. What is more interesting, however, is how much it seems that states are hemming him in. Elon needed Saudi money to finance the takeover of Twitter. Because of that the U.S. government is investigating whether it falls under CFIUS jurisdiction. To paraphrase Elon, there is a tiny possibility that there might be more to Musk’s confused ramblings about Taiwan and China than meets the eye. In other words: maybe he needs to stay in the good graces of the People’s Republic of China.
Then there is the European Union. Bremmer suggests that Europe is a weak actor in a technopolar age. As Mashable’s Chris Taylor points out, howeve, Musk has little choice but to play nice with the EU and its forthcoming Digital Services Act (DSA): “European Commissioner Thierry Breton reminded Musk of his DSA obligations immediately after the Twitter sale went through – ‘the bird will fly by our rules’ – and Musk had no response. Not even his classic bomb-throwing ‘LOL’ emoji. How could he? He’s in a video with Breton announcing their joint support for the DSA back in May.”
Musk isn’t playing one government off another to get what he wants; he’s simply trying not to angering any government that he cannot afford to ignore.
Marxists like to talk about the structural dependence of the state on capital, but that aphorism often works in reverse. One should never underestimate the structural dependence of capital on the state.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is not trying to say that big tech companies have no independent effect in world politics. But the idea that we should think of them as states exhibiting an increasingly unchecked level of influence over international affairs is bonkers.
It is fair to say that some multinational corporations can exert some power for a generation or two. That matters. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye made a similar argument a half-century ago in Transnational Relations and World Politics, however, and the result was decades of scholarship pointing out how that observation did not mean world politics had been transformed.
It’s a new century. Maybe that means this argument has more juice this time around. But I doubt it.
This piece is republished from Drezner’s World.