INTERNET INTERREGNUM
The world seems more chaotic than ever. Hackers take down important websites while large businesses and foreign governments spend big money on cybersecurity and cyberespionage. Our own governments use the internet to track our activities. Technology companies conduct mood-manipulation experiments. The Russian mafia buys our credit card records so they can figure out where to steal the best cars. Chinese hackers take secrets from governments and intellectual property from businesses. Drones help catch terrorists, but also violate our sense of privacy. The internet was supposed to change politics forever, but every new app seems to expose us to new risks.
But we’ve actually just come through the era of real uncertainties—a kind of interregnum. It was a twenty-five-year stretch between the political order of the Cold War and the beginning of something new. In 1991 a group of hard-line Communist leaders tested Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union. Dedicated citizens wouldn’t give up their cause and kept up their acts of civil disobedience. Boris Yeltsin made an impassioned plea from atop a tank in front of Russia’s parliament buildings, and the hard-liners lost. Yet that was also the year that Tim Berners-Lee published the first text on a webpage and demonstrated how large amounts of content could be made widely available over digital networks. Within only a few years, idealistic new social movements like the Zapatistas were using the internet to advertise their struggle and build international audiences.
Twenty-five years after the Zapatista Rebellion, many popular uprisings for democracy and homespun activist campaigns were marshaling social media for political change. Political elites were using digital media too, and the first bots went to war for their political masters. The Zapatistas had organized offline, found the internet, and used it effectively for propaganda. Movements like the Arab Spring were being born digitally.1 They were organized online, and projected power in the streets of Tunis and Cairo. Osama bin Laden, the most wanted global terrorist in recent memory, was caught and killed because the internet of things betrayed him. A new world order, of people and devices, had emerged from the uncertainty of technological transition.
This new world order includes the UglyGorilla—he is a hacker, not a great ape. He has been at work since at least 2004. He’s a high-profile member of China’s cyberarmy, and the only reason we know he exists is because he has made mistakes. In February 2013 the security firm Mandiant released an extensive study of China’s hackers and their impact on governments and businesses in the West.2 UglyGorilla, also known as Wang Dong, featured prominently in the report because investigators managed to get access to the passwords used for his various accounts. They were able to trace his activities over an extended period.
Along with his teammates in People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398, UglyGorilla shares responsibility for multiple attacks on businesses, news organizations, and governments. He has infected devices around the world with different kinds of malware. In May 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States issued a wanted poster for UglyGorilla. He and several colleagues were indicted, the first time the FBI had charged the employees of other governments with crimes.
As a student, UglyGorilla had taken classes at China’s National Defense University, where he asked a professor in the Department of Military Technology and Equipment whether China had cybertroops.3 Just being a credible programmer and making this query opened a new career path, and within a few years UglyGorilla’s moniker was appearing in several different kinds of malicious code.
He is not the only one to follow such a career path. Hundreds of students at other universities across China ended up in the same unit after making queries to their cadre leaders and professors. As a team they have hijacked thousands of devices around the world, but Mandiant was able to track the hackers’ digital footprints back to a run-down office building in a district of Shanghai. They’ve stolen medical records, blueprints for new computer chips, and strategy documents.4 By 2015 they had hit the infrastructure of more than one hundred firms and dozens of government offices. They have hacked the New York Times for Chinese Party officials. They hit civil-society groups too, especially human-rights groups in the West that work on the plight of Tibetans and the treatment of other minorities in China.5 They have gone into the computers of defense contractors in the United States, and into the communications infrastructure of the public and private utilities that run our power and water supplies.
Assessing the harm of these attacks, the value of lost intellectual property and damaged equipment, and the costs of increased security is tough.6 We do know that the largest organized team of government-sponsored hackers can be found in China. Chinese firms are also victims: hackers working for public-private partnerships and Chinese startups routinely go after one another’s intellectual property.7
China is not the only country to blame for escalating cyberespionage. Other governments help their country’s businesses with industrial espionage, and those firms assist governments on security issues—as I have stressed, this is the basic deal behind the pax technica. We also know that Western firms and governments collaborate on industrial espionage.8 Hackers from eastern Europe, many with connections to Russian crime syndicates, have breached Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. North Korea sends its elite hackers, specially trained at its military school, Mirim College, to attack South Korean and U.S. infrastructure on national holidays.
The list of state-sponsored viruses is growing. One attack crippled the world’s most valuable company, the $10 trillion Saudi oil firm Aramco. Hackers wiped out data on three-quarters of the company’s computers.9 The attack was probably launched by Iran, and it came on a carefully chosen day when the impact would be severe. Stuxnet, the virus that crippled Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges, was probably developed by the United States and Israel.10 The same team that produced Stuxnet probably also produced the viruses Flame and Gauss, all of which have some shared code.11 These more recent viruses have basic data-mining goals, and Gauss seems to be targeting Lebanese banks. China is only one of several countries that have a full-time, professional cohort of hackers who aggressively attack information infrastructure in other countries and steal intellectual property. Along with the United States, Israel, and China, the government payrolls of Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine are believed to include hackers.
We can learn from UglyGorilla. First and foremost he has taught us that “national security” must now include the ability to respond to cyberattack, and that the initiators and targets of such attacks are not just governments. Cyberattack involves finding and exploiting vulnerable device networks by entering, copying, exporting, or changing the data within them. The distinction between corporate espionage and state espionage is no longer so meaningful, and Western technology firms and media outlets are among the most prized targets.
Second, he’s shown us how businesses and governments in the West are increasingly bound up in a kind of mutual defense pact. Organizations within the pax technica are ever more mutually dependent for cybersecurity. Governments and private firms are forced to share ever more information about the kinds of attacks they undergo and the security standards they maintain. State, business, and civil-society actors in the world’s democracies are deeply interdependent regarding cybersecurity.
For better or worse, cybersoldiers such as UglyGorilla often have several employers during their career, sometimes going to work for one Chinese company against another. So the good thing about collaboration within the pax technica is that governments, firms, and civic groups rarely attack one another. They may surveil each other, but they often share security knowledge. The discovery of some background on UglyGorilla doesn’t make it more likely that he will be caught, though the FBI does want him caught.12 With a host of programmers boasting such valuable skill sets, it is more likely that he’ll generate new pseudonyms, change workstations, and move offices. His network is here to stay.
UglyGorilla has been throwing his weight around the international arena. This shadowy figure is not the only new kind of political actor with influence. Another distinctive feature of this internet interregnum has been the blossoming of unusual kinds of social movements employing the creative use of digital media. Malicious state-sponsored hackers are not the only disruptive force in modern international affairs.
For a modern social movement to succeed—since movements compete with other movements—network devices are needed both for organizational logistics and for reaching an audience. Mobile phone–wielding activists used to inspire a lot of hope. It seems like only yesterday that an aspiring insurgent with some basic consumer-grade electronics and a decent data plan could bring any urban center to a standstill, or toss out even the most recalcitrant dictator. Now it seems as if some movements for popular democracy have lost their technological advantage.
These days, mobile phones, drones, hacktivists, and cyber-attacks seem simply to add to the chaos. Many strongmen and authoritarian governments have quickly climbed the technological learning curve and put their digital devices to work as tools of social control.13 Regimes in Iran, Bahrain, and Syria use Facebook to expose opposition networks and to entrap activists. China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia make big investments in surveillance infrastructure, with national, internal internet structures built from the ground up as tools for cultural management. Recently, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that cyber-terrorism had replaced other forms of terrorism as its primary security concern. Drones are only the latest technology to challenge our domestic policies on airspace, privacy, and access to consumer electronics, to say nothing of challenging our warfare ethics.14 Technology firms are earning a bad reputation for the ways they experiment on and manipulate public opinion.15
Anonymous, a group of online activists, has become a force in global affairs.16 It targets whomever its members want, sometimes with impact. In 2014 Anonymous took down soccer’s World Cup website to protest poverty, corruption, and police brutality in Brazil.17 It has exposed corruption, gone after child pornography websites, and embarrassed cults. Its operations are not always successful, sometimes doing damage more than raising awareness. When overwhelmed, governments have begun to address Anonymous as an equal in negotiation. The government of the Philippines has tried to engage with the group by making concessions and involving it in national cyberstrategy.18
Internet pundits have added to the chaos of international politics. Julian Assange’s online WikiLeaks project exposed diplomatic correspondence and upset many delicately balanced relationships among states and between power brokers. Both Assange and Edward Snowden decided that democracies were the least likely to provide them with just treatment as whistle blowers. The Russians gave Assange an online talk show and have sheltered Snowden. Moreover, many kinds of authoritarian regimes like Russia now employ their own social media gurus to engage with the public. Having more information and communication technologies hasn’t made international affairs more transparent, honest, or democratic. If anything, global politics seems even more convoluted and complex with the arrival of the internet.
Rather than bringing clarity to our understanding of where global politics is headed, technology pundits have made complex trends even more confusing. Malcolm Gladwell declared that political conversations don’t count for much unless they are face to face, something recently deposed dictators, recently elected politicians, and active citizens would dispute with personal experience. Media pundit Evgeny Morozov has excoriated the U.S. State Department for spending taxpayer dollars on technology initiatives, even though the number of groups grateful for the affordances of new technology tools grows year by year.19 Gladwell’s essential claim is that social-movement organizing can employ different technologies. Social media aren’t particularly important because collective action happens with face-to-face contact, and social-movement logistics can be handled with a paper and pencil. I argue the opposite—that a host of political actions cannot be undertaken with paper and pencil.
While hacktivists with specialized tech skills—like the Anonymous collective—can have a dramatic impact during a crisis, the public now uses device networks for their consumption of political news and information in very straightforward ways. In the United States, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports ever rising numbers of people promoting civic issues, contributing political commentary, and sharing news articles over networks of family and friends.20 By 2015, YouTube had well over a billion regular users a day from around the world.21 Every contemporary political crisis is digitally mediated in some way, and not always in a good way. Especially in times of crisis and uncertainty, people seek more sources of information. In Syria, mobile-phone and internet subscriptions continued to grow throughout the civil war, confirmation that in times of crisis people want more information.22 When the president of Turkey, Recep Erdoǧan, shut down his country’s Twitter networks in 2014, he drove up public interest in learning how to use Twitter to get around state interference. When the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, shut down his country’s internet during the Arab Spring, he drove more Egyptians into the streets of Cairo and ultimately lost his job.
The global spread of cellphone towers and wifiaccess points has been rapid. By 2015 there were almost 100,000 towers, a thousand cellular network companies, and well over a million wifiaccess points.23 When closed countries do open up, information-deprived communities clamor for internet access. Now that civil-society actors in Myanmar have more room to maneuver, one of the hottest countrywide social-movement campaigns has been for cheaper mobile-phone rates. People want to connect.
On top of this, there are several big demographic trends that explain why the internet of things is emerging as it is. First, device networks are spreading quickly. While our planet now holds just over seven billion people, it is home to more than ten million mobile digital devices.24 The number of stationary—yet connected—devices is estimated at forty million. This is both an immense network of opportunity and a significant infrastructure for abuse. It’s also a growing network. The world will have more wired, intelligent devices in the coming years. The network is already made up of more devices than people, and the devices continue to share information even when we aren’t personally using them.
Second, more and more people are online. By 2020 everyone will effectively be online. Most people will have direct internet access through mobile phones and the internet, but everyone will be immersed in a world of devices that are constantly connected to the internet. Already people who don’t have direct access are tracked and monitored through government and corporate databases. Their economic, political, and cultural opportunities are still shaped by digital media. This means that for the first time in history, virtually everybody can connect to virtually everyone else. Most countries have upward of 80 percent internet penetration. And this is only the internet of mobile phones and computers. The internet of things will keep everyone networked constantly.
Third, most internet users—and eventually most people—will soon be “digital natives.” Digital natives are the people born since the turn of the century in countries where digital media forms a ubiquitous part of social life. By 2010, the majority of all internet users were digital natives. Until recently, internet users were largely a kind of “digital immigrant” population that had started going online when they arrived at their universities or had become connected through their work. This is changing. By 2010, more than 50 percent of the internet-using population consisted of people who were born into a world of pervasive internet, mobile phones, and digital media.
Alas, this population is unevenly distributed: the bulk of new technology users are young and living in Africa or Asia. Most are coming from failed, fragile states with weak economies. The norms that shaped our internet—the internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s—are going to be reshaped by the next two billion users. What will the internet look like after young people in Tehran, Nairobi, and Guangzhou reshape its content?
In the hushed morning after New Year’s Eve celebrations in 1994, hundreds of masked rebels moved through the empty streets of San Cristóbal, Chiapas. Cutting phone lines and immobilizing the local police, they wanted a new political order. Even though they hailed from the Lacandon Jungle at the southern tip of Mexico, their well-organized digital-outreach campaign put the Zapatistas into international headlines.
If the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of the history-making battle between capitalism and state socialism, the Zapatista uprising helped restart history by kicking off the battle over device networks. In 1995 I traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, to meet with the Zapatista insurgents. I wanted to learn about their motivations and their struggle, and to understand why they were having such an unusual impact on international politics. By the time I landed in San Cristóbal, the Zapatista Liberation Army was beginning to retreat into the jungle. Their knowledge of the forest gave them an advantage over the Mexican army. San Cristóbal was tense but quiet, and it was easy to find people who were sympathetic with the Zapatista cause.
I visited one supporter, an ecologist, at his research lab outside the city. The Mexican military had just looted his offices and destroyed his computer equipment. It was the only equipment of its kind in the region, and he was eager to talk about why his lab was a strategic target. He had used his geographic information systems (GIS) to make the only accurate maps of jungle deforestation. At the time, plotting changes using satellite images actually meant clicking a handheld pointer over the contours of a hard copy of the satellite photo—it was not an automated process. His funding came from the United Nations and was for forest-related research. In this case, plotting the growth of coffee-wealthy plantations, ranches, and logging operations was a political act. Much of the land was supposed to be collectively managed by the poor campesinos and indigenas of the region or to be under the protection of the national park system. Yet satellites could see the changes from orbit, and his lab had computed the rates of change.
The Mexican army had come for the digital maps, but the sergeant in charge didn’t know what it meant for the data to be “in the computer.” He thought the ecologist was hiding something, so he ordered his men to destroy all the equipment. The Zapatistas had visited him only two weeks before. They knew the value of data, and they knew how to repurpose satellite coordinates on forest cover for political impact. They had asked for the same data, knowing what they were looking for. They had brought their own diskettes for copying the data.
During that trip I found that the grievances of the Zapatistas were like those of many landless poor in Latin America. They were tired of waiting for land rights, and angry about industrial logging in the rainforest. So the Zapatistas used the internet to campaign internationally. Most of their members did not have a dial-up modem. Subcomandante Marcos, the spokesperson and nominal leader, did. When his modem broke, Marcos’s speeches were smuggled out of the jungle, transcribed, and distributed by email. His eloquent, excoriating commentary activated people from around the world, and bound the Zapatistas up in a global conversation about neo liberal reform, social justice, and poverty. The Chiapas95 listservs alerted journalists around the world and kept activists engaged with compelling stories written by the insurgents themselves. The internet was used to coordinate food caravans, and to pass good stories and images to journalists. Zapatista leaders called for “pan, tierra, y liberdad,” and the Zapatistas were the first social movement to go digitally viral. This global attention made it impossible for the Mexican government to put down the insurrection as violently as they had crushed rebellions from other poor farming communities in the region.
Pictures and stories flowed out of Chiapas. Most important, the compelling narratives of injustice and poverty circumvented the media blockade set up by the Mexican government. The Zapatistas didn’t fully succeed as a social movement, though they now have a Facebook page. They did, however, inspire a host of other social movements to go global via the internet. Following their example, civil-society actors flourished online: fair-trade coffee, the World Social Forum, and Jubilee 2000 are only a few of the global movements that learned from the example of the Zapatistas’ digital media impact. The online propaganda success of the Zapatistas helped to establish a new set of norms for how political actors communicate and organize.
Fifteen years after talking to the Zapatistas, I traveled to Tunisia to work as an election observer. A popular uprising there had deposed the longtime dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. For the first time, Tunisians were choosing a constituent assembly, and the excitement was palpable. Bloggers were running for higher office. There were civic projects to “video the vote.” And election monitors from many different groups were capturing images from polling stations for posterity.
Both uprisings marked the start of something new. It had been fifteen years since the last “wave” of democratization. Between 1989 and 1995, many remnants of the Soviet Union and failed authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world turned themselves into variously functional electoral democracies. By 2010, roughly three in every four post-Soviet states had some democratic practices.25 Certainly there were also large, important countries that made little effort toward democratization, strategically important states run by hereditary rulers, and other states that seemed to be slipping, sliding, or otherwise teetering on the edge of dictatorship. As a region, North Africa and the Middle East were noticeably devoid of popular democracy movements, at least until the early months of 2011.
The internet was part of the story of Tunisia’s recent popular uprising. Yet it wasn’t simply a new communications tool for the propaganda of democracy advocates. Many Tunisians had been disaffected for a long time, but organized opposition grew online. Digital images of the burned body of Mohamed Bouazizi circulated by mobile phone within the country and eventually across North Africa. The activists behind the Arab Spring used digital media for propaganda and organization. Their revolutionary spirit spilled across borders. Using a combination of social media and agile street tactics, they toppled multiple dictators in a surge of unrest that has been called the “fourth wave” of popular uprising for democracy.26
Both events are difficult to understand without considering the importance of digital media. The Zapatistas started using the internet after organizing themselves, because they found an international audience there. In contrast, the Arab Spring was born digitally.
Both movements attracted poor, disenfranchised citizens, with few land rights or job opportunities. Both groups were fighting back against authoritarian elites, who had relied on oppression and subsidies—essentially bribes—to keep their restive populations contented and dissidents marginalized. Yet the disenfranchised used the internet to catch political elites off guard. The Zapatistas did not achieve their immediate welfare and land-reform objectives, but they were successful in commanding international attention and did much to dissolve the authority of the ruling PRI party, which subsequently was voted out after ruling Mexico for more than sixty years. The leaders of the Arab Spring were successful in toppling multiple dictators, and upsetting the political status quo across an entire geopolitical region.
The stories of the Zapatistas and the Arab Spring are not about nationalist fervor inspiring political revolution. They are not about religious fundamentalism. These movements were not particularly Marxist, Maoist, or populist. They had leaders, but employed comparatively flat organizations of informal teams compared with the formal and hierarchical unions and political parties behind Václav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Lech Wałęsa. Instead, digital photos circulated widely and kept grievances alive. Periods of political history are not easy to define. They begin and end slowly. Their features are not absolute, but are prominent and distinctive. That’s how these two social movements demark the interregnum.
Despite Francis Fukuyama’s claim that history was at an “end” in the early 1990s, I argue that device networks have given history a new beginning.27 Two moments of upheaval in international affairs mark the transition. The Zapatistas used the internet to project their plight and demands well beyond the communities of Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle. We’ve just lived through the second moment, with events in the Middle East that demonstrate how mobile phones, the internet, and social media now drive political change. A sense of frustration caused a cascade of popular uprisings during the Arab Spring.
The organizers behind the Zapatista and Arab Spring movements, twenty years apart and using very different internets, brought about change at home and upended global politics. This may not seem like an original argument because lots of people have said that the internet is revolutionizing economics, politics, and culture. People have declared that there is a revolution in how political power is organized and projected. It is important to be cautious, because as the saying goes, history is replete with turning points.
Yet carefully looking through the evidence reveals just how much our political lives have changed because of and through the diffusion of information technologies like mobile phones and the internet. We have been through a significant, technologically enabled transition, marked from the point in time when we began linking webpages to the point in time when we began linking everyday objects. The interregnum started at the end of the Cold War, as we began linking ideas and content over the internet. The transition was completed recently, when the first bot wars erupted, the Arab Spring bloomed, and Osama bin Laden was caught and killed. And now we have begun linking objects in an internet of things.
Between the Zapatista Rebellion and the Arab Spring significant features of political life changed, and a new world order, structured by device networks, emerged. Yet this transition didn’t just involve protesters and insurgents. The political economy of government changed, also because of the diffusion of device networks. It used to be the amount of gold that a state stored that was the measure of its wealth, and the basis upon which that state could issue currency. Now it is information and technology. And even though it was government investment in public infrastructure that built the internet, governments no longer own and control it the way they once did.
For hundreds of years, a government’s stash of gold was the best measure of its strength and wealth. At different points in time, access to fish, timber, pelts, and other resources made a country or empire wealthy.28 But when governments needed to borrow money to finance wars or public infrastructure, it was usually the store of gold in the crown’s treasury that determined how much the government could borrow and at what rates. The result was what economic historians called a “gold standard.” This single metal became the global currency because it was relatively rare and could be stored, guarded, bought, and sold. For more than a thousand years, a rich colony, country, or empire was one with lots of gold.
By 1930 this had started to change. The global economy had developed and industrialized to the point where there were many different ways of judging a state’s wealth. Some countries had significant timber, coal, and fuel resources. Precious metals other than gold, such as silver, were increasingly valuable, and having good rail lines or productive factories was clearly important to a country’s economic productivity. Other countries had significant labor resources, and financiers became sophisticated enough that they could evaluate a country’s wealth beyond gold assets. Moreover, paper currency became a reasonably good representation of value, and economists got better at measuring the demand and supply of money, inflation, and a government’s monetary and fiscal policies.
Eventually, the gold standard was not so standard anymore. Countries still maintained a supply of gold in case of a fiscal emergency, but gold was no longer the primary basis for lending money to governments. Nations had physical places where they stored gold, even after the gold standard was dropped. These storehouses of gold formed an important part of the valuation and stability of currencies well into the twentieth century. Even today, having a store of gold is one sign of sovereign wealth, though the actual amount of gold a sovereign government holds may not have much of an impact on how markets value that government’s bonds or an economy’s stability.
Today, other resources are regarded as having truly international, exchangeable value: technology and data. Significant amounts of value are tied up in digital networks, in remittances and electronic currencies that are not backed up by paper or gold. States once stocked up on gold to show off their stability. Now bond markets, currency speculators, and security analysts judge a government’s stability by its ability to keep electrical power flowing and its devices connected to the internet. The ways of measuring a country’s value have changed once again. We now have all sorts of indicators about the size of the information economy, and we often evaluate a country by how much technical innovation we find there.
The World Bank now counts patents and Ph.D.s in its country-wealth indicators. We continually worry about the supply of engineers in the economy. Bytes of traffic are a good proxy for a country’s importance in the global-information infrastructure. The financial services sector expects government investment in the internet, and when countries invest in information infrastructure, many industries benefit. The perception of technical innovation, the size of the information economy, and the reach of high-tech industries are all important to the evaluation of modern economic wealth.
This new sense of valuation is what drives the startling rise of virtual currencies, mobile money, and other digital exchanges. Such virtual currencies are designed to free money, or more abstractly “value,” from the control of a particular country’s central bank. The World Bank estimates that by 2020, the economy of mobile-phone money exchanges might top $5 trillion and include the two billion people who otherwise have no access to banks.29 Some of the oldest institutions around—universities—have started accepting virtual currencies like Bitcoins for tuition.30 It was easier for governments to hoard and guard their gold than it is data, information infrastructure, and intellectual property. States don’t control public information infrastructures upon which value is exchanged.
For the first time, governments don’t control the information infrastructure upon which public life is lived. They can manipulate devices, but so can many other actors.
States Don’t Own It, Though They Fight Hard to Control It
Governments work hard to control device networks, even when facing pressure to relax regulations. Generally, there are four ways to grade government control over information infrastructure. The most complete control usually comes through direct ownership, and the government simply treats the national phone company and internet service provider like state assets. All information infrastructure is directly managed by the government. So the first way to evaluate state control is to see whether the national phone company, along with any broadcasters and other media outlets, have been effectively privatized. The second check is to see whether a regulator has been set up—a kind of watchdog group that tries to keep the national phone company, the TV broadcasters, and the internet service providers honest and fair. The third check is to see whether that regulator is actually independent and free of political appointees. Ideally, the head of the regulator can be a technocrat—an engineer or a policy specialist—who is great at solving technical problems and not interested in playing politics with whatever party is in government. The fourth benchmark is the market for consumer electronics and the internet of things. This involves opening up the market so that all the latest mobile phones and wifirouters can come into the country for people to buy. If the market for the new devices with built-in power supplies, sensors, and radios is restricted, then governments have a better chance at controlling the flow of information.
In 1995, just around a quarter of all countries had privatized their phone companies or set up media-watchdog organizations. A small fraction of countries—mostly in the West—were choosing technocrats over politicians to run such agencies and letting the latest consumer electronics into the country without levying import taxes on them or imposing outright bans.31
By 2005, that picture had changed dramatically. Media and technology firms had successfully beat back government control over both telecommunications services and consumer electronics, and these industries had made the privatization of information infrastructure in the developing world a priority. Almost two-thirds of all countries had started privatizing their state-owned phone companies, and four-fifths had set up independent regulators. Almost half were appointing engineers over political leaders to oversee media development, and three-quarters of all countries had very liberal policies for importing consumer electronics. A few years later, not only had countries opened up the consumer market for electronics, but the technology industry itself had moved much of its production out of the countries that had built the internet in the first place. Even though most people around the world were connecting to the internet with their mobile phones, the main Western equipment makers gave up producing mobile phones.32
But then people started doing politics with their digital devices. Opposition movements started catching ruling elites off guard by using new communications technologies to organize huge numbers of people quickly. The very policy reforms that seemed to make some governments popular and some economies boom were allowing new political actors to act in powerful and decisive ways. After the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, and after a host of politicians from around the world were disgraced by the quick judgment of the internet, governments that hadn’t relaxed the rules became less interested in doing so.
Lots of governments try to control the internet, and they are likely to keep on trying. They try to build surveillance systems. They try to build kill switches. They try to set the rules and regulations for developing new parts of their information infrastructures. We are rightly worried when they try. Internationally, the policy agencies that work on communication issues have faced concerned publics. Closed countries managed by political strongmen find that they can’t control the internet in times of crisis, so they argue for changes in technology standards that give them a tighter grip on information flows. Fortunately, there aren’t very many clear examples of regimes that have fully retained control of their country’s information infra structure.
The way social movements organize and grow is not the only feature of the emerging global order. Even hawkish security experts agree that security strategies have had to evolve in dramatic ways over the past twenty-five years. In November 2012 the Israel Defense Forces began its Pillar of Defense assault, and it announced the attack on Twitter first.
The IDF has begun a widespread campaign on terror sites & operatives in the #Gaza Strip, chief among them #Hamas & Islamic Jihad targets.33
@IDFSpokesperson continued:
We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.34
Of course Hamas responded, with both a defensive posture and a tweet.
You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves.35
Following this exchange, Israeli missiles crashed into Gaza, and Hamas mortars fell on Israel. Global alliances of opinion on Twitter could be tracked with the hashtags that also revealed allegiances: #pillarofdefense versus #gazaunderattack.
This was the first time that a Twitter battle preceded—indeed announced—a ground battle. Social media have quickly become useful tools for both insurgency and counterinsurgency campaigns. Making digital media so central to the conduct of modern warfare is only one of the distinctive features of the new order of international affairs.
In late 1996, hundreds of thousands of protesters came out on the streets of Belgrade, Serbia, to protest the official results of local elections. These protests became known as an “internet revolution” because the University of Belgrade students who organized them communicated extensively via email. They also helped journalists at the only independent radio station, B92, to put podcasts online when the government took away its broadcast license. This took place at a time when only 3 percent of the population had internet access. Two years later and oceans away, the rise of online journalism and the expansion of mobile phone access in Indonesia eroded the Suharto regime to the point of collapse. “Color revolutions” in post-Soviet countries and the Arab Spring in the Middle East then followed, each uprising involving some creative use of digital media that caught elites off guard.
Yet digital networks are for more than propaganda in political competition and conflict. Pervasive device networks helped provide much needed evidence about the location of the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden. Vast amounts of video, photo, and text content culled from the web placed the international pariah within 125 miles of Abbottabad—a process that civilians could replicate.36 The relative absence of mobile-phone pings to network towers drew attention to a particular compound—it was a large home that was noticeably off the grid. Drones and satellites gave analysts the aerial view.37 And high-risk ground observations raised more evidence.
“Big data” refers to information about many people collected over many kinds of devices, and big data helped find a major international pariah. U.S. Navy SEAL assault rifles were the proximate cause of bin Laden’s death, and those military personnel took on very real risks. He was the world’s leading terrorist for a decade, but the operation to get him kicked into high gear when supercomputers, state-of-the-art software, global surveillance systems, and mobile-phone networks were combined with the assets of human spy networks and elite commando units.
Today, every dictator, thug, and kingpin has experienced some kind of unwanted attention after video evidence he could not control was distributed online. Every gang, cult, and criminal network has lost members to online evidence about their bad deeds. Every activist and every revolutionary—aspiring, successful, and failed—applies a digital strategy.
Historians of revolution often argue that the most important cause of any particular revolution in a country is that country’s previous revolution.38 In other words, it is tough to identify a present circumstance that seems more causally important than whatever conditions were set up by the last big social change. Yet an important part of the new world order is that the very definition of dissidence now includes being deviant with your devices. Being a modern dissident is about having enough tech savvy to run a blog or Twitter account that tells stories different from the stories the government puts out. In some countries, having a blog can put someone on a dissident list even if the author only occasionally dabbles in political conversation or is tangentially linked to a network of dissident friends. In countries where even the opposition political parties need to be licensed, the best-organized dissidents are usually online.
Before the Arab Spring, Tunisia’s and Egypt’s most effective political dissidents were found online.39 For several years, Cuba’s most prominent blogger, Yoani Sánchez, has been one of the regime’s most worrisome dissidents.40 Every Free Syria Army rebel unit is equipped with a videographer. The internet is now so much more than a propaganda tool. In many countries, social media allow people to maintain their own networks of family and friends, often with little manipulation by political elites. And the data trail of Facebook likes, cell phone log files, and credit card records has proven useful for security services—the good ones and the bad ones.
But It’s Not a Westphalian—or Feudal—World
Our aspirations for what information technologies might do for democracy won’t go away. In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the U.S. State Department’s tech evangelist Jared Cohen argued in Foreign Affairs that global politics was in for a thorough digital disruption.41 They urged a strong set of alliances between Western governments and global-technology firms. This, they said, was going to be the best strategy for ensuring that information infrastructure will be put to work for liberal values.
By 2020 the world will have almost eight billion people and around thirty billion devices. What will it mean to have vast amounts of political content and intelligence generated by devices and autonomous agents? Are these just more people and devices for UglyGorilla to manipulate?
To some it might seem like a classical Westphalian world. The Treaties of Westphalia, signed in 1648, ended widespread conflict in Europe and created a new political order in which rulers were sovereign over their lands and did their best not to interfere in one another’s domestic affairs. Some would say that what emerged in recent years is more of a Westphalian internet, with separate sovereign internets that allow little room for outside interference in domestic technology policy.42 In this way of looking at things, the internet has become the infrastructure for political conversations for many in wealthy countries and the medium by which young people in developing countries develop their political identities. The problem with this perspective is that these public conversations occur over private infrastructure, and the owners of our digital media can have distinctly un-public values.
Yet national governments have not simply been enlisted to advance the cause of corporate information infrastructure: such infrastructure is being put to the service of government. It makes sense that states would want to treat the internet like territory. Device networks already provide actors with the commanding heights needed to prevail, in terms of both soft and hard power.
If our current political order doesn’t seem like a Westphalian collection of distinct internet states, perhaps the right metaphor can be found in feudalism.43 After all, we are increasingly beholden to a small number of big companies for our data, connectivity, and privacy. Some of us commit to Google, others to Apple, still others to Microsoft, or sometimes our employers make that commitment for us. We commit to buying their products and services, and they commit to making new technologies available (within their information ecologies). These feudal lords try to keep our data safe.
If we want to participate in the modern information economy, or we want employment in a modern workplace, or we want to use digital media to maintain social ties with families and friends, we have to pledge allegiance to at least one of these lords. As data serfs it is difficult to pick up and move between kingdoms.
However, this perspective doesn’t work because social elites are hardly using the internet to usher in a new era of feudalism. There are important civil-society actors that lead successful campaigns against the absolute dominance of technology firms. The 2012 defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act is a good example of the clout that users can have when they are organized. An important open software movement gives us good, free tools, such as Firefox and Apache. In feudal politics the state and religious authority were one and the same thing. China’s technology businesses and government agencies are sometimes indistinguishable from one another because of complex reporting structures and ownership patterns. In most democracies, technology firms and government agencies are closely aligned but organizationally distinct.
Hyperbole aside, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are not states. If sovereign authority possesses the “legitimate exercise of military power,” none of these firms qualifies. The feudal state and church were deeply entwined institutions, and the technology industry and government may seem similarly bound up in agreements over data sharing, business arrangements, and collaborative standards. These days, government and technology firms collude in self-serving ways, but it is probably not a collusion legitimated by a Higher Power.
So what is the right historical parallel? Governments and tech firms definitely collaborate on foreign policy. Tech firms often get their way, but not always. Users often feel tied to their technology providers. Social networks are not bound in the same ways nations can be. Thinking of the current state of technology affairs as a Westphalian set of national internets or a highly structured feudal system misses the point: networks are essentially made up of other networks. The pax metaphor does the most to describe the network system of organizations and information technologies that enforce a de facto stability in economic, political, and cultural engagement.
A surprising stability has come from having giant technology firms and powerful nations colluding on how to sell the next generation of device networks to the rest of the world. We are entering a period of global political life that will be profoundly shaped by how political actors use the internet of things. Indeed, the internet of things will define, express, and contain this period. The capacities and constraints of political life have often been shaped by technological innovation—and vice versa. Technology and politics have an impact on each other and on how current events and future prospects should be situated in the context of the recent past. More devices come online each month, and progressively more people are connected through these digital networks. Now almost every aspect of human security depends on digital media and this internet of things.
Responsibility for creating this internet of things still rests with all of us. We use social media, and few of us are diligent about maintaining our privacy. We do our computing in the cloud and communicate through mobile phones that we know are traceable and hackable. We trust immense amounts of data to private firms and governments. Most of us have grown up with an internet that mediates political conversations between people. Increasingly, politically revealing conversations occur between devices, often long after we’ve finished using them. Everyday objects we aren’t used to thinking of as networked devices will sense and shape the social world around them.
If the past twenty-five years has been an internet interregnum in which we developed new political habits around our communication technologies, how will this larger internet of things affect our systems of political communication? If there is going to be a great new physical layer of networked devices, we need to expand our definition of human security to appreciate the ways that this new internet of things serves us. We need to develop a public policy that ensures that this internet serves us responsibly. We need to map the new world order of the pax technica.