The Raging 2020s

by Alec Ross

  The United States is beginning to recognize the threat and has tried to stop its allies from installing Chinese telecommunications equipment, fearing that it could be used as a data collection channel for Chinese state intelligence services. In 2020, the White House announced it would rescind visas for Chinese students and researchers with ties to China’s military universities. The government is also applying greater scrutiny to Chinese business ventures involving American companies.

  In 2016, a Chinese gaming company called Beijing Kunlun Tech paid $93 million to acquire a 60 percent stake in Grindr, a popular dating app for gay men. But three years later, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States ordered the company to sell its stake in the app. The reason: its data could be used to blackmail American national security officials.

  If you were to open Grindr in Washington, DC, odds are you would stumble upon profiles of intelligence analysts, members of the military, and government officials and contractors who hold security clearances. Those profiles include your standard online dating details—age, height, personal interests, and location—but also more sensitive information, like sexual orientation, HIV status, unusually precise location data (down to the foot), and whether or not the user is in the closet. Combine that information with a few personal photos (sometimes with minimal clothing), and you can build a potentially compromising dossier.

  Given the close ties between the Chinese government and private sector, US national security officials feared that Grindr data would ultimately pass from Beijing Kunlun Tech to the hands of the Chinese government, which would use it to blackmail US officials. The risk was especially great for people who are not open about their sexuality.

  “We know there’s plenty of people who aren’t honest and open about who they love,” one thirty-year-old intelligence analyst who uses Grindr told me. “The risk of personal trauma or losing your career, losing your job, losing your family—people will do a lot to protect that, which is something adversaries know full and well.”

  Grindr is not a physical US security asset. It does not explode or fly or sail, like the technologies developed by defense contractors during the Cold War. It does not power nuclear reactors or control sophisticated fighter jets or support critical infrastructure. What Grindr does is generate valuable data.

  In a sense, the injunction also suggests that we need a serviceable buffer in the social contract, between citizens and states, to handle the data that underlies the internet and the rapidly advancing AI industry. It is not safe for such data to be turned over to state-affiliated entities, the United States is arguing. Of course, on that matter, the US intelligence networks would be pleased to have comparable data. But that makes the Grindr scuffle all the more interesting. It underscores the special role that we have already come to expect from companies in our lives.

  There are things many of us are comfortable having companies know about us, provided they do not misuse that data. Yet we would not be comfortable sharing the same information with governments, whether foreign or our own. Fostering the kind of autonomy we see in the work of Rebellion Defense, and pushing technology companies to be transparent about their policies and principles surrounding data, has great value. It can offer a check against the frightening power that centralized data can have, and this is especially the case if policy makers keep reasonable checks on these companies in turn. That gap between corporation and state, where each can constrain the other, ends up serving citizens in the long run. Because, as we have seen in China, when there is no meaningful separation between government and business, the door springs open for full-on authoritarianism.

  WHERE DO WE GO?

  If the geopolitical landscape during the second half of the 20th century was defined by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the first half of the 21st century is being defined by the Code War between the United States and China. This rivalry is unlikely to grow as tense or as binary as the Cold War, but it will still draw nations and companies to one side or the other. Chinese and American technology companies will compete against each other for talent, market share, and first-mover advantages in new branches of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. The Chinese and American governments will each strive to outdo the other in setting global standards for digital technology and adopting the latest innovations into their defense and intelligence agencies. Each country will form its own sphere of influence through international alliances, business partnerships, intelligence sharing, and academic collaboration.

  The vision put forth by China is clear. The Chinese government sees artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies as instruments of political and social control. It seeks to build a surveillance state so total that it becomes impossible for citizens to organize meaningful opposition. The Chinese model strengthens its control over the social contract.

  Moving through the 2020s, Western democracies must figure out how to maximize the democratizing potential of digital technology and minimize its abuses through legal and regulatory guardrails. Europe has taken the lead through measures like the General Data Privacy Regulation.

  Eric Schmidt, the former chairman and CEO of Google, who has led two government panels on national security and technology, warned in a February 2020 article that “ultimately, the Chinese are competing to become the world’s leading innovators, and the United States is not playing to win.” Without “unprecedented partnerships between [the United States] government and industry” on artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and 5G, China will likely come out on top.

  Others have argued that to prevail over China’s techno-authoritarian model, and to keep the flame of a democratic social contract alive, it will be necessary to turn to the type of strong international alliances that bound together liberal democracies during the Cold War.

  My former State Department colleague Jared Cohen has proposed the idea of building an alliance of “techno-democracies” that he dubs the T-12. “There’s not a single democratic country that’s big enough to compete with China on a one-to-one ratio—China has too much flexibility in terms of rules, and too much capacity,” Cohen told me. “The only way to compete with China is through collective action, and the best way to compete with collective action is to organize like-minded states.”

  This organization, composed of democratic nations that lead in strategic technology fields—including the United States and key European nations, as well as India, Japan, and South Korea—could shape international norms, pool resources, and coordinate policy around export controls, supply chain security, and AI ethics. Together, these countries could build a unified front against China’s techno-authoritarianism.

  I see the appeal of this type of approach, but the loss of standing of the American government on technology policy issues in the eyes of its likely partners—especially the Europeans—would make this exceedingly difficult, though it is still worth pursuing. The US government just is not trusted to guide international alliances in the days of the Code War the way it was during the Cold War. Advancing democracy during the Code War will be a whole-of-society effort, and the global corporations that have emerged out of and thrived in democratic societies cannot shy away from the fight, particularly those in the technology industry.

  This is true across the broad sweep of global concerns that we are facing in the coming decades—from climate change to human rights to inequality, as well as tax avoidance and the stewardship of AI and data. These issues require governments to act and citizens to speak up, but they cannot realistically be solved within a reasonable time frame without leadership from the world’s most influential companies as well. A good deal of corporate responsibility actions under shareholder capitalism are window dressing. But when companies like Unilever, Apple, and Microsoft commit to becoming carbon neutral—and hit that goal—it proves that a paradigm shift is possible. Such changes in the standards by which business is done can push authorities to standardize them across other indu
stries (like technology), codifying them into law. And when global companies set clear standards and explain the rationale behind them, they can help jump-start changes across a number of countries.

  * * *

  IT IS ONE thing to say that companies need to step up and grow into their new role in the social contract. But how do we ensure that it can actually happen?

  First off, we will get nowhere unless corporate leadership embraces stakeholder capitalism. If companies are going to meaningfully weigh in on the biggest problems the world is facing, then they need to do so without a short-term, profit-only motive. Otherwise they can justify building anything and selling to anybody. And such a shift needs to come with transparency and metrics, such as the generally accepted accounting principles discussed in earlier chapters. We can develop analytics that measure companies’ environmental and human rights records; we can do the same for foreign policy records. There also needs to be oversight from several angles. Company boards will be the very first line of defense, ensuring that companies have stronger standards for the goals and implications of the products they create. Board oversight will be even stronger if it includes workers’ input, as we discussed in the labor chapter.

  Lawmakers will also need to continue to establish guardrails and guidelines, which will require dialing up their expertise on these subjects, above what you will find in my son’s high school classroom. Even as companies can use their expertise and scale to help address sweeping societal questions, this cannot come without government playing a role. Antitrust measures should not fall by the wayside, and it’s worth even extending anticompetitive standards to cover the danger around regulatory capture as well.

  While many companies see themselves as global actors, unconstrained by the domestic and foreign policy concerns of their home countries, it does not take much collective action from the world’s leading governments to correct that notion. According to political scientist Fareed Zakaria, it would be fairly easy for a government to disabuse them of that idea.

  “People need to understand that at the end of the day, whatever power that these companies have is power that has been ceded by the state,” Zakaria told me. “The state can very easily recapture that power at any moment. None of these companies have the ability to flaunt state authority in the way that the British East India Company might have been able to do. The reality is all these companies live in fear of regulation. They’re constantly adjusting themselves to abide by state authority.”

  People tend to become chiefs of global companies because of their expertise in fields such as management, sales, finance, or product—not in navigating the geopolitical landscape. But that is exactly what success in the 21st century demands. The world’s most successful CEOs are those who adopt and adapt the toolkit of a world leader.

  Expanding into new global markets and helping to establish industry standards requires the skills of diplomacy. Different cultures require different business strategies, different customer experiences, and different government relations. If companies do not learn how to do business in different cultural contexts, they will fail.

  Multinational companies must also develop something of an intelligence apparatus to help them see around the corner. In today’s global supply chains, civil unrest in southeast Asia could impact sales in North America and civil unrest in North America could impact sales in Europe. Effective geopolitical forecasting could make a significant difference to a company’s bottom line.

  At the same time, companies on the global stage now need to know how to defend themselves when it comes to cybersecurity. Any company that handles valuable information is a potential target of digital attacks, whether it is a defense contractor or a dating app. They need to work proactively to protect that information from falling into the wrong hands.

  “Every company needs its own State Department, Pentagon, and CIA,” said Jared Cohen, my former State Department colleague turned tech executive, who proposed the idea of the T-12.

  Lastly, companies need to be able to articulate their principles, policies, and lines in the sand. And they need to do so transparently with customers, regulators, and employees alike. Accounting principles and standard regulations will help keep companies honest, and the days when a large company does not need to articulate its own ethical groundings are over.

  All these shifts are ways in which companies stand to learn from policy makers—and that is fitting. Because for us to account for the dangers of AI and mass surveillance, or of climate change, we need buy-in and action from the world’s largest companies. They are not in the periphery of geopolitical power; they have used their gains over the last thirty years to become protagonists, and now it is time to live up to the responsibilities that come with their great power.

  6

  THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHANGE: THE CONTEST FOR POWER BETWEEN CLOSED AND OPEN SYSTEMS

  For more than six thousand years, people have worked to balance the rights and responsibilities of the state, the people, and businesses. The social contracts that have emerged out of that balancing act have taken different forms in different places at different times, but their existence remains a constant throughout world history. Strong social contracts tend to reinforce themselves while weak ones give way to new models. The contracts established a basic equilibrium: governments provided the security and stability needed to maintain a free market that let citizens and companies flourish, while citizens held the power to choose their leaders.

  As we have seen throughout this book, however, that equilibrium has been lost in much of the world. In the United States and many European countries, companies took on responsibilities we have traditionally reserved for the state, and government institutions became less effective and less responsive to citizens. Inequality grew out of control, and economic mobility declined. As a result, we have seen disaffected citizens respond with xenophobia and populism. All the while, the world has grown massively interconnected. News can spread from a village in Brazil to the rest of the world in an instant; a market crash in London can affect lives and livelihoods in every other continent on the planet; the fuel burned in one corner of the globe affects the entire atmosphere. As the world grew more interconnected, global poverty fell massively and new opportunities opened up for billions around the world, but we are still just coming to terms with how the rapid networking of the world affects us all. The basic equilibrium of decades ago has lost hold, and in the developed and developing world alike social contracts are increasingly frayed.

  Countries around the world have responded to the tumult by shifting their social contracts in one of two directions. Either nations have closed off and adopted a more controlled, authoritarian model of government, or they have opened up—welcoming innovation, investment, immigration, free speech—while simultaneously enacting reforms that can shelter their citizens from the greatest risks that openness can bring.

  While the United States seemed to emerge as the only model worth emulating in the wake of the Cold War, it has failed to adapt its model to reflect the raging forces of the 21st century. It has instead seen its own brush with authoritarianism and populism in recent years, and from the perspective of the other 195 countries in the world, it has lost its status as the go-to model for stability and prosperity.

  In this chapter, we will look at the fork in the road that countries around the world are facing. For much of the book, we have focused on nations that are caught in the tumult, needing to find a way to fix their problems. Here, we turn to the nations that have already chosen their approach. Some, like China, have embraced a controlled model, while adding key adaptations that allow them to thrive in the global economy. Others, like the Nordics, have built a new template for the open model, one that balances capitalism and stability. Moving through the 2020s and beyond, every country will have to make difficult choices about how to adapt their social contracts to our new age. Countries like the United States and most of those in Europe will need to find ways to right the balance. Meanwhil
e, many of the fledgling democracies that emerged across Latin America, Africa, and South Asia in the late 20th century are beginning to give in to their more authoritarian tendencies.

  We will come to understand the nations around the world that offer crucial examples—both positive and negative—of how to rebuild a global social contract for the 21st century. We’ll examine the tough trade-offs that need to be made, the high stakes for the planet, and the work that every country needs to undertake to be able to thrive in the raging 2020s.

  CHINA

  We will start by looking at the siren-song appeal of the controlled model, and at its most powerful proponent: China.

  The controlled model seems to many in the West like a regression to a bygone era. It is a social contract that is drafted, signed, and executed entirely by the state. The people have very little say in laying out rules and responsibilities for their governments and businesses. Those who do not comply face the consequences.

  Throughout history, you can find examples of kings, queens, emperors, sultans, religious leaders, and political party strongmen imposing their will on entire societies, unchecked by public opinion or democratic consent. Authoritarianism is the world’s oldest form of government, and it has taken on many guises over the years. But no country has more effectively adapted the model for the 21st century than China.

  In part, this follows from the country’s history. A strong central government has ruled the Chinese people for more than 3,500 years. The country was led by a succession of 557 emperors from antiquity through the early 20th century, descended into infighting, civil war, and foreign occupation for several decades, and then reemerged in 1949 under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. There is no history of democracy in mainland China. Its 1.4 billion people remain subject to whatever social contract the state forces upon them. And for the last four decades, it has been defined by the marriage of economic liberalization and political control.