The Statecraft of Technology

“Opinion | The Statecraft of Technology”, News 18, July 14, 2026

“On October 7, 2022, the United States Commerce Department published an export regulation so dense with technical classifications that most of the world ignored it. Trade lawyers filed it under compliance. They were wrong. The rule attempted something no tariff has ever attempted: to slow a rival’s progress across an entire field of technology by controlling not products but the ability to make them. It was foreign policy dressed as paperwork, and it has been quietly re-organising the world ever since

I keep returning to that document because of what it exposed about assumptions we had all been carrying. For most of my career, technology was an economic sector. Governments regulated it the way they regulated any industry: antitrust here, intellectual property there, research grants, spectrum auctions. The arrangement felt permanent because the assumption beneath it felt obvious. Computing was a business. The state’s job was to referee it, encourage it, and tax it. The only question a minister asked about technology was how much growth it would produce. It was a comfortable question, and it produced comfortable answers. It also stopped describing the world some time ago, and the institutions asking it were among the last to notice.

Then the sector became the substrate, and nobody sent a memo. Payments, hospitals, ports, power grids, the machinery of government itself, all of it migrated onto digital rails, one unremarkable procurement decision at a time, which is why almost nobody registered the cumulative meaning of the move. Finance showed everyone what that meant……..”

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