The levers of tech-diplomacy have been cranking hard and fast in recent years. Amid a hardening geopolitical climate, there’s a global scramble underway by both states and companies to shore up greater degrees of technological self-sufficiency, de-risk reliance on foreign supply chains, and secure control over critical digital infrastructure.

Massive funding programmes to boost domestic semiconductor industries in the US and EU, the European Commission’s attempt to reign in AI via regulation, paranoia in the West over TikTok, Ukraine appealing for a ban of Russia from ICANN, an intensifying global scramble for chemicals and rare earths involving both states and companies. Recent events point not only to how technology plays a prominent role in international politics but also to how crucial control over its networks and resource dependencies has become.

It is sometimes said that platform giants like Google and Meta are to the 21st century what the East India Companies were to the 17th century – private entities grown into ‘para-states’ with unprecedented power, geographical reach, and sufficient influence to challenge and influence national policy. Since these first megacorporations were established, the interests of capital and those of the state have been intertwined in sometimes symbiotic, sometimes adversarial ways.

Yet historical comparisons can only take us so far. Digital networks have added new layers of complexity to how the borders of sovereignties between states and non-state actors are drawn. They overlap and compete in often weird new ways, making for an entangled patchwork of power and agency. What are we to make of a world where platform providers have a greater degree of information control than most nations, where they interface with a greater number of people daily, and own an increasing share of the digital infrastructure that modern life depends on?

According to philosopher of technology Benjamin Bratton, we need new schematics to make sense of our age. Much of Bratton’s work revolves around conceiving of different ways to think about governance and geopolitics in a world characterised by what he calls ‘planetary scale computation’ – a kind of “worldwide cognitive infrastructure that impacts structures of knowledge, geopolitics, and ecologies,” as it is defined on the website of Antikythera, a US-based think tank founded in 2022 with Bratton as its Director.

Bratton’s philosophy of computation envisions Earth’s biological, chemical, geological, and technological processes as interconnected components of a vast, all encompassing cybernetic system. While cloud computing, satellite communication, and artificial intelligence are celebrated as triumphs of human innovation, they are inextricably linked to Earth’s fundamental components – its resource flows and natural cycles. Earth’s colossal network, which now boasts an exoskeleton of human-built technologies, extends from the mineral-rich layers beneath the soil to the data that circulates in the cloud, incorporating all users, interfaces, cities, nations, and corporations that interact within it. The rise of this megastructure, Bratton believes, compels us to reassess core concepts such as economics, politics, society, and intelligence, challenging the notion of the human as distinct from both machines and nature. Moreover, it has profound implications for questions relating to geopolitics, sovereignty, and governance.

“Planetary scale computation organises people, conversations, and flows of matter and information and energy in ways that are difficult if not impossible to govern according to the Westphalian logic of circumscribed territories on plots of land,” Bratton explains to me over a Zoom call.

“That system of governance emerged in a different time in which language, information, energy, matter, and currencies had a spatial footprint that might be delimited in a meaningful way.”

We may still all be national subjects in the Westphalian sense, but in the age of planetary computation, we have become ‘users’ as well. Passports have been supplemented by digital IDs, biometrics, and social media; national currencies supplemented with digital ones; roads and landlines supplemented with undersea cables, cloud computing, and satellites bouncing signals from near-Earth orbit.

Most of this new infrastructure is governed by a for-profit, extractive logic that draws revenue from the cognitive capital of users, as Bratton puts it. But nevertheless, it has become indispensable for daily life. As a result, the borders between state sovereignty and platform sovereignty have become vague and overlapping: “As the cloud becomes more like a state, states become more like the cloud,” Bratton explains.

He refers to this overlapping system of sovereignties as ‘the Stack’, a term first popularised in a titular book from 2015. It is a blueprint for the shift to a future where the likes of “Google can operate as a global sovereign,” he writes.

Bratton’s project is first and foremost a philosophical one, in that it offers new ways to think about the past, present, and future of human society. But his thinking has practical implications as well, or at least it ought to have. Insisting on an outdated logic of governance is not only lazy but dangerous as well, Bratton believes, and it has brought us to a situation where our technological capabilities have come to outstrip our social and cultural capacities for self-organisation.

In his book The Revenge of the Real (2021), the philosopher points to how this manifested itself with deadly ramifications during the Covid-19 pandemic and the various mismanaged responses to it. The virus, to Bratton, was the ‘real’ that exacted its deadly revenge on our political fantasies – whether they manifested themselves in irrational individualism or kneejerk resistance to centralised networks of surveillance and control.

In the book, he envisions a ‘positive biopolitics’ that uses society’s ability to self-regulate via a deep layer of sensing and automation. A term first popularised by philosopher Michel Foucault, biopolitics is commonly used to describe how states influence their subjects through methods like surveillance and population control. Yet Bratton emphasises how it does not need to lead to unfree, insidious forms of government supervision. When it comes to managing our response to a ravaging pandemic, we could imagine a future where the arbitrary whims of political leaders are replaced by decision-making much more embedded in information infrastructures – if our capacity for governance manages to keep up with our technical abilities, that is.

Critics of Bratton see in this proof a techno-authoritarian and anti-humanist vision of governance that understands society as merely a system to be managed. When asked to respond to the critique, Bratton suggests that it merely proves his point that we are stuck in old ways of thinking about new problems.

“There’s this idea that only two positions exist: anti-surveillance, pro-individual freedom on one side and pro-surveillance, anti-individual freedom on the other. The point I’m making is that the way we think about surveillance after the pandemic has changed completely, from individual terms to vector surveillance of the manifold movements of a virus across bodies,” he says. “I’ve said this in the most explicit language possible. It doesn’t matter. What some people hear is: ‘Bratton wants us to surveil individuals more’.”

The lessons Bratton drew from the pandemic align with his broader message, that to solve planetary challenges, we must recognise ourselves as planetary beings as well. Not in the sense that we must revert to some imagined state of natural, pre-digital indigeneity, but that we must dispose of romantic notions that technology and artificiality are somehow corrupt and unethical by default.

Bratton instead advocates for pushing our relationship to Earth into strange new territories. To him, our response to climate change – more ‘revenge of the real’ – will need to include a wholesale terraforming of our planet through more artificiality, more ‘tampering with nature’ – a nature that is, notably, already wholly artificial and terraformed.

“Just as the history of urban planning was about setting aside different zones in the city, we need to plan Earth in the same way. There will be zones where certain kinds of processes take place – for biodiversity, for wildlife corridors, for carbon or nitrogen sinks, photosynthesis, and other geochemical technologies. I see it as part of artificialisation, not its antithesis,” he says.

Bratton’s embrace of the artificial contrasts with the apprehension one often encounters in the humanities around questions of technology’s effects on society. Worse than that, Bratton sees technophobia as a foundational disposition among many of his peers in university philosophy departments, and on the intellectual left in general, who engage in what he considers ‘cartoon critiques’ of technocracy. He elaborates: “Some people believe we need to decomputerise society, decentralise power, and reintroduce organic, neighbourhood-based communities. They imagine the opposite of that belief to be that there is a giant American corporation building a computer that’s going to control everything we do based on individual surveillance.”

“The idea is that large scale technologies are the things that are causing the problems, and that the elevation of human culture, lived experience, and filtration of technology from our lives is the solution to all the problems. This affects important things like climate policy through the belief that there are only moral and ethical solutions to climate change, which is nonsense and a self-evidently illogical conclusion.”

The point, to Bratton, is not that technology alone offers magic bullet solutions to planetary issues, or that we should relinquish all power to our platform overlords, but that governance and large-scale problem solving are already, and will increasingly be, manifested in and dependent on technological networks. In a world where these structures are built by the likes of Meta, Alphabet, or SpaceX, distinctions between public and private, state and non-state, become increasingly blurry.

These networks and their resource dependencies are sure to be a locus for conflict in the future, not only between states but also between Westphalian and ‘post-Westphalian’ forms of governance.

“When the capacity to produce a society requires the ability to mediate complex flows of information, matter, energy, language, and affect, competitions involving both vertical [states, ed.] and horizontal [platforms, ed.] claimants to sovereignty over the sourcing of minerals, energy, high-capacity chips, or data becomes inevitable,” Bratton explains.

We are already beginning to see the contours of these new kinds of conflicts today. One part of the story is the balkanisation of the internet, with China’s Great Firewall, Russia’s new online isolationism, Silicon Valley’s for-profit datahoarding, and the EU’s user-centric regulation all contributing to the splintering of the net into separate zones. It is what makes the idea of a truly ‘global’ internet an increasingly meaningless ideal. Yet rather than being a countertrend to the formation of planetary scale computation, Bratton sees online regionalisation as a feature of it.

“I don’t call it the ‘splinternet’,” he says. “Instead, I call it ‘multipolar computation’. If over the past 10 years there’s been an increasing multipolarisation of geopolitics, there’s also been an increasing multipolarisation of planetary computation between the US, Europe, Russia, and China. These phenomena not only track each other – they are arguably the same thing.”

The reason, Bratton explains, is that while the last decade saw efforts by both autocratic and democratic states to fence in the online world, the capacity of these states to govern their populations has concurrently become much more dependent on and embedded in systems outside of their direct control.

“The internet has made it very clear to everyone that it’s not like you have a society plus the computation infrastructure you use to mediate that society. The capacity to produce a society and the capacity to produce a system necessary to mediate the complex flows of information, matter, energy, language, and affect are the same thing.”

“When Denmark says that its relations with Google are as important as those with any other state, we should take this as wisdom and not altogether bad news,” Bratton says, referring to a decision by the Danish government in 2017 to appoint a Tech Ambassador with a mandate that cuts across foreign and security policy. A less prudent approach to governing the technosphere, Bratton believes, is Brussels’ scattershot efforts to regulate AI.

“Right now, the EU thinks the most important thing to worry about regarding AI is the litany of things that it mandated against in the AI Act – some of which are reasonable and some of which are myopic,” he says. “But the presumption is that this is a new thing that the parliament in Brussels is going to somehow keep its thumb on. It’s like if Napoleon passed a law against electricity in the 1800s. You can mess with it for a little while, but in the long run – good luck.”

As technology continues to challenge traditional notions of sovereignty, the risk of disorder could increase. The establishment of the Westphalian system was a product of the Thirty Years’ War, Europe’s bloodiest conflict. As a new political geography struggles to mature, we must ask what new risks follow with it, and whether mayhem and rupture are necessary prerequisites to the eventual solidification of a new order – perhaps one resembling Bratton’s vision of multipolar competition between vertical and horizontal centres of power. Although long-standing notions of governance and sovereignty are being challenged, Bratton does not necessarily believe the result will be chaos.

“There’s fragmentation happening today. But I see a new moment of stability eventually – not now, but perhaps in the next decade – around a new multipolar arrangement,” he concludes.

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