(via)
It has been a while since I wrote about nation states, or notion states as I call them. Now is not really a good time to bring this up in India, but hey, it’s a free country. Oh, wait! Therefore, let’s talk about Apple vs the FBI on where digital security ends and national security begins. (via The Guardian) Washington-Silicon Valley shadowboxing as the publication puts it, and Apple has the support of Google, Facebook and Twitter. [If this were happening in India, by now Tim Cook would have probably been lynched by a mob, and charged for sedition – now a very loose word that can be applied to even things such as sneezing while watching the Republic Day parade on TV]
This battle is interesting as it is because it will set a precedent for an individual’s privacy rights, and is being fought between the world’s most valuable corporation and the world’s biggest (one might even say only) superpower. On one side, we have and entity whose decisions affect billions of lives around the world, and on the other, a country marked by boundaries but influencing policies that affect an equal number. Phenomenally intriguing and layered as this is, I actually find it riveting because I see a couple of my favourite narratives coming to a boil.
One is that of Bits vs Atoms. The nation state is a product of geography (atoms) and despite its hardware prowess, Apple has a strong foundation of ‘bits’. In that sense, it is a collision of worlds, and as Venkatesh Rao eloquently puts it, When software eats hardware, however, we can physically or virtually recreate hardware as necessary, imbuing transient atoms with the permanence of bits.
The other is from Finite and Infinite Games and involves how the species chooses to be organised – the concepts of society and culture. Broadly, the nation state represents society and Apple could represent culture. To quote, “In their own political engagements infinite players make a distinction between society and culture. Society they understand as the sum of those relations that are under some form of public constraint, culture as whatever we do with each other by undirected choice.”
The friction between the corporation and the nation state will only increase, and I am reasonably sure that the winner, even if it may not be evident immediately, will be the corporation. Unfortunately, while that dominance might be relatively better than what we have now, it has tons of challenges – arising mostly from the motivation of the corporation. It’s not an altruistic enterprise after all, and at this point, largely operates on what has been termed captology, from an acronym for “computers as persuasive technology.” (read) It has the capability to massively influence our thoughts without us even realising it.
The hope remains that at some point, the victors will move their focus from meaningful to profound – a nuance brought up by Scott Galloway in the “Gang of Four”. But it is only a hope, and that’s why I fear that even ‘culture’ in the near future as propagated by the victorious ‘bits’ will be within the scope of ‘society’, and therefore inauthentic. That, I guess, will persist till the species recognises life as the infinite game it is. Until then, I for one, welcome our new overlords!