Geopolitics of Technology

Programma’s uit het verleden

22 04 24

Rising AI and the Concentration of Corporate Power

Technology reshapes our societies. AI, platform economy and other technological developments are remaking our daily routines, practices, and ways of being in the world. These changes also come with shifts in power dynamics between corporations, states, and citizens, giving rise to novel political questions. This multidisciplinary event delves into the concentration of power held by Big Tech companies, the societal challenges arising from this concentration, and potential strategies to uphold public imperatives.

23 02 24

Welcome to the New Future of the Tech Industry

Data Is Dead

The future of the tech industry is in infrastructure, not data. This means that those companies that control key infrastructure, like chips and cloud computing, hold sway. Companies like ASML, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), rather than X or Meta, will become the most powerful players. Is it their choices that will influence what our collective futures look like? Do we need to adapt our understanding of power in the tech sector to this new reality?

08 02 24

Knowledge-Driven Power in a Digitized World

Who holds, controls, and creates power in contemporary societies? On the occasion of their new book, The New Knowledge: Information, Data and the Remaking of Global Power, Blayne Haggart and Natasha Tusikov will present their answer to this question. They will take us along from Google’s Internet-of-Things projects, new modes of property and knowing that arose during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the ideology through which power is exercised.

05 12 23

Making it Political: China, the EU, and Technology Standards

Technological standards are at the center stage of the competition between China and the EU. China promotes their own standards in the EU and on the international stage, which gives them a leading role in the geopolitics of technology. This evening we discuss the nature of this interaction between China and the EU.

13 09 23

How we got here, why they matter, and what our technological future will look like

“Chip Wars”

Computer chips have taken center stage in the current geopolitical conflicts. Many debates tend to depict these issues as new challenges, but they are not. The geopolitics of computer chips has a deep and complicated history. In this sixth event of our “Geopolitics of Technology” series, we will discuss how decades of globalization have built and re-built our supply chains; why and how states have always played a key role in chip markets; and how and why concepts of economic, political and military power intersect particularly in this technological field.

23 03 23

The Geopolitics of Foreign Technologies

Europe and the Technologies of ‘Others’

In this edition of the ‘Europe and the Geopolitics of Technology’ series, experts scrutinize various urgent questions of European technology regulation. When does foreign innovation become a threat, and how do European technology regulators and publics imagine and differentiate sovereign spaces and practices of technology regulation and application? How do practices of various technology actors (private and public) produce security and sovereignty in Europe, China, Russia and beyond? And how are these spaces, digital infrastructures and practices mutually imagined, othered, and (self-)orientalized?

14 12 22

Infrastructural Distortion and Possession

Global internet infrastructure is increasingly becoming part of geopolitical conflicts. However, politics have always been an inherent part of communication infrastructures. One could even argue that the internet infrastructure has been a field of reconfiguration of global power for decades, we just failed to see it.

23 11 22

Politics of (Dis)Connection

The possible establishment of a sovereign internet in Russia, European initiatives on ‘Digital Sovereignty’, and the conflict between China and the United States over Huawei equipment are rekindling the discussion on splinternets and the limits to global interconnectivity.

14 09 22

Why and How the United States Curtailed High Technology Trade in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Dangerous Knowledge in Postwar America

In their new groundbreaking book, Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America, Mario Daniels and John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945.