Technopolitique

Like it or not, the technology giants — “Big Tech” — are profoundly redefining the morphology of that collective construction we call the state. At the heart of an American “BigState” in full mutation, they take an active part in the manufacture of power and now position themselves as one of their country’s armed extensions (NASA, the Pentagon, their role in Ukraine…), which points to the emergence of a techno-military complex structured around hybrid entities that are at once private companies, military actors and geopolitical ones.

Yet if Big Tech is necessary to the American state in its strategic competition with China, it is also doubly disruptive of democracy. First, through certain ideologies carried by a section of a technological elite radicalised towards the far right via social media, reinforced by emerging tools of artificial intelligence and by the metaverse. Second, because they amplify a form of techno-security paranoia in the state (techno-surveillance, mass data capture), tipping the project of political liberty towards a counter-insurgency logic.

Taking on every false debate that makes us miss what matters, Asma Mhalla advances a strong and unsettling thesis : the new technologies have made soldiers of every one of us, in spite of ourselves. It is urgent that we think it through, for nothing less than the international balance of power is at stake — and it is reconfiguring the political order of the world.