How Techno-Nationalism Is Harming Tech Policymaking

A decade ago, the United States government saw technology, particularly the internet, as a vehicle to promote democratic values and global trade, and as a positive force for international understanding. In 2010, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We need to work toward a world in which access to networks and information brings people closer together and expands the definition of the global community.”

This belief became a defining quality of the 2000s. Economically, cross-border investment and innovation in consumer tech facilitated America’s recovery from the global financial crisis and expanded its influence. From Wall Street to Tahrir Square, social networks were seen as a new, powerful way to organize towards a more democratic world. Washington encouraged scientific collaborations abroad, even in countries with different ideological priorities.

But those days are long over. Amid heightened tensions with China, the global vision of technology governance has been replaced with one that we might characterize as “techno-nationalism” — anchored by national security concerns and a geopolitical agenda that sees national competition between the U.S. and China as a zero-sum tech arms race.

Driven by this vision, calls for technological decoupling — by restricting U.S. dollars, technological exports, and know-how to China’s tech industry — have led to policies that cut cross-border ties in areas from semiconductors to artificial intelligence. Though the Biden administration claims to be taking a “small yard, high fence” approach to protect critical technologies, the purview of national security under this administration and the next seems poised to grow broader with time.

This techno-nationalist approach has also had rippling effects on domestic policy. The push to prohibit Americans from using TikTok due to security concerns marks a major departure from a model of internet governance that prioritizes open, competitive markets and free expression. Ironically, these policies move the U.S. more in line with Chinese and Russian approaches that have emphasized “cyber sovereignty” and digital borders.

“There are not distinctive ‘Chinese’ and ‘U.S.’ ways of developing and using technology.”

There are real consequences that come with such a change in approach. The focus on perceived foreign threats obscures the global nature of technology. The incentives of the Chinese and American technology sectors are more symbiotic than they are diametrically opposed, and they often mirror each other. While regulators focus on Chinese tech firms, their U.S. competitors — posing similar social risks but seen as agents to boost America’s competitiveness — are left alone. The result is partial policies that fail to grapple fully with the challenges posed by emerging technologies.

We need an alternative to techno-nationalism in our thinking around U.S. foreign policy. In our recent report, we call for a transnationalist agenda in which policymakers and civil society actors embrace three major commitments. First, instead of dealing with technological risks and their societal implications on crude national lines, research and policy should underscore how technology and its underlying politics transmit across borders. In practice, there are not distinctive “Chinese” and “U.S.” ways of developing and using technology, but instead a global convergence of models that are often more similar than they are different.

Second, while the optimism of the 2000s looks naive at best in retrospect, its positive, international aspirations might offer lessons for the governance of emerging technologies in the 2020s. There’s a need for a critical assessment of optimist foreign policy of the past to diagnose its successes and failures and revitalize it for the present.

And third, civil society organizations should work to build transnational bridges to mitigate common harms. U.S. activists, journalists, and researchers should collaborate with their Chinese peers — who are now under increased political pressure — to understand digital forms of oppression and identify counter-strategies in both countries. They should also look beyond the U.S.-China binary and organize around similar causes in other countries, where the harms and contradictions of techno-nationalism are sometimes felt most keenly.

Techno-nationalism is an attempt to bring down the curtain on an aspirational era where values of free expression, open competition, and global collaboration in technology were rightly considered assets to American power and influence. For those who still believe in a foreign policy that rigorously defends and extends these values, building robust intellectual and practical alternatives to techno-nationalism is an urgent priority. While the steps we call for here are a starting point, much more remains to be done to safeguard these principles.

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