The new digital domain. How the Pandemic Reshaped Geopolitics, the Social Contract and Technological Sovereignty

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, besides triggering the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, is accelerating technological trends that were well in the making before its outbreak. The Great Lockdown exposed the digital divide between frontier and non-frontier firms, with the former group being able to provide services and goods no longer available within traditional markets. The growing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few global digital companies will shape global and domestic politics in the immediate future. Globally, the pandemic has increased geopolitical rivalry and underlined the decline of the US as a superpower. At the same time, it has highlighted the fact that geopolitical confrontation is increasingly taking place in the digital domain and among private companies. The information space has been overloaded by an ‘infodemic’ and cyberattacks directed at hospitals, research institutes and universities have soared in the race to discover and market a vaccine. Domestically, states are struggling with a loss of technological sovereignty in terms of governing data and unilaterally taxing the winners of the digital economy. Some of the largest European governments have been unable to implement their own contact-tracing protocols due to the stranglehold of Apple and Google. At the same time, there are serious concerns regarding data privacy in both centralized contact tracing as well as using the Apple/Google protocol should such national protocol be implemented, which further underlines the importance of data privacy in the twenty-first century. Today’s biggest winners are the big tech companies, who represent the lion’s share of the most valuable companies that run on data, algorithms and apps rather than physical labor, but have also managed to utilize the under-governed nature of the digital domain to avoid paying tax and social security. The societal flipside of the growing digital gaps between winners and losers has been skyrocketing inequality and the hollowing-out of the middle class—something that in the short term the pandemic is likely to exacerbate.