John Perry Barlow’s intoxicating dream is fading fast and may soon vaporise altogether. In 1996, the American poet stirred the imagination of a generation by proclaiming sovereignty for the nascent internet in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. For the first time in history, this virgin, virtual territory would allow new global communities to form and fresh ideas to flourish, unconstrained by any terrestrial power.
“You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear,” he wrote. “We will create a civilisation of the Mind in Cyberspace.”
Barlow’s utopian imaginings of an otherworldly civilisation grew from the compost of the hippie-trippy, flower-power counterculture of San Francisco in the 1960s. This way of thinking seeped into the highly individualistic, anti-establishment entrepreneurial ethos of Silicon Valley, which viewed any incursion by Washington — or its attendant military-industrial complex — with suspicion. It later informed the “Don’t Be Evil” culture of the giant tech companies, such as Google, that came to dominate the internet.
But as we saw at the inauguration of Donald Trump, Silicon Valley has experienced a radical vibe shift as the besuited bosses of many of the biggest US tech companies metaphorically prostrated themselves at the feet of an imperial president. Now camped out in Washington, Tesla’s self-proclaimed “Technoking” Elon Musk — whose business interests span rocket ships, satellite networks and social media — embodies a new embrace between technological and political power.
Meanwhile authoritarian governments, most notably in China, Russia and Iran, have hijacked cyber space for their own geopolitical ends. Rather than a means of liberation, cyber space has increasingly become an instrument of geopolitical control.
According to Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, two top executives from Palantir Technologies, a company intertwined with the national security state, Silicon Valley’s utopian tech thinking was always untethered from reality and it’s a good thing that it is now ending. Fixating on the fickle whims of consumers rather than the strategic needs of the public by providing photo-sharing platforms and chat apps, the founders of many technology companies have tried — and failed — to escape from the country that enabled their emergence.
“Silicon Valley has lost its way,” they thunder in the opening sentence of their provocative book The Technological Republic. “The problem is that tolerance of everything often constitutes belief in nothing.”
For too long, the authors claim, Silicon Valley directed its energies, talent and capital to the “trivial and ephemeral”. It must now rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its efforts to tackling the biggest challenges we face, such as healthcare, education and science. In particular, it must lean into the defence of the nation, as Palantir has done by providing intelligence analysis platforms for the military, and help preserve the “enduring yet fragile” geopolitical advantage of the west. In short, Silicon Valley must help the US win the technological arms race with China.
Such is the electroshock that President Trump has already delivered to the system that the book’s criticisms already feel a little dated, as if the authors were jousting against the wind. Still, they certainly help explain the sudden and extraordinary change of worldview that has seized much of the US tech elite. Although the authors are unlikely to welcome the description, their book may be read as a manifesto for the “tech industrial complex” that President Joe Biden warned against in his farewell address.
Even if Karp and Zamiska are critical of Silicon Valley’s ethos, they remain evangelistic about its methods and its astonishing innovative capabilities. The founder-led, software-enabled, start-up approach to innovation has powered the rise of some of the most valuable companies in history.
As of 2024, US tech companies were worth $21.4tn — equivalent to 86 per cent of the total value of the world’s 50 biggest tech companies. These companies’ expertise in software and AI will now ensure that they play an increasingly critical role in defence. “How will the state ensure that this engineering elite remains subservient and accountable to the public?” the authors ask. It is a good question that they never fully answer.
Indeed, in spite of the copious references to philosophers (including Sir Isaiah Berlin and Michael Sandel), the book is disappointingly light in examining the potential downsides of this US version of military-civil fusion. Few qualms are expressed about the moral consequences of developing lethal autonomous weapons systems or the widespread use by the police of facial recognition technology.
Nor is much mention made of the self-interest involved: companies such as Palantir stand to make a fortune from this software-enabled national security state. Even so, The Technological Republic provides a fascinating, if at times disturbing, insight into the reassertion of US hard power. The lingering question, as Marxists would say, is whether Trump represents the death throes of the old world order or the birth pangs of the new.
In World Builders, Bruno Maçães, a former Portuguese politician turned analyst, takes a broader and more historical perspective, exploring the interconnections between technological advances and geopolitical change. In his analysis, there have been four great geopolitical moments in modern times that have resulted in different ways of building, and understanding, the world.
The first came at the beginning of the 1900s, when the whole world became subject to measurement and control. Rather than attempting to discover new territories, the geopolitical struggle revolved around establishing and enforcing different blueprints for the mapped world. The second arrived with the invention of nuclear weapons, which made humanity both “omnipotent and totally impotent,” permanently teetering on the edge of global destruction. The third was the re-emergence of China on the world stage this century and its attempts to build a different culture and development model.
But the fourth moment that is only just beginning — and is therefore still opaque — is the era of software automation. We are moving from a world of atoms to one of bits leading to virtual rivalries. Competition between the US and China has become invisible and indirect, and involves internet standards and protocols as much as rockets and battleships.
Today’s great game is a “game whose purpose is to create the rules of the game,” writes Maçães. “Geopolitics is the struggle not to control territory but to create territory,” he adds. “When your opponent is building a fully artificial or technological world that could eventually redefine your own reality, geopolitics becomes not merely existential but ontological.”
Karl Rove, a political consultant under President George W Bush, was one of the first to understand and articulate the new rules of the game, according to Maçães. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality, we will act again, creating other new realities,” Rove was reported to have said in 2004.
Chinese observers were quick to notice that the west had won the cold war “without gunpowder”, highlighting the importance of ideological power. As an antidote and a challenge, President Xi Jinping has launched his own “China dream” emphasising the renewal of the nation. This has unleashed a rivalry between two imaginary worlds or “a competition between designers or programmers to determine which of them can build the most powerful dream machine.”
Maçães’s exploration of this virtual dimension of geopolitics is compelling, as far as it goes. It will now be interesting to see how far the Trump presidency represents a continuation, or a rupture, of the dynamic that Maçães identifies.
As Karp and Kamiska explain, the US is now intent on reasserting its hard power. Trump himself has shown a keen interest in international real estate opportunities by eyeing expansion in Greenland, Canada, Panama and Gaza, in a seeming return to the more traditional imperial impulses of the 19th century. China, too, has made clear its determination to win control of Taiwan. And the war in Ukraine has shown that ultimately the world of atoms weighs more heavily than that of bits.
At an even higher level of abstraction, Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt explore the ways in which the wonder technology of our age — artificial intelligence — will change the human condition. Genesis was the last book that the veteran US statesman wrote before his death in 2023 in collaboration with two leading technologists. The authors contend that AI, deployed appropriately, can become an invaluable partner to humanity — but warn that the technology also poses huge risks. “AI’s future faculties, operating at inhuman speeds, will render traditional regulation useless. We will need a fundamentally new form of control,” they write.
The big question, the authors ask, is one of alignment: will humans become more like AI or will AI become more human? Their sobering, if realistic, take is that: “Far more work is needed to render our machines, and ourselves, transparent, legible, and reliable.”
Maçães, too, acknowledges the dangers of AI as the “culmination of ideological power”, which may make it impossible to identify the human will behind the machine. He concludes his book with a more dystopian quotation from Frank Herbert’s science fiction saga Dune. “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free,” the Reverend Mother says. “But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
Such discussions take us a very long way from John Perry Barlow’s dreams about the promise of technology. Will we ever be able to revive them?
The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West by Alexander C Karp and Nicholas W Zamiska Bodley Head £25/Crown Currency $30, 320 pages
World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics by Bruno Maçães Cambridge University Press £22.99, 274 pages
Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit by Henry A Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie John Murray £22/Little, Brown $30, 288 pages
John Thornhill is the FT’s innovation editor
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