Geopolitics

Geopolitics and Digital Geographies

In this chapter I examine relationships between geopolitics and digital geographies. Geopolitics here consists of both state and corporate deployment of forms of governance, political policy, and international relations, particularly at the international (state-to-state) level. It is therefore often about power. However, it is not only about the centre exercising power over the periphery; tactics and procedures can boomerang back, or indeed be resisted and overcome. A signature aspect of digital geographies is also that they need not occur only at the state level – there are many ways in which they operate ‘beyond the state’. For example, police departments may adopt technologies such as drones and spatial analytics which were originally developed by government. Commercial entities are as important as the state, if not in fact a form of neoliberal extension of the state. Finally, some ‘everyday’ digital geopolitics have attracted attention in videogames (Bos, 2016).

History

The relationship between geopolitics and digital geographies is not separable from the history of computing. Computers, and after World War II digital computing, arose to meet government requirements for encryption/decryption, calculation of missile trajectories, weather predictions during wartime, and analysis of data. Although computers came into their own during the second half of the twentieth century, a remarkable precursor was developed a century earlier: the Difference Engine developed by Charles Babbage and explained and promoted by the mathematician Ada Lovelace. Babbage began developing the Difference Engine in 1823 (and the Analytical Engine in 1833) to calculate [Page 282]mathematical tables for navigation and astronomy. A maritime economy, Britain relied on the production of timely and accurate tables, which had previously been calculated by hand – a tedious and slow process. Lovelace’s notes on the Analytical Engine included an algorithm for the calculation of a certain class of numbers known as Bernoulli numbers, and this is considered the first published algorithm for a computer.

Although Babbage’s Engines were not digital, they embodied ‘almost all the functions of a modern digital computer’ because they could be programmed (Campbell-Kelly et al., 2014: 42). Babbage was inspired by the Jacquard loom, a process for weaving textiles in any pattern using punch cards. This punch-card solution was later adopted by Hermann Hollerith who invented a scheme to tabulate census returns for the US Census of 1890 – a card for each citizen. Hollerith’s company eventually became IBM, and the era of mass information processing was born.

But it was developments during World War II that properly launched the deep connection between the digital and geopolitics. Two in particular were critical: a theory of information (Shannon, 1948) and a theory of computing intelligence (Turing, 1950). This notion of intelligence is still with us today as geographical intelligence or GEOINT (the term was coined after 9/11 but has long historical antecedents). Turing’s question ‘can machines think?’ lies at the heart of today’s efforts towards machine learning, big data, and algorithms. Shannon’s paper showed that information could be calculable, which meant it could be collected, measured, analysed, and communicated. Wartime computer developments in the USA (the Mark I computer at Harvard) and the UK (the work of Turing and colleagues at Bletchley Park to decrypt German Enigma ciphers) exemplified these developments, but it was the idea that was important, rather than the technology.

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