What seem like defined debates today over security and privacy will broaden to questions of who controls and influences virtual identities and thus citizens themselves. Democracies will become more influenced by the wisdom of crowds (for better or for worse), poor autocracies will struggle to acquire the necessary resources to effectively extend control into the virtual world, and wealthier dictatorships will build modern police states that tighten their grip on citizens’ lives. These changes will spur new behaviors and progressive laws, but given the sophistication of the technologies involved, in most cases citizens stand to lose many of the protections they feel and rely upon today. How populations, private industry and states handle the forthcoming changes will be highly determined by their social norms, legal frameworks and particular national characteristics.
We will now turn to a discussion of how global connectivity will affect the way states operate, negotiate and wrestle with each other. Diplomacy has never been as interesting as it will be in the new digital age. States, which are constantly playing power politics in the international system, will find themselves having to retool their domestic and foreign policies in a world where their physical and virtual tactics are not always aligned.
1 Most of these techniques fall under the umbrella of search-engine optimization (SEO) processes. To influence the ranking algorithm of search engines, the most common method is to seed positive content around the target (e.g., a person’s name), encourage links to it and frequently update it, so that the search-engine spiders are likely to identify the material as popular and new, which pushes down the older, less relevant content. Using prominent keywords and adding back-links (incoming links to a website) to popular sites can also influence the ranking. This is all legal and generally considered fair. There is an underside to SEO, however—“black-hat SEO”—where efforts to manipulate rankings include less legal or fair practices like sabotaging other content (by linking it to red-flag sites like child pornography), adding hidden text or cloaking (tricking the spiders so that they see one version of the site while the end user sees another).
2 This dictum is commonly attributed to Stewart Brand, the founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, recorded at the first Hackers’ Conference, in 1984.
3 While in the technical community the term “hacker” means a person who develops something quickly and with an air of spontaneity, we use it here in its colloquial meaning to imply unauthorized entry into systems.
4 Among the tweets the Pakistani IT consultant Sohaib Athar sent the night of the bin Laden raid: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”
5 “Predictive analytics” is a young field of study at the intersection of statistics, data-mining and computer modeling. At its core, it uses data to make useful predictions about the future. For one example, predictive analytics could use data on ridership fluctuations on the New York City subway to predict how many trains would be needed on a given day, accounting for seasonality, employment and the weather forecast.
6 Interestingly, the VPPA statute came into play in a Texas lawsuit in 2008, when a woman filed a class-action suit against Blockbuster for sharing her rental and sales record with Facebook without her permission. The parties settled.
7 In the United States, the “trespass to chattels” tort has in some cases already been applied to cyberspace.
8 Wearable technology overlaps with the similar emergent industry of haptic technology, but the two are not synonymous. Haptics refers to technology that interacts with a user’s sense of touch, usually though pulses or the application of pressure. Wearable technologies often include many haptic elements but are not limited to them (like a jacket for cyclists that lights up in the evening); nor are all haptic technologies wearable.
CHAPTER 3
The
Future of States
What do we talk about when we talk about the Internet? Most people have only a vague sense of how the Internet works, and in most cases that’s fine. The majority of users don’t need to understand its internal architecture or how a hash function works in order to interface fluidly with the online world. But as we turn to a discussion about how state power affects, and is affected by, the Internet, some basic knowledge will help make clear a few of the more conceptually difficult scenarios that come into play.
As it was initially conceived, the Internet is a network of networks, a huge and decentralized web of computer systems designed to transmit information using specific standard protocols. What the average user sees—websites and applications, for example—is really the flora and fauna of the Internet. Underneath, millions of machines are sending, processing and receiving data packets at incredible speed over fiber-optic and copper cables. Everything we encounter online and everything we produce is ultimately a series of numbers, packaged together, sent through a series of routers located around the world, then reassembled at the other end.
We have often described the Internet as a “lawless” space, ungoverned and ungovernable by design. Its decentralized makeup and constantly mutating interlinking structure make government attempts to “control” it futile. But states have an enormous amount of power over the mechanics of the Internet in their own countries. Because states have power over the physical infrastructure connectivity requires—the transmission towers, the routers, the switches—they control the entry, exit and waypoints for Internet data. They can limit content, control what hardware people are allowed to use and even create separate Internets. States and citizens both gain power from connectivity, but not in the same manner. Empowerment for people comes from what they have access to, while states can derive power from their position as gatekeeper.
So far we have focused mostly on what will happen when billions more people come online—How will they use the Internet? What kinds of devices will they use? How will their lives change?—but we haven’t yet said what their Internet will look like, or how states will make the most of it in their own physical and virtual dealings with other states and with their own people. This will increasingly matter, as populations with different alphabets, interests and sets of norms become connected, and as their governments bring their own interests, grudges and resources to the table. Perhaps the most important question in ten years’ time won’t be if a society uses the Internet, but which version of it they use.
As more states adapt to having large portions of their populations online, they’ll strive to maintain control, both internally and on the world stage. Some states will emerge stronger—more secure and with greater influence—from this transition into the virtual age, benefiting from strong alliances and smart uses of digital power, while others will struggle just to keep up with and adapt to technological changes both domestically and internationally. Friendships, alliances and enmities between states will extend into the virtual world, adding a new and intriguing dimension to traditional statecraft. In many ways, the Internet could ultimately be seen as the realization of the classic international-relations theory of an anarchic, leaderless world. Here’s how we think states will respond to each other and to their citizens.