Article by Ian Bremmer: “In February 2022, as Russian forces advanced on Kyiv, Ukraine’s government faced a critical vulnerability: with its Internet and communication networks under attack, its troops and leaders would soon be in the dark. Elon Musk—the de facto head of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), xAI, the Boring Company, and Neuralink—stepped in. Within days, SpaceX had deployed thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine and activated satellite Internet service at no cost. Having kept the country online, Musk was hailed as a hero.
But the centibillionaire’s personal intervention—and Kyiv’s reliance on it—came with risks. Months later, Ukraine asked SpaceX to extend Starlink’s coverage to Russian-occupied Crimea, to enable a submarine drone strike that Kyiv wanted to carry out against Russian naval assets. Musk refused—worried, he said, that this would cause a major escalation in the war. Even the Pentagon’s entreaties on behalf of Ukraine failed to convince him. An unelected, unaccountable private citizen had unilaterally thwarted a military operation in an active war zone while exposing the fact that governments had remarkably little control over crucial decisions affecting their citizens and national security.
This was “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…(More)”.