Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic John Perry Barlow\u2019s intoxicating dream is fading fast and may soon vaporise altogether. In 1996, the American poet stirred the imagination of a generation by proclaiming sovereignty for the nascent internet in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. For the first time in history, this virgin, virtual territory would allow new global communities to form and fresh ideas to flourish, unconstrained by any terrestrial power. \u201cYou have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe will create a civilisation of the Mind in Cyberspace.\u201d Barlow\u2019s utopian imaginings of an otherworldly civilisation grew from the compost of the hippie-trippy, flower-power counterculture of San Francisco in the 1960s. This way of thinking seeped into the highly individualistic, anti-establishment entrepreneurial ethos of Silicon Valley, which viewed any incursion by Washington \u2014 or its attendant military-industrial complex \u2014 with suspicion. It later informed the \u201cDon\u2019t Be Evil\u201d culture of the giant tech companies, such as Google, that came to dominate the internet. But as we saw at the inauguration of Donald Trump, Silicon Valley has experienced a radical vibe shift as the besuited bosses of many of the biggest US tech companies metaphorically prostrated themselves at the feet of an imperial president. Now camped out in Washington, Tesla\u2019s self-proclaimed \u201cTechnoking\u201d Elon Musk \u2014 whose business interests span rocket ships, satellite networks and social media \u2014 embodies a new embrace between technological and political power. Meanwhile authoritarian governments, most notably in China, Russia and Iran, have hijacked cyber space for their own geopolitical ends. Rather than a means of liberation, cyber space has increasingly become an instrument of geopolitical control.According to Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, two top executives from Palantir Technologies, a company intertwined with the national security state, Silicon Valley\u2019s utopian tech thinking was always untethered from reality and it\u2019s a good thing that it is now ending. Fixating on the fickle whims of consumers rather than the strategic needs of the public by providing photo-sharing platforms and chat apps, the founders of many technology companies have tried \u2014 and failed \u2014 to escape from the country that enabled their emergence. \u201cSilicon Valley has lost its way,\u201d they thunder in the opening sentence of their provocative book The Technological Republic. \u201cThe problem is that tolerance of everything often constitutes belief in nothing.\u201dFor too long, the authors claim, Silicon Valley directed its energies, talent and capital to the \u201ctrivial and ephemeral\u201d. It must now rebuild its relationship with government and redirect its efforts to tackling the biggest challenges we face, such as healthcare, education and science. In particular, it must lean into the defence of the nation, as Palantir has done by providing intelligence analysis platforms for the military, and help preserve the \u201cenduring yet fragile\u201d geopolitical advantage of the west. In short, Silicon Valley must help the US win the technological arms race with China.How will the state ensure that this engineering elite remains subservient and accountable to the public?Such is the electroshock that President Trump has already delivered to the system that the book\u2019s criticisms already feel a little dated, as if the authors were jousting against the wind. Still, they certainly help explain the sudden and extraordinary change of worldview that has seized much of the US tech elite. Although the authors are unlikely to welcome the description, their book may be read as a manifesto for the \u201ctech industrial complex\u201d that President Joe Biden warned against in his farewell address. Even if Karp and Zamiska are critical of Silicon Valley\u2019s ethos, they remain evangelistic about its methods and its astonishing innovative capabilities. The founder-led, software-enabled, start-up approach to innovation has powered the rise of some of the most valuable companies in history. As of 2024, US tech companies were worth $21.4tn \u2014 equivalent to 86 per cent of the total value of the world\u2019s 50 biggest tech companies. These companies\u2019 expertise in software and AI will now ensure that they play an increasingly critical role in defence. \u201cHow will the state ensure that this engineering elite remains subservient and accountable to the public?\u201d the authors ask. It is a good question that they never fully answer.Indeed, in spite of the copious references to philosophers (including Sir Isaiah Berlin and Michael Sandel), the book is disappointingly light in examining the potential downsides of this US version of military-civil fusion. Few qualms are expressed about the moral consequences of developing lethal autonomous weapons systems or the widespread use by the police of facial recognition technology. Nor is much mention made of the self-interest involved: companies such as Palantir stand to make a fortune from this software-enabled national security state. Even so, The Technological Republic provides a fascinating, if at times disturbing, insight into the reassertion of US hard power. The lingering question, as Marxists would say, is whether Trump represents the death throes of the old world order or the birth pangs of the new.In World Builders, Bruno Ma\u00e7\u00e3es, a former Portuguese politician turned analyst, takes a broader and more historical perspective, exploring the interconnections between technological advances and geopolitical change. In his analysis, there have been four great geopolitical moments in modern times that have resulted in different ways of building, and understanding, the world. The first came at the beginning of the 1900s, when the whole world became subject to measurement and control. Rather than attempting to discover new territories, the geopolitical struggle revolved around establishing and enforcing different blueprints for the mapped world. The second arrived with the invention of nuclear weapons, which made humanity both \u201comnipotent and totally impotent,\u201d permanently teetering on the edge of global destruction. The third was the re-emergence of China on the world stage this century and its attempts to build a different culture and development model. But the fourth moment that is only just beginning \u2014 and is therefore still opaque \u2014 is the era of software automation. We are moving from a world of atoms to one of bits leading to virtual rivalries. Competition between the US and China has become invisible and indirect, and involves internet standards and protocols as much as rockets and battleships. Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave themToday\u2019s great game is a \u201cgame whose purpose is to create the rules of the game,\u201d writes Ma\u00e7\u00e3es. \u201cGeopolitics is the struggle not to control territory but to create territory,\u201d he adds. \u201cWhen your opponent is building a fully artificial or technological world that could eventually redefine your own reality, geopolitics becomes not merely existential but ontological.\u201d Karl Rove, a political consultant under President George W Bush, was one of the first to understand and articulate the new rules of the game, according to Ma\u00e7\u00e3es. \u201cWe are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality, we will act again, creating other new realities,\u201d Rove was reported to have said in 2004.Chinese observers were quick to notice that the west had won the cold war \u201cwithout gunpowder\u201d, highlighting the importance of ideological power. As an antidote and a challenge, President Xi Jinping has launched his own \u201cChina dream\u201d emphasising the renewal of the nation. This has unleashed a rivalry between two imaginary worlds or \u201ca competition between designers or programmers to determine which of them can build the most powerful dream machine.\u201dMa\u00e7\u00e3es\u2019s exploration of this virtual dimension of geopolitics is compelling, as far as it goes. It will now be interesting to see how far the Trump presidency represents a continuation, or a rupture, of the dynamic that Ma\u00e7\u00e3es identifies. As Karp and Kamiska explain, the US is now intent on reasserting its hard power. Trump himself has shown a keen interest in international real estate opportunities by eyeing expansion in Greenland, Canada, Panama and Gaza, in a seeming return to the more traditional imperial impulses of the 19th century. China, too, has made clear its determination to win control of Taiwan. And the war in Ukraine has shown that ultimately the world of atoms weighs more heavily than that of bits. At an even higher level of abstraction, Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt explore the ways in which the wonder technology of our age \u2014 artificial intelligence \u2014 will change the human condition. Genesis was the last book that the veteran US statesman wrote before his death in 2023 in collaboration with two leading technologists. The authors contend that AI, deployed appropriately, can become an invaluable partner to humanity \u2014 but warn that the technology also poses huge risks. \u201cAI\u2019s future faculties, operating at inhuman speeds, will render traditional regulation useless. We will need a fundamentally new form of control,\u201d they write.The big question, the authors ask, is one of alignment: will humans become more like AI or will AI become more human? Their sobering, if realistic, take is that: \u201cFar more work is needed to render our machines, and ourselves, transparent, legible, and reliable.\u201dMa\u00e7\u00e3es, too, acknowledges the dangers of AI as the \u201cculmination of ideological power\u201d, which may make it impossible to identify the human will behind the machine. He concludes his book with a more dystopian quotation from Frank Herbert\u2019s science fiction saga Dune. \u201cOnce men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free,\u201d the Reverend Mother says. \u201cBut that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.\u201dSuch discussions take us a very long way from John Perry Barlow\u2019s dreams about the promise of technology. Will we ever be able to revive them?The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West by Alexander C Karp and Nicholas W Zamiska Bodley Head \u00a325\/Crown Currency $30, 320 pagesWorld Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics by Bruno Ma\u00e7\u00e3es Cambridge University Press \u00a322.99, 274 pages Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit by Henry A Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie John Murray \u00a322\/Little, Brown $30, 288 pages John Thornhill is the FT\u2019s innovation editorJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Caf\u00e9 and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and\u00a0X<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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