From Rossiiskaya gazeta, Aug. 27, 2024, p. 5. Complete text:
The arrest of Telegram Messenger founder Pavel Durov, who decided to stroll through Paris, generated lots of buzz, from market and technology buzz to media and political buzz. Let’s focus on that last one, especially since this incident is becoming yet another milestone in the global political restructuring.
Pavel Durov comes from a field that can claim a nonnational status more than any other. Information and communication technologies have transformed the world into a common space and seem to have done away with sovereign jurisdictions. The enormous influence that the information technology giants have amassed has been converted into huge amounts of money, which, in turn, has increased their influence. Transnational corporations have existed before – mining companies, machine-building companies, financial companies. Despite their international nature, though, they have always been associated with certain states and their interests. The global communications industry and its associated innovation sector have dared to leapfrog over this link, thereby rejecting sovereignties as such, including those within which specific entities have emerged.
The period of globalization, which lasted from the late 1980s to the end of the 2010s, was conducive to this attitude. After all, it contributed to the formation of a single environment where the most developed countries had a clear advantage. And they made the most of it. The costs associated with the growing ability of tech giants to manipulate societies – including their own, Western ones – were not considered critical for some time.
The crisis of liberalization led to a change in the international reality (or vice versa, but that doesn’t change the point) – the agreement to play by the same rules has begun to fade rapidly and everywhere. And, crucially, even in the places that wrote these rules, in the leading states of the Western community. The previous phase did not go unnoticed. The world has become highly competitive but remains closely interconnected.
Two things are holding it together. The trade, production and supply chains that arose during the globalization boom and qualitatively transformed the economy, which are separating quite painfully. And the single information field that exists precisely because of “nationally neutral” communications giants. But factors sowing division are new. Instead of a desire to make off with something more in the spirit of “the struggle of imperialist predators,” to use Lenin’s language, it is the feeling of internal vulnerability that is deepening in a wide range of states. Paradoxically, the larger the state, the stronger and more powerful this feeling, because these are the powers that are participating in the most high-stakes game. Hence the impulse to reduce any factors that could impact internal stability to a minimum. And first and foremost, this concerns channels that serve as conductors of influence (read: manipulation) from outside or from certain internal forces, or, actually, from any internal force.
Structures operating in transnational mode immediately give rise to suspicion for obvious reasons. They must be “nationalized” – not in terms of their form of ownership, but in terms of confirming their loyalty to a specific state. This is a major shift. In the foreseeable future, this process could dramatically weaken the aforementioned second pillar of current global connectedness.
Pavel Durov is a staunch cosmopolitan-libertarian, a typical representative of the “global society.” He has had tensions with all the states where he has worked, beginning with his homeland and then throughout his peregrinations. Of course, as a major entrepreneur in a sensitive industry, he was in dialectical cooperation with governments and special services in various countries, which required maneuvering and compromises. However, the policy of avoiding any national anchoring remained. Having passports for any occasion seemed to expand his room for maneuver and boosted his confidence, as long as this global society lived and breathed, calling itself the liberal world order. But it is contracting. In this case, having French citizenship along with a number of other citizenships promises not to mitigate, but to aggravate the defendant’s position.
Supranational entities will be increasingly required to come back down to earth – that is, to identify with concrete states. If they don’t want to do this, they will be forcibly “grounded” and deemed agents not of a global world, but of specific enemy states. This is what is happening with Telegram right now, but it is not the first nor the last entity to experience this. The struggle to subjugate various entities, and, therefore, to fragment the single field will likely become the centerpiece of the next political stage in the world. The tightening of control over everything connected to data will inevitably increase the level of repression in the information sector, especially since it is very difficult to muffle undesirable channels in practice; this is a two-way street. But while until relatively recently it seemed like it would be impossible to dig up the world’s information superhighway and make it unsuitable for passage, that doesn’t seem so outlandish now.
The most interesting question is how likely the contraction of the information universe will affect the trade and economic interconnections that remain the backbone of global unity. Judging by the momentum of change, there will soon be news on that front, too.