The Technopolar Parodox : Ian Bremer / Foreign Affairs

Article shared by Fouad Kronfol

More disquieting news about the dangers of techno-politics and what is affecting humans. Nobody seems to have answers to this new menace to humanity. First we had the nuclear bomb, now we have a technology going amock. Both add to climate change to make our very existence more precarious. We must be really worried about what the next generations will face.

Click here for The Frightening Fusion of Tech Power and State Power

Note: Ian Bremmer is President and Founder of Eurasia Group.

Summary

Ian Bremmer argues that we’ve entered a technopolar moment—a world where powerful tech firms and their billionaire leaders rival nation-states in geopolitical influence. He illustrates this with Elon Musk’s unilateral use of Starlink in Ukraine, and his refusal to extend coverage to Crimea, highlighting how private decisions now shape military and diplomatic outcomes 

Bremmer traces three overlapping shifts:

1. Tech consolidation – During Covid‑19 and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, firms like SpaceX, Microsoft, and Palantir became indispensable for infrastructure and security

2. Nation-state pushback – Governments responded with antitrust laws, data regulations, export controls, and industrial policies. The US and China are forging divergent ecosystems: a “technopolar” US aligned with tech giants and a “statist” China asserting full state control 

3. Techno-authoritarianism – Visionary tech leaders like Musk and Thiel are not only resisting regulation but seeking to “capture” government—Musk’s covert influence on the Trump administration, control over federal data, and use of AI for surveillance illustrate this shift 

Bremmer concludes that the emerging world is neither fully governed by states nor tech firms—it’s a messy hybrid polarized between a US model of tech-powered corporate-state fusion and a Chinese model of state supremacy. Both prioritize efficiency and control over democratic accountability. The real question, he warns, is not whether tech will surpass states, but whether liberal democracies can survive the fusion of state and corporate power

Excerpts

We are in the age of…." Technopolarity" in action: a technology leader not only driving stock market returns but also controlling aspects of civil society, politics, and international affairs that have been traditionally the exclusive preserve of nation-states.

Over the past decade, the rise of such individuals and the firms they control has transformed the global order, which had been defined by states since the Peace of Westphalia enshrined them as the building blocks of geopolitics nearly 400 years ago.

For most of this time, the structure of that order could be described as unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, depending on how power was distributed among countries.

The world, however, has since entered a "technopolar moment," a term I used in Foreign Affairs in 2021 to describe an emerging order in which "a handful of large technology companies rival [states] for geopolitical influence."

Major tech firms have become powerful geopolitical actors, exercising a form of sovereignty over digital space and, increasingly, the physical world that potentially rivals that of states.

In 2021, the power of those companies seemed poised to grow, and over the last three years, it has. I argued that governments would not go down without a fight, and in the time since, their struggle for control over digital space has intensified.

But the balance of power between technology firms and states has shifted in some surprising ways. What is emerging as a result of this contest is not quite any of the scenarios I originally envisioned—neither a globalized digital order, in which tech companies wrested control of digital space from the state, nor a U.S.-Chinese tech cold war, in which governments reasserted authority over the digital realm, nor a fully technopolar world, in which Westphalian state dominance gave way to a new order led by tech firms.

Instead of a clean triumph of states over firms or vice versa, the future is taking on a more hybrid form—a bifurcated system pitting a technopolar United States, where private tech actors increasingly shape national policy, against a statist China, where the government has asserted total control over its digital space. Most of the rest of the world is under pressure to reluctantly align with one pole or the other, but with both models offering little in the way of democratic accountability and individual freedom, the choice is less stark than it may seem. As tech power and state power fuse everywhere, the question is no longer whether tech companies will rival states for geopolitical influence; it is whether open societies can survive the challenge.