Facebook, Google and Amazon are similar to states. Bremmer: Will they replace nationhood?

NEW YORK, Oct. 19, 2021 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- On the day in early January when former President Donald Trump encouraged thousands of his followers to storm America's capitol building during Congress's session to certify the election of Joe Biden, the most consequential decisions to re-establish order were made not by law enforcement or the military, but by giant tech companies, who decided – on their own, and without government encouragement – to punish the leaders of the failed insurrection.

As Ian Bremmer powerfully argues in a provocative new article in Foreign Affairs, The Technopolar Moment: How Digital Powers will Reshape the Global Order, the decisions made by Facebook and Twitter to "de-platform" Donald Trump, and those made by Amazon, Apple and Google to effectively ban Parler, used by Trump supporters to coordinate the attack, are part of a much more important trend, where "a handful of large technology companies rival (states) for geopolitical influence."

Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, says it's time to start thinking of large tech firms such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter as similar to states, since they "have taken control of aspects of American society, the economy, and national security that were long the exclusive preserve of states."

Tech firms, Bremmer says, "have created a new dimension in geopolitics – digital space – over which they exercise primary influence. People are increasingly living out their lives in this vast territory which governments do not and cannot fully control." And, as Facebook has attracted an audience of more than three billion, it has far more users than any one nation has citizens.

To understand their geopolitical impact, Bremmer categorizes these tech giants into three types: the globalists (think of Apple, Facebook, Google and ByteDance, who built their empires by building on a truly international scale, untethered to physical territory; the national champions (think Baidu and Tencent in China, Microsoft in the US), whose power is derived in large part from their willingness to align themselves with the priorities of their home governments; and the techno-utopians, (think Ethereum and its founder, Vitalik Buterin, founded by charismatic visionaries who see their firms as a revolutionary force that could replace the 400-year-old nation-state paradigm altogether.

How will the world's traditional powers, like the US, China and Europe, attempt to re-exert their influence in the face of ever-expanding competition from these tech companies? And "will we live in a world where the internet is increasingly fragmented and technology companies serve the interests and goals of the states in which they reside, or will Big Tech decisively wrest control of digital space away from governments—freeing itself from national boundaries and emerging as a truly global force?"

There are three possible ways for this to play out, says Bremmer, all of which will change our relationships to the politics of the countries we live in. To find out more, read the latest issue of Foreign Affairs here, and see additional coverage on GZERO Media, at http://www.gzeromedia.com. Finally, tune into GZERO World with Ian Bremmer for a special show on Big Tech and politics, airing on public television stations nationwide, beginning on Oct. 22nd. Check local listings.

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ABOUT IAN BREMMER:

Ian Bremmer is president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm, as well as GZERO Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent and engaging coverage of global affairs. He is also host of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, which airs weekly on public television stations, and serves as the foreign affairs columnist and editor at large for TIME magazine. Bremmer teaches political risk at Columbia University, and his most recent book is "Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism."

ABOUT EURASIA GROUP:

Eurasia Group is the world's leading global political risk research and consulting firm. By providing information and insight on how political developments move markets, we help clients anticipate and respond to instability and opportunities everywhere they invest or do business. Our expertise includes developed and developing countries in every region of the world, specific economic sectors, and the business and investment playing fields of the future. With our best-in-class advisory and consulting offerings and GZERO Media, the Eurasia Group umbrella provides the marketplace with a complete political risk solution. Headquartered in New York, we have offices in Washington, London, San Francisco, Brasilia, Sao Paulo, Singapore, and Tokyo, as well as on-the-ground experts and resources in more than a hundred countries. "Politics first" grounds our work: Politics is the lens through which we view the world, and we are committed to analysis that is free of political bias and the influence of private interests.

ABOUT GZERO MEDIA:

GZERO Media is a company dedicated to providing the public with intelligent and engaging coverage of global affairs. It was created in 2017 as a subsidiary of Eurasia Group, the world's leading political risk analysis firm. In addition to producing the national public television program GZERO World with Ian Bremmer and its companion podcast, GZERO Media publishes the regular newsletter Signal, and daily text and video stories at http://www.gzeromedia.com and across social media channels.

MEDIA ENQUIRIES:
Gregory Roth
Director of Communications
Eurasia Group / GZERO Media
[email protected]

Media Contact

Gregory Roth, Eurasia Group, 646-424-2514, [email protected]

SOURCE Eurasia Group