Our digital age and the exercise and contestation of power

Over the last 30 years, digital innovation has been met with vacillating opinions on whether technology is emancipatory or tends to benefit those with political and/or economic power. In the context of innovations in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the early 2020s, this brief tackles the question: In a digital age, what is new in who exercises power over whom? It focuses on the power of States in relation to both citizens and territory, and outlines four areas where fundamental changes are taking place in the exercise and contestation of power: (i) new State dependencies on tech firms; (ii) digitalisation of citizenship; (iii) the preoccupation with the potential for total surveillance; and (iv) new concerns and claims to territorial rule.

By late 2023, it had seemed clear that the world is shifting towards a digital age, whereby information in the form of digital data underpins social, economic and political activities and decision-making. The public launch of ChatGPT a year earlier, through which AI is shown to generate human-like conversational text, resulted in an explosion of interest in advances in the possibilities for AI to transform human activities—from the nature of work, to fraud, to geopolitical competition. While other technological innovations may still be more distant, such as the promise of quantum computing, their potential future use is nonetheless becoming more imaginable.

A ‘digital age’ provokes existential concerns that digital technology might surpass human performance and control, or that Big Tech will become a ‘new leviathan’ that will challenge state sovereignty. Such a focus, however, hides the continued limitations of technological use. For instance, generative AI depends on physical infrastructure and energy for complex technological processing, which remains a barrier for many States.

The paper can be accessed by clicking here.

This paper has been authored by Stephanie Diepeveen.