When we discuss technology, we neglect to ask whether technology serves as the backdrop for our actions, or whether some other thing does. I think builders and technologists do not spend much time on this issue. Perhaps we simply take technology to be a bundle of gadgets. The idea that it might become the environment is daring, though maybe too daring. When we speak about smart cities, we are heading that way, but still with caution.
Here I want to contend that we inhabit a technological world, a technological medium that encloses us like a wholly artificial environment. Notably, this is easier to see in world politics, where states are constantly worried about technological advantage and therefore tend to judge their actions more or less by reference to how technology operates.
It seems to me that the rivals exist and operate within a particular medium. At times this medium appears to assume a life of its own, even taking on an agent’s qualities. In those moments it feels as though a higher force is standing over Washington and Beijing, setting the terms of their conduct, their escalating rivalry, and the result that will follow.
It is not simple to assess something that does not resemble a state, yet is in truth all around us while never becoming fully visible or completely disclosed. But when real decision makers in Washington or Beijing choose a course or carry out a strategy, you should watch closely what follows, and you may catch a brief sight of this concealed actor. For instance, Washington may decide to put a Chinese company on the entity list, cutting off its access to valuable inputs and components. That choice is only the start. What comes afterward may take highly surprising or unintended shapes. You could wind up accelerating technology in China, as Chinese firms have to reinforce domestic semiconductor production, for example. You can see my point. These choices may well be the right ones, but we cannot know that with certainty unless we examine how they unfold.
Put another way: they are moves in a game.
You might end up shrinking the global chip supply, damaging your own automakers. That has occurred over the past few months, with at least one American automaker shifting chip production away from Chinese Semiconductor Manufacturing International after it was struck by trade restrictions to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which by that point was overbooked. Or you could end up barring your own companies from attending meetings where Chinese companies are present, leaving an open field for their deliberate efforts to have key Chinese technologies approved as global standards. After Huawei was added to the entity list in May 2019, some companies with American operations in fact withdrew from the meetings and processes they had once joined. As The Economist observed at the time, “in areas where Huawei is active, this has left America voiceless in setting the tech rules of the future.” These are only the immediate effects of the decisions above.
I could continue on to the next chain of consequences, but this brief article would begin to look like a novel, a garden of forking paths. Chess masters can work out thirty moves in advance. Political masters? Two, perhaps, but the logic is the same.
Who determines what occurs? Not Washington, not Beijing, but the rules of the game. Better to understand the rules in all their maddening and unpredictable detail. The game is sovereign — America and China are much less so. So my argument is really aimed at builders and technologists: They should recognize that, in the end, technology is the set of rules under which the great questions of war and peace now unfold. It would be naive to believe otherwise. We have left the jungle behind. Great powers do not compete in the jungle and are not governed by the law of the jungle. They compete within a technological construct, obeying the game algorithm while also trying to uncover every rule and possibility it contains.
The matter is complicated by the fact that the algorithm is unknown to the player and only discloses itself through repeated rounds of the game. One has to play in order to learn how the algorithm functions and only afterward in order to win. This seems to me a highly fitting account of world politics, where we mainly discover the rules by playing, and only rarely have all the rules laid out for us before play begins. A standard game starts at some point within a broad, unknown space. During the game the player will explore that space, chart its geography, and uncover its secrets.
No strategy can overlook the fact that states now function inside a global system that has become heavily automated and appears more and more capable of shaping outcomes, rewarding or punishing those agents that fail to grasp how it all functions. Think of the pace of financial crises, global investment and economic incentives, technological progress and power. Human beings have, of course, created this system. We made the world game and we are the ones who play it.
How did we arrive here?
If I were to write the history of the world game, a few dates would clearly stand out. First, of course, the creation of nuclear weapons. This was the point when states lost their monopoly on the use of force. You might think nuclear weapons merely increased their power of destruction, but in fact they introduced the possibility that even the most powerful state could be wiped out in a nuclear war. It placed states beneath a higher power, one with a technological rather than human center.
The second decisive moment was the American victory in the Cold War. The defeat of the Soviet Union marked the moment when the scheme of total control over society and the economy was exposed as impossible. That meant states would have to act against a backdrop of forces they could not fully control, and even that rivalry between them would come down to how successful they might be in acting within that broader system.
The system has certain rules that hold out the prospect of success to those who understand how markets and technology, capital and natural resources — how these great forces really function. At that point, the logic of the world game was finished.
A third and final revolution is just as unavoidable, though it still lies ahead, so I will not go much further than careful observation. Think about global competition today: Success or failure do not depend on psychological traits such as courage. Excellence for us means control, but control is an endless game. There is always a better way to move your chess pieces, to deploy your resources, to predict your opponent’s thoughts. There is one move and then another and still another in an endless sequence. The task is not narrow and limited but can extend to every part of the game environment. There is no finish. The game goes on forever and the final aim is to stay ahead forever.
A state capable of taking every available piece of data into account and weighing it properly in each decision would soon rise to global dominance. Such a state, as you will have guessed by now, would be run by software. How petty and childish the maneuvers of even a brilliant statesman appear by comparison.
A game, however, is not an algorithm. It is the human use of an algorithm. To play a game is to learn how the algorithm functions. The game merely provides the stage. Human beings still have to play it. Think of chess: The system of rules and possible moves helps release your creativity and abilities. The mind needed to govern human societies will be very different from an algorithm. Intuition, brilliance, genius. These qualities have to be preserved and, if preserved, they can preserve the world.
When the game board changes…
For builders, the world game is more than a metaphor. It is a reminder that they are constructing something far larger than a gadget or an app. They are building a global platform that is defining the terms of global power competition. There is no escaping geopolitics and the question of what the rules are. At the same time, the overall shape of the game gives order and stability to world politics.
For the student of geopolitics, there comes a moment when we begin to suspect that a hidden actor is deciding outcomes. At some point, one begins to shift his or her attention away from the visible centers of power and toward this hidden center, which is in fact at the center of their relative distances.
It is a moment of awakening. Competition is not direct after all and there is a higher agent — higher even than the most powerful player — deciding the winner.
The world political and economic system resembles the workings of a game in one critical, often neglected respect. In a game you never confront your opponent directly. There are moves and relations that bind you together and you fight your opponent by turning those moves and relations against him. Even two boxers are not trying to hit each other like two brawlers in the street: They are acting within a defined contest and thinking about the contest as a whole and about the best strategy to secure victory, which is something different from destroying your opponent. Those who take it personally are more likely to lose. The players have spent years or decades learning how to master and refine all the possibilities opened by the game. They use the game’s possibilities to defeat their opponent.
The same thing happens with technology today, which works at the level of the system itself. Using the power of the global technological system to pursue your aims is far more effective than using more direct means. When I say this is an exceedingly complex game, I have in mind the process by which an actor comes to master the way technology works, with its connected parts and knock-on effects. It is almost impossible to distinguish from the process by which one learns how to play a game.
For instance: As a major oil and gas producer, Russia knows it has more energy resources inside its borders than it could ever require, and customers are always guaranteed a more or less mechanical outcome of a growing and more balanced global economy. But that set of assumptions overlooks how other producers can strike its interests by manipulating market prices. Use the system to attack your opponent. By the end of 2015, a 10% cut in public spending in Russia was the clearest evidence of the rising pressure from the pincer of international sanctions and low energy prices in an economy that depends on crude at $100 a barrel. Faced with a direct challenge, Russia decided that the Middle East was now the arena where its future would be decided.
As more economic blocs concentrate on particular technologies, each one must ensure that its chosen fields win out and become a kind of global standard. The European Union has made a clear bet on hydrogen. The European Green Deal could have a major effect on Russia, a country that relies heavily on fossil-fuel exports to the European Union. WoodMac, a respected energy consultancy, now has a scenario in which oil prices could sink to $10 a barrel by 2050 if the world speeds up the shift to clean energy. 2025 could be an inflection point for the vital automobile industry, when electric and combustion vehicles are expected to cost the same. Countries in East Asia are racing to develop the battery technology of the future, and China is building integrated supply chains for electric cars in Indonesia. European firms still lead the world in wind turbines, and Germany is pushing for global leadership in hydrogen technology, while China threatens to catch up quickly even in these areas.
An extraordinarily intricate game.
We must understand that what seems like disorder is, in fact, a new kind of order, imposed from above on all players. There are even penalties in the system, applied more or less automatically to those who fail to understand the game and the way it is played. Some can see the game and some can see only the players. At every moment, the beginning of wisdom is to rise above the players. Technology decides. The game decides in this system.