CYBER TECHNOLOGY AND WORLD ORDER
For most of history, technological change unfolded over decades and centuries of incremental
advances that refined and combined existing technologies. Even radical innovations could over time
be fitted within previous tactical and strategic doctrines: tanks were considered in terms of
precedents drawn from centuries of cavalry warfare; airplanes could be conceptualized as another
form of artillery, battleships as mobile forts, and aircraft carriers as airstrips. For all their
magnification of destructive power, even nuclear weapons are in some respects an extrapolation from
previous experience.
What is new in the present era is the rate of change of computing power and the expansion of
information technology into every sphere of existence. Reflecting in the 1960s on his experiences as
an engineer at the Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore concluded that the trend he had observed would
continue at regular intervals to double the capacity of computer processing units every two years.
“Moore’s Law” has proved astoundingly prophetic. Computers have shrunk in size, declined in cost,
and grown exponentially faster to the point where advanced computer processing units can now be
embedded in almost any object—phones, watches, cars, home appliances, weapons systems,
unmanned aircraft, and the human body itself.
The revolution in computing is the first to bring so many individuals and processes into the same
medium of communication and to translate and track their actions in a single technological language.
Cyberspace—a word coined, at that point as an essentially hypothetical concept, only in the 1980s—
has colonized physical space and, at least in major urban centers, is beginning to merge with it.
Communication across it, and between its exponentially proliferating nodes, is near instantaneous. As
tasks that were primarily manual or paper based a generation ago—reading, shopping, education,
friendship, industrial and scientific research, political campaigns, finance, government record
keeping, surveillance, military strategy—are filtered through the computing realm, human activity
becomes increasingly “datafied” and part of a single “quantifiable, analyzable” system.
This is all the more so as, with the number of devices connected to the Internet now roughly ten
billion and projected to rise to fifty billion by 2020, an “Internet of Things” or an “Internet of
Everything” looms. Innovators now forecast a world of ubiquitous computing, with miniature dataprocessing devices embedded in everyday objects—“smart door locks, toothbrushes, wristwatches,
fitness trackers, smoke detectors, surveillance cameras, ovens, toys and robots”—or floating through
the air, surveying and shaping their environment in the form of “smart dust.” Each object is to be
connected to the Internet and programmed to communicate with a central server or other networked
devices.
The revolution’s effects extend to every level of human organization. Individuals wielding
smartphones (and currently an estimated one billion people do) now possess information and
analytical capabilities beyond the range of many intelligence agencies a generation ago. Corporations
aggregating and monitoring the data exchanged by these individuals wield powers of influence and
surveillance exceeding those of many contemporary states and of even more traditional powers. And
governments, wary of ceding the new field to rivals, are propelled outward into a cyber realm with as
yet few guidelines or restraints. As with any technological innovation, the temptation will be to see
this new realm as a field for strategic advantage.
These changes have occurred so rapidly as to outstrip most attempts by those without technological
expertise to comprehend their broader consequences. They draw humanity into regions hitherto
unexplained, indeed unconceived. As a result, many of the most revolutionary technologies and
techniques are currently limited in their use only by the capability and the discretion of the most
technologically advanced.
No government, even the most totalitarian, has been able to arrest the flow or to resist the trend to
push ever more of its operations into the digital domain. Most of the democracies have an ingrained
instinct that an attempt to curtail the effects of an information revolution would be impossible and
perhaps also immoral. Most of the countries outside the liberal-democratic world have set aside
attempts to shut out these changes and turned instead to mastering them. Every country, company, and
individual is now being enlisted in the technological revolution as either a subject or an object. What
matters for the purpose of this book is the effect on prospects for international order.
The contemporary world inherits the legacy of nuclear weapons capable of destroying civilized
life. But as catastrophic as their implications were, their significance and use could still be analyzed
in terms of separable cycles of war and peace. The new technology of the Internet opens up entirely
new vistas. Cyberspace challenges all historical experience. It is ubiquitous but not threatening in
itself; its menace depends on its use. The threats emerging from cyberspace are nebulous and
undefined and may be difficult to attribute. The pervasiveness of networked communications in the
social, financial, industrial, and military sectors has vast beneficial aspects; it has also revolutionized
vulnerabilities. Outpacing most rules and regulations (and indeed the technical comprehension of
many regulators), it has, in some respects, created the state of nature about which philosophers have
speculated and the escape from which, according to Hobbes, provided the motivating force for
creating a political order.
Before the cyber age, nations’ capabilities could still be assessed through an amalgam of
manpower, equipment, geography, economics, and morale. There was a clear distinction between
periods of peace and war. Hostilities were triggered by defined events and carried out with strategies
for which some intelligible doctrine had been formulated. Intelligence services played a role mainly
in assessing, and occasionally in disrupting, adversaries’ capabilities; their activities were limited by
implicit common standards of conduct or, at a minimum, by common experiences evolved over
decades.
Internet technology has outstripped strategy or doctrine—at least for the time being. In the new era,
capabilities exist for which there is as yet no common interpretation—or even understanding. Few if
any limits exist among those wielding them to define either explicit or tacit restraints. When
individuals of ambiguous affiliation are capable of undertaking actions of increasing ambition and
intrusiveness, the very definition of state authority may turn ambiguous. The complexity is
compounded by the fact that it is easier to mount cyberattacks than to defend against them, possibly
encouraging an offensive bias in the construction of new capabilities.
The danger is compounded by the plausible deniability of those suspected of such actions and by
the lack of international agreements for which, even if reached, there is no present system of
enforcement. A laptop can produce global consequences. A solitary actor with enough computing
power is able to access the cyber domain to disable and potentially destroy critical infrastructure
from a position of near-complete anonymity. Electric grids could be surged and power plants
disabled through actions undertaken exclusively outside a nation’s physical territory (or at least its
territory as traditionally conceived). Already, an underground hacker syndicate has proved capable of
penetrating government networks and disseminating classified information on a scale sufficient to
affect diplomatic conduct. Stuxnet, an example of a state-backed cyberattack, succeeded in disrupting
and delaying Iranian nuclear efforts, by some accounts to an extent rivaling the effects of a limited
military strike. The botnet attack from Russia on Estonia in 2007 paralyzed communications for days.
Such a state of affairs, even if temporarily advantageous to the advanced countries, cannot continue
indefinitely. The road to a world order may be long and uncertain, but no meaningful progress can be
made if one of the most pervasive elements of international life is excluded from serious dialogue. It
is highly improbable that all parties, especially those shaped by different cultural traditions, will
arrive independently at the same conclusions about the nature and permissible uses of their new
intrusive capacities. Some attempt at charting a common perception of our new condition is essential.
In its absence, the parties will continue to operate on the basis of separate intuitions, magnifying the
prospects of a chaotic outcome. For actions undertaken in the virtual, networked world are capable of
generating pressures for countermeasures in physical reality, especially when they have the potential
to inflict damage of a nature previously associated with armed attack. Absent some articulation of
limits and agreement on mutual rules of restraint, a crisis situation is likely to arise, even
unintentionally; the very concept of international order may be subject to mounting strains.
In other categories of strategic capabilities, governments have come to recognize the self-defeating
nature of unconstrained national conduct. The more sustainable course is to pursue, even among
potential adversaries, a mixture of deterrence and mutual restraint, coupled with measures to prevent
a crisis arising from misinterpretation or miscommunication.
Cyberspace has become strategically indispensable. At this writing, users, whether individuals,
corporations, or states, rely on their own judgment in conducting their activities. The Commander of
U.S. Cyber Command has predicted that “the next war will begin in cyberspace.” It will not be
possible to conceive of international order when the region through which states’ survival and
progress are taking place remains without any international standards of conduct and is left to
unilateral decisions.
The history of warfare shows that every technological offensive capability will eventually be
matched and offset by defensive measures, although not every country will be equally able to afford
them. Does this mean that technologically less advanced countries must shelter under the protection of
high-tech societies? Is the outcome to be a plethora of tense power balances? Deterrence, which, in
the case of nuclear weapons, took the form of balancing destructive powers, cannot be applied by
direct analogy, because the biggest danger is an attack without warning that may not reveal itself until
the threat has already been implemented.
Nor is it possible to base deterrence in cyberspace on symmetrical retaliation, as is the case with
nuclear weapons. If a cyberattack is limited to a particular function or extent, a “response in kind”
may have totally different implications for the United States and for the aggressor. For example, if the
financial architecture of a major industrialized economy is undermined, is the victim entitled only to
counterattack against the potentially negligible comparable assets of its attacker? Or only against the
computers engaged in the attack? Because neither of these is likely to be a sufficient deterrent, the
question then turns to whether “virtual” aggression warrants “kinetic” force in response—and to what
degree and by what equations of equivalence. A new world of deterrence theory and strategic
doctrine now in its infancy requires urgent elaboration.
In the end, a framework for organizing the global cyber environment will be imperative. It may not
keep pace with the technology itself, but the process of defining it will serve to educate leaders of its
dangers and the consequences. Even if agreements carry little weight in the event of a confrontation,
they may at least prevent sliding into an irretrievable conflict produced by misunderstanding.
The dilemma of such technologies is that it is impossible to establish rules of conduct unless a
common understanding of at least some of the key capabilities exists. But these are precisely the
capabilities the major actors will be reluctant to disclose. The United States has appealed to China
for restraint in purloining trade secrets via cyber intrusions, arguing that the scale of activity is
unprecedented. Yet to what extent is the United States prepared to disclose its own cyber intelligence
efforts?
In this manner, asymmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between
cyber powers both in diplomacy and in strategy. The emphasis of many strategic rivalries is shifting
from the physical to the information realm, in the collection and processing of data, the penetration of
networks, and the manipulation of psychology. Absent articulation of some rules of international
conduct, a crisis will arise from the inner dynamics of the system.
THE HUMAN FACTOR
From the opening of the modern era in the sixteenth century, political philosophers have debated
the issue of the relationship of the human being to the circumstances in which he finds himself.
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau advanced a biological-psychological portrait of human consciousness
and derived their political positions from this starting point. The American Founders, notably
Madison in Federalist 10, did the same. They traced the evolution of society through factors that
were “sown in the nature of man”: each individual’s powerful yet fallible faculty of reason and his
inherent “self-love,” from the interaction of which “different opinions will be formed”; and
humanity’s diversity of capabilities, from which “the possession of different degrees and kinds of
property immediately results” and with them a “division of the society into different interests and
parties.” Though these thinkers differed in their analyses of specific factors and in the conclusions
they drew, all framed their concepts in terms of a humanity whose inherent nature and experience of
reality were timeless and unchanging.
In the contemporary world, human consciousness is shaped through an unprecedented filter.
Television, computers, and smartphones compose a trifecta offering nearly constant interaction with a
screen throughout the day. Human interactions in the physical world are now pushed relentlessly into
the virtual world of networked devices. Recent studies suggest that adult Americans spend on average
roughly half of their waking hours in front of a screen, and the figure continues to grow.
What is the impact of this cultural upheaval on relations between states? The policymaker
undertakes multiple tasks, many of them shaped by his society’s history and culture. He must first of
all make an analysis of where his society finds itself. This is inherently where the past meets the
future; therefore such a judgment cannot be made without an instinct for both of these elements. He
must then try to understand where that trajectory will take him and his society. He must resist the
temptation to identify policymaking with projecting the familiar into the future, for on that road lies
stagnation and then decline. Increasingly in a time of technological and political upheaval, wisdom
counsels that a different path must be chosen. By definition, in leading a society from where it is to
where it has never been, a new course presents advantages and disadvantages that will always seem
closely balanced. To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and
courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first.
And the statesman must then inspire his people to persist in the endeavor. Great statesmen (Churchill,
both Roosevelts, de Gaulle, and Adenauer) had these qualities of vision and determination; in today’s
society, it is increasingly difficult to develop them.
For all the great and indispensable achievements the Internet has brought to our era, its emphasis is
on the actual more than the contingent, on the factual rather than the conceptual, on values shaped by
consensus rather than by introspection. Knowledge of history and geography is not essential for those
who can evoke their data with the touch of a button. The mindset for walking lonely political paths
may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends
on Facebook.
In the Internet age, world order has often been equated with the proposition that if people have the
ability to freely know and exchange the world’s information, the natural human drive toward freedom
will take root and fulfill itself, and history will run on autopilot, as it were. But philosophers and
poets have long separated the mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and
wisdom. The Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially.
Ever-more-complex functions are devised, particularly capable of responding to questions of fact,
which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search engines are able to handle
increasingly complex questions with increasing speed. Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically
inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before.
The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the
foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance. As ever more issues are treated as if of a
factual nature, the premise becomes established that for every question there must be a researchable
answer, that problems and solutions are not so much to be thought through as to be “looked up.” But in
the relations between states—and in many other fields—information, to be truly useful, must be
placed within a broader context of history and experience to emerge as actual knowledge. And a
society is fortunate if its leaders can occasionally rise to the level of wisdom.
The acquisition of knowledge from books provides an experience different from the Internet.
Reading is relatively time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important. Because it is not
possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily
everything one has read, learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking—the ability to
recognize comparable data and events and project patterns into the future. And style propels the
reader into a relationship with the author, or with the subject matter, by fusing substance and
aesthetics.
Traditionally, another way of acquiring knowledge has been through personal conversations. The
discussion and exchange of ideas has for millennia provided an emotional and psychological
dimension in addition to the factual content of the information exchanged. It supplies intangibles of
conviction and personality. Now the culture of texting produces a curious reluctance to engage in
face-to-face interaction, especially on a one-to-one basis.
The computer has, to a considerable extent, solved the problem of acquiring, preserving, and
retrieving information. Data can be stored in effectively unlimited quantities and in manageable form.
The computer makes available a range of data unattainable in the age of books. It packages it
effectively; style is no longer needed to make it accessible, nor is memorization. In dealing with a
single decision separated from its context, the computer supplies tools unimaginable even a decade
ago. But it also shrinks perspective. Because information is so accessible and communication
instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is
significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than
anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a
historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the
principal policy tool.
In the same way, the Internet has a tendency to diminish historical memory. The phenomenon has
been described as follows: “People forget items they think will be available externally and remember
items they think will not be available.” By moving so many items into the realm of the available, the
Internet reduces the impulse to remember them. Communications technology threatens to diminish the
individual’s capacity for an inward quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator and
mediator of thought. Information at one’s fingertips encourages the mindset of a researcher but may
diminish the mindset of a leader. A shift in human consciousness may change the character of
individuals and the nature of their interactions, and so begin to alter the human condition itself. Did
people in the age of printing see the same world as their medieval forefathers? Is the optical
perception of the world altered in the age of the computer?
Western history and psychology have heretofore treated truth as independent of the personality and
prior experience of the observer. Yet our age is on the verge of a changed conception of the nature of
truth. Nearly every website contains some kind of customization function based on Internet tracing
codes designed to ascertain a user’s background and preferences. These methods are intended to
encourage users “to consume more content” and, in so doing, be exposed to more advertising, which
ultimately drives the Internet economy. These subtle directions are in accordance with a broader
trend to manage the traditional understanding of human choice. Goods are sorted and prioritized to
present those “which you would like,” and online news is presented as “news which will best suit
you.” Two different people appealing to a search engine with the same question do not necessarily
receive the same answers. The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized—losing its
universal character. Information is presented as being free. In fact, the recipient pays for it by
supplying data to be exploited by persons unknown to him, in ways that further shape the information
being offered to him.
Whatever the utility of this approach in the realm of consumption, its effect on policymaking may
prove transformative. The difficult choices of policymaking are always close. Where, in a world of
ubiquitous social networks, does the individual find the space to develop the fortitude to make
decisions that, by definition, cannot be based on a consensus? The adage that prophets are not
recognized in their own time is true in that they operate beyond conventional conception—that is what
made them prophets. In our era, the lead time for prophets might have disappeared altogether. The
pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the
development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions.
American elections—especially presidential elections—represent another aspect of this evolution.
It has been reported that in 2012 the election campaigns had files on some tens of millions of
potentially independent voters. Drawn from research in social networks, open public files, and
medical records, these files amounted to a profile for each, probably more precise than the target
person would have been capable of doing from his own memory. This permitted the campaigns to
choose the technology of their appeals—whether to rely on personal visits by committed friends (also
discovered via the Internet), personalized letters (drawn from social network research), or group
meetings.
Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of
the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce
candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would
have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role
may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to
convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections
of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy
avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the
reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined? If the gap between the qualities required for
election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and
sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these
qualities may take so much of a president’s first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the
United States.
FOREIGN POLICY IN THE DIGITAL ERA
Thoughtful observers have viewed the globalizing transformations ushered in by the rise of the
Internet and advanced computing technology as the beginning of a new era of popular empowerment
and progress toward peace. They hail the ability of new technologies to enable the individual and to
propel transparency—whether through the publicizing of abuses by authorities or the erosion of
cultural barriers of misunderstanding. Optimists point, with some justification, to the startling new
powers of communication gained through instantaneous global networks. They stress the ability of
computer networks and “smart” devices to create new social, economic, and environmental
efficiencies. They look forward to unlocking previously insoluble technical problems by harnessing
the brainpower of networked multitudes.
One line of thinking holds that similar principles of networked communication, if applied correctly
to the realm of international affairs, could help solve age-old problems of violent conflict.
Traditional ethnic and sectarian rivalries may be muted in the Internet age, this theory posits, because
“people who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will struggle to
keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners. With more data, everyone gains a
better frame of reference.” It will be possible to temper national rivalries and resolve historical
disputes because “with the technological devices, platforms and databases we have today, it will be
much more difficult for governments in the future to argue over claims like these, not just because of
permanent evidence but because everyone else will have access to the same source material.” In this
view, the spread of networked digital devices will become a positive engine of history: new
networks of communication will curtail abuses, soften social and political contradictions, and help
heretofore-disunited parts cohere into a more harmonious global system.
The optimism of this perspective replicates the best aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s prophecy of a
world united by democracy, open diplomacy, and common rules. As a blueprint for political or social
order, it also raises some of the same questions as Wilson’s original vision about the distinction
between the practical and the aspirational.
Conflicts within and between societies have occurred since the dawn of civilization. The causes of
these conflicts have not been limited to an absence of information or an insufficient ability to share it.
They have arisen not only between societies that do not understand each other but between those that
understand each other only too well. Even with the same source material to examine, individuals have
disagreed about its meaning or the subjective value of what it depicts. Where values, ideals, or
strategic objectives are in fundamental contradiction, exposure and connectivity may on occasion fuel
confrontations as much as assuage them.
New social and information networks spur growth and creativity. They allow individuals to
express views and report injustices that might otherwise go unheeded. In crisis situations, they offer a
crucial ability to communicate quickly and to publicize events and policies reliably—potentially
preventing the outbreak of a conflict through misunderstanding.
Yet they also bring conflicting, occasionally incompatible value systems into ever closer contact.
The advent of Internet news and commentary and data-driven election strategies has not noticeably
softened the partisan aspect of American politics; if anything, it has provided a larger audience to the
extremes. Internationally, some expressions that once passed unknown and unremarked are now
publicized worldwide and used as pretexts for violent agitation—as occurred in parts of the Muslim
world in reaction to an inflammatory fringe cartoon in a Danish newspaper or a marginal American
homemade movie. Meanwhile, in conflict situations, social networking may serve as a platform to
reinforce traditional social fissures as much as it dispels them. The widespread sharing of videotaped
atrocities in the Syrian civil war appears to have done more to harden the resolve of the warring
parties than to stop the killing, while the notorious ISIL has used social media to declare a caliphate
and exhort holy war.
Some authoritarian structures may fall as a result of information spread online or protests convened
via social networking; they may in time be replaced by more open and participatory systems
elaborating humane and inclusive values. Elsewhere other authorities will gain exponentially more
powerful means of repression. The proliferation of ubiquitous sensors tracking and analyzing
individuals, recording and transmitting their every experience (in some cases now, essentially from
birth), and (at the forefront of computing) anticipating their thoughts opens up repressive as well as
liberating possibilities. In this respect, among the new technology’s most radical aspects may be the
power it vests in small groups, at the pinnacle of political and economic structures, to process and
monitor information, shape debate, and to some extent define truth.
The West lauded the “Facebook” and “Twitter” aspects of the Arab Spring revolutions. Yet where
the digitally equipped crowd succeeds in its initial demonstrations, the use of new technology does
not guarantee that the values that prevail will be those of the devices’ inventors, or even those of the
majority of the crowd. Moreover, the same technologies used to convene demonstrations can also be
used to track and suppress them. Today most public squares in any major city are subject to constant
video surveillance, and any smartphone owner can be tracked electronically in real time. As one
recent survey concluded, “The Internet has made tracking easier, cheaper, and more useful.”
The global scope and speed of communication erode the distinction between domestic and
international upheavals, and between leaders and the immediate demands of the most vocal groups.
Events whose effects once would have taken months to unfold ricochet globally within seconds.
Policymakers are expected to have formulated a position within several hours and to interject it into
the course of events—where its effects will be broadcast globally by the same instantaneous
networks. The temptation to cater to the demands of the digitally reflected multitude may override the
judgment required to chart a complex course in harmony with long-term purposes. The distinction
between information, knowledge, and wisdom is weakened.
The new diplomacy asserts that if a sufficiently large number of people gather to publicly call for
the resignation of a government and broadcast their demands digitally, they constitute a democratic
expression obliging Western moral and even material support. This approach calls on Western
leaders (and particularly American ones) to communicate their endorsement immediately and in
unambiguous terms by the same social-networking methods so that their rejection of the government
will be rebroadcast on the Internet and achieve further promulgation and affirmation.
If the old diplomacy sometimes failed to extend support to morally deserving political forces, the
new diplomacy risks indiscriminate intervention disconnected from strategy. It declares moral
absolutes to a global audience before it has become possible to assess the long-term intentions of the
central actors, their prospects for success, or the ability to carry out a long-term policy. The motives
of the principal groups, their capacity for concerted leadership, the underlying strategic and political
factors in the country, and their relation to other strategic priorities are treated as secondary to the
overriding imperative of endorsing a mood of the moment.
Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated
from a mood to a strategy. In the quest for humane values, the expression of elevated principles is a
first step; they must then be carried through the inherent ambiguities and contradictions of all human
affairs, which is the task of policy. In this process, the sharing of information and the public support
of free institutions are important new aspects of our era. On their own, absent attention to underlying
strategic and political factors, they will have difficulty fulfilling their promise.
Great statesmen, however different as personalities, almost invariably had an instinctive feeling for
the history of their societies. As Edmund Burke wrote, “People will not look forward to posterity,
who never look backward to their ancestors.” What will be the attitudes of those who aspire to be
great statesmen in the Internet age? A combination of chronic insecurity and insistent self-assertion
threatens both leaders and the public in the Internet age. Leaders, because they are less and less the
originators of their programs, seek to dominate by willpower or charisma. The general public’s
access to the intangibles of the public debate is ever more constrained. Major pieces of legislation in
the United States, Europe, and elsewhere often contain thousands of pages of text whose precise
meaning is elusive even to those legislators who voted for them.
Previous generations of Western leaders performed their democratic role while recognizing that
leadership did not consist of simply executing the results of public polls on a day-to-day basis.
Tomorrow’s generations may prove reluctant to exercise leadership independent of data-mining
techniques—even as their mastery of the information environment may reward them with reelection
for pursuing cleverly targeted, short-term policies.
In such an environment, the participants in the public debate risk being driven less by reasoned
arguments than by what catches the mood of the moment. The immediate focus is pounded daily into
the public consciousness by advocates whose status is generated by the ability to dramatize.
Participants at public demonstrations are rarely assembled around a specific program. Rather, many
seek the uplift of a moment of exaltation, treating their role in the event primarily as participation in
an emotional experience.
These attitudes reflect in part the complexity of defining an identity in the age of social media.
Hailed as a breakthrough in human relations, social media encourage the sharing of the maximum
amount of information, personal or political. People are encouraged—and solicited—to post their
most intimate acts and thoughts on public websites run by companies whose internal policies are,
even when public, largely incomprehensible to the ordinary user. The most sensitive of this
information is to be made available only to “friends” who, in practice, can run into the thousands.
Approbation is the goal; were it not the objective, the sharing of personal information would not be
so widespread and sometimes so jarring. Only very strong personalities are able to resist the digitally
aggregated and magnified unfavorable judgments of their peers. The quest is for consensus, less by
the exchange of ideas than by a sharing of emotions. Nor can participants fail to be affected by the
exaltation of fulfillment by membership in a crowd of ostensibly like-minded people. And are these
networks going to be the first institutions in human history liberated from occasional abuse and
therefore relieved of the traditional checks and balances?
Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about
international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived
of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other
era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series
of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of
turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major
countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will
suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of
differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward
passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.
Wisdom and foresight will be needed to avoid these hazards and ensure that the technological era
fulfills its vast promise. It needs to deepen its preoccupation with the immediate through a better
understanding of history and geography. That task is not only—or even primarily—an issue for
technology. Society needs to adapt its education policy to ultimate imperatives in the long-term
direction of the country and in the cultivation of its values. The inventors of the devices that have so
revolutionized the collection and sharing of information can make an equal if not greater contribution
by devising means to deepen its conceptual foundation. On the way to the first truly global world
order, the great human achievements of technology must be fused with enhanced powers of humane,
transcendent, and moral judgment.
