D IPLOM ATICOURIER.com
A Global Affairs Media Network VO L UME 13 I ISSUE 3 I M AY 2019
Science Health Diplomacy
COVER STORY
SOCIETY
TECHNOLOGY
GALLERY
CYBATHLON: A SCIENCE DIPLOMACY SUCCESS STORY
COMMUNITY OF ONE: THE RISE OF SCREENCAPITALISM
INFO OPS IN THE AGE OF CYBER WAR
BOKO HARAM’S DEN: MAIDUGURI, BORNO STATE, NIGERIA
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D I P L O M AT I C O U R I E R .c o m
COVER STORY C Y B AT H L O N
Cybathlon: A Science Diplomacy Success Story By Robert Riener & Marianne Lucien
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CROEV FE RU G S TEOERSY C Y B AT H L O N
The world’s first Cybathlon—a competitive and collaborative Olympic-style event—launched a movement around the world. Here is how this movement advanced technology for assistive devices and sparked a meaningful dialogue between science and the world. Overview of competition arena, SWISS Arena in Kloten. Photo by ETH Zurich/Alessandro Della Bella.
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D I P L O M AT I C O U R I E R .c o m COMMUNITY OF ONE
COMMUNITY I OF ONE: THE RISE OF SCREENCAPITALISM By: Jacksón Smith
t has become almost commonplace to declare modern politics consumed by a resurgence of nationalism—but that’s wrong. While there are compelling and important parallels between Brexit, MAGA, and the traditional Blut und Boden nationalism of the 20th century— we are living in an era defined by a new paradigm of personalization that is driving a tectonic shift in the way we imagine and identify with our larger communities. The stakes? A democratic world increasingly sacrificed to swaths of people who earnestly believe that governments are using chemicals to turn frogs gay, a version of reality where elections are determined by programmers, data-scientists, opportunist influencers, and Russian troll factories. In the mid-15th century, there were still thousands of languages on our Earth—as many languages as there were stars in the sky. Unsurprisingly, these languages were not clearly demarcated between English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic with clear dictionaries and grammar books defining very succinctly what is and is not each body of words. Within Europe, as you moved from city center to city center, there was no clear understanding of which languages M AY 2 0 1 9 16
each city spoke. Rather, if you were a nomad, you would find yourself roaming a gradient of sounds in a continual ebb and flow of dialects, picking up new words and tones as fast as you could walk. Enter: the invention of mass literacy and the emergence of print-capitalism. At the turn of the 17th century, print capitalism had become the dominant logic, laying the foundations for nationalism with a series of powerful economic incentives for publishers embodied by a simple equation: to reach the maximum number of people you must publish for the lowest common denominator. This wasn’t a sudden revelation. Rather, publishers realized, over time, that the best and most efficient way to reach your audience was for you to find the lowest common denominator of words, of utterances, and letter combinations that could resonate and be widely understood. And so, as literacy became more widespread through education, languages started to coagulate and clump together for newspapers and magazines, pamphlets, and propaganda. Gradually, the world witnessed the emergence of the
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“The internet is a cesspool for the proliferation of dog-whistling— where language evolves, like hashtags for conspiracies, a secret-handshake to confirm you’ve tuned into are particular channel of truth, a particular web of relevant facts.”
modern demarcations of language— languages that would become inseparable from the identities, geographies, and demographics who spoke them. Language even became an object of ownership. My language is English. Their language is German. This form of print-capitalism— the intersection of economics and information—proved to be a massive accelerant toward the creation of modern nations, our imagined communities organized around language and territory. Language, as it turned out, was the central channel for stoking a sense of shared reality. Every morning, whole populations began reading their daily newspaper —and the only thing connecting all of the disparate, bizarre, and fragmented events embodied on that front page was a timestamp and a place. January 4th, 1901—Los Angeles Times. October 12th, 1921—The Missoulian. These newspapers became, in a sense, the best-selling novel of every day for their communities, crafting a coherent narrative of the on-going events and hubbub of the people as characters living within them. As each person read the unfolding story of their community in the paper, they could imagine 250,000 other Montanans, or 100 million other
The algorithms driving publishing and advertising aren’t programmed to siphon us into a liberal or conservative box, they’re programmed to mirror our preferences, in their infinite. Americans reading the very same paper at their own breakfast table, thinking their own Montanan, American thoughts with their own Montanan, American families. Even though most of those millions of Americans would never meet, they all played a pivotal role in each other’s imagination. So, are these same mechanisms at play today? At first, when the internet was created, you could have the New York Times in print and online. While the digital version was cheaper and eco-friendly, they were, largely, identical. But over the last two decades, another subterranean force was building momentum. The entire equation of print capitalism—to reach the maximum number of people by appealing to the lowest common denominator—was inverting.
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Screen capitalism, marking the shift from print to digitally delivered media, follows an opposite incentive scheme: to reach the maximum number of people you have to appeal to the highest common denominators— limitless personalization. Suddenly the lowest common denominator represents all that is cliché, bland, and unappealing in a world defined by a wealth of information and a poverty of attention. If you’re able to deliver news to you that is personalized to you, that means algorithms are delivering the best-selling newspaper for each and every one of us, rather than whole communities. I do not know who is reading what or when. As I sit at the dinner table, headlines simultaneously vibrate through the bricks in each our pockets—How Giuliani Might Take Down Trump … Google Moves to Address Wage Equity—but which other families are seeing the same? One? Ten? One million? Rather than Extra Extra! paper boys yelling a common substance for conservatives and democrats to chew on, debate, and uphold—our central funnels for information have shifted to the subterranean black boxes of the internet, where a street full of people can be nose down in their phones,
D I P L O M AT I C O U R I E R .c o m CYBERPUNK FUTURE
OUR CYBERPUNK PRESENT, OUR CYBERPUNK FUTURE: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM NEAL STEPHENSON’S SNOW CRASH By: Daniel Clausen
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here is much that students and practitioners of global politics can learn from cyberpunk. As a genre cyberpunk has been described by Bruce Sterling as a “combination of lowlife and high tech”. But from the perspective of international politics, we might think of much of cyberpunk as a kind of techno-medievalism—a lumpy landscape of technology, tribalism, overlapping authority and sovereignty, and migratory identities. Some of the classics of cyberpunk include the writing of Philip K. Dick, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film equivalent Blade Runner, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and Japanese manga such as Akira, which also became a major anime film. Cyberpunk has successfully predicted many of the current dynamics of international politics: abundant and anarchical information environments, layered realities, the rise of media personalities as international players, the rise of tribal politics, and negotiable identities. Hopefully, scarier things found in cyberpunk will not come to pass—hyperinflation even in supposedly stable currencies, the breakdown of nation-states at an M AY 2 0 1 9 22
alarming rate, and the creation of walled and tribal city-states. A classic cyberpunk, Neal Stephenson’s 1993 classic Snow Crash, can teach us much about our evolving future. In the book, the United States has been carved up into separate territories by gangs, churches, the mafia, and corporations. Each of these actors competes against (and sometimes cooperates with) one another to control territory, create spheres of influence, and to protect themselves from emerging dangers. The federal government claims sovereignty over all of its former territory, but in reality, it is only one actor in a landscape of sub-state entities and can only hold a small physical footprint. But physical territory is not the only entity these actors concern themselves with. Many people spend much of their time in a place called the metaverse, where they interact through avatars. This was years before the internet or social media became staples of our daily life. Perhaps one of the most relevant themes of Snow Crash has to do with identity. Identity is depicted as precarious, fragmented, and negotiable. In a world with weak, non-existent, or failing nation-states,
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Written in 1993, but forecasting many of the trends we see today—information overload and anarchy, tribalized worldviews, alternative currencies, and a new digital world—the novel is extremely relevant. As is the entire genre of cyberpunk.
it can also be highly tribal. How should we judge fiction vis-à-vis international political theory? First, like theory, we should judge it by its internal consistency. How much does the fiction obey the rules it creates for itself? And second, we should judge it by its relevance to the current world we live in. In other words, how much does the fictional world actually reflect and illuminate dynamics in the real world? Third, we should also ask in what ways the fiction surpasses theory (what I call explicitly stated theory, as opposed to the implicitly depicted theory of fiction). Is the fictional world of Snow Crash internally consistent? In the novel, the United States is an anarchical territory mostly dominated by “burbclaves” (relatively well-to-do suburban enclaves) “franchulates” (franchises that control and compete for territories), narcotribes, city-states, and the rump federal government (that articulates the practices of a government without actually governing very much). Does the fictional world obey the rules it creates for itself? For the most part, yes. There is certainly
a tonal consistency that carries the book. However, one does have to wonder how vital infrastructures are maintained. It seems as if principles of greed, honor, and cooperation within anarchy keep the territory known as America together. But this reality seems tenuous at best sometimes. The absurdity of this future is often its draw and its plausibility comes from the rich details the author endows the book with. The world-building is so complete that mid-way through the book, the reader can start to anticipate how things will happen. But there are still lingering questions. Without a strong central government, how do airports continue to function? How do nuclear arsenals remain secure (enough)? And why is the United States, with only a rump federal government, still considered the “First World” by the characters in the book? Second, is the novel relevant to the current world? Written in 1993, but forecasting many of the trends we see today—information overload and anarchy, tribalized worldviews, alternative currencies, and a new digital world—I would say the novel is extremely relevant. As is the entire genre of cyberpunk. However, since the novel is fiction and not theory or policy writing, the question could be asked: What wisdom, if any, can be pulled from this fictional world? To answer this question, we would need to go beyond the novel itself and ask another important question. How does the world become the world predicted in the novel? One key answer is the breakdown and hollowing out of public institutions.
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In the novel, the CIA eventually becomes the CIC (the Central Intelligence Corporation) and the federal government becomes a shadow of its former self. The irrelevance of these organizations opens up opportunities for the Mafia, narcotribes, franchulates, and Asian city-states like Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong (and its alternative currency Kongbucks). So, one possible answer to the question of what wisdom can be drawn from the fictional world is simple: restore trust in and renew public institutions. And finally, does the novel surpass explicitly stated theory? My answer to this question will seem wishywashy. I have always considered fiction as a superior form of writing because it can deal freely with the often blurred, curved, layered, and otherwise absurd aspects of reality. Fiction never has to smooth out the rough edges of the world. The very thing that makes it superior to explicitly written policy writing or international political theory, however, also leaves it lacking. An analytical interpretation of the novel—rendering it theory—kills much of what is unique and valuable in the world it has created, but at the same time makes it accessible to audiences with specific intellectual needs. In short, you give up the rich fictional world to gain the theoretical one. Which is more valuable? Well, like the hero of Stephenson’s novel, Hiro Protagonist (yes, that really is his name), who travels between the metaverse and the real world to accomplish his objectives, I suggest that you become a frequent traveler between worlds to live the richest possible theoretical life (rich in Kongbucks, of course). ●
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Daniel Clausen is a graduate of Florida International University’s PhD program in International Relations and an instructor at Nagasaki International University. His research has been published in Asian Politics and Policy, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, and Culture and Conflict Review, among other publications.