The Daily Planet #6: Network Wars

The planetary is not just about trees and coral reefs, but also about chips and rare earth minerals and economic sanctions. Social scientists - and physicists in their own way - keep reminding us that all information is material: a data center is a physical entity after all.

We can expand that claim to say: all information is planetary.

The next few daily planets will be devoted to the planetary politics underlying information, especially AI.

The first Cold War was between the United States and its allies on the one side, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other. Some countries such as India claimed to sit this one out, while China started firmly in the Soviet camp but peeled out after they almost came to blows with the Soviet Union in the 60's, followed by detente with the US in 72.

Nevertheless, the two camps didn't have much to do with one another - very few people moved from one to the other, even scientific contacts were kept to a minimum and the economies were almost entirely decoupled. In contrast, the US and China are completely intertwined.

How might they press each others' buttons?

If proxy wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America were a key feature of the first Cold War, Farrell and Newman's essay in Foreign Affairs is insightful on how interdependence is being weaponized and will be a characteristic mode of conflict in the second Cold War. Both sides will be feeling each other's strengths and weaknesses and exploit choke points. Semiconductor export bans meet Rare Earth export bans, for example.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the United States began using these systems to pursue terrorists and their backers. Over two decades of cumulative experimentation, U.S. authorities expanded their ambitions and reach. The United States graduated from exploiting financial chokepoints against terrorists to deploying sanctions to target banks and, in time, to cutting entire countries, such as Iran, out of the global financial system. The Internet was transformed into a global surveillance apparatus, allowing the United States to demand that platforms and search companies, which were regulated by U.S. authorities, hand over crucial strategic information on their worldwide users.

The Weaponized World Economy

When Washington announced a “framework deal” with China in June, it marked a silent shifting of gears in the global political economy. This was not the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s imagined epoch of “liberation” under unilateral American greatness or a return to the Biden administration’s dream of managed great-power rivalry. Instead, it was the true opening of the age of weaponized interdependence, in which the United States is discovering what it is like to have others do unto it as it has eagerly done unto others.