| | | | The World Is Splitting Over Tech | | | The multipolar world order is coming to an end, Gideon Rachman writes in the Financial Times, and it's being replaced by a two-bloc system led by China and the United States. It's different from the Cold War, he writes, in that this time the world is divided over technology: Instead of picking between American and Soviet military alliances, the world is being forced to choose between American and Chinese tech deals. While the US squeezes allies to exclude Huawei, China has already banned American tech giants Google and Facebook—and two technological systems are developing in parallel. China already has an advantage in high-tech exports—it surpassed the US in 2004, per World Bank data—but the new divide is about more than cell-phone sales. It's about data and communications, which are "fundamental to almost all forms of business and military activity," Rachman writes, meaning this new divide could spill over into other areas and threaten "globalization itself." | | Here Come the 'Hyperleaders' | | | If we're concerned about what the Internet has done to our social lives, or to children, we should be equally concerned about how it's affected our politicians. A new type of them has emerged, thanks to Twitter and Facebook: "hyperleaders," as they're dubbed by Paolo Gerbaudo in the New Statesman. From Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, these new leaders connect directly with supporters, break down old political lines, and are now more important than the parties to which they belong—all by using personality-driven politics and Twitter-style argumentation. We'll only see more of them, it seems: As Evening Standard editor George Osborne has said, politicians who learned in the 1990s to speak in message-disciplined sound-bites, as a response to cable news, need to change their ways in today's social-media environment in order to survive. | | Why China Will Keep Borrowing | | | China's economy is increasingly loaded up with debt, and while it once seemed President Xi Jinping would ease off policies of economic stimulus, that has not come to pass, as lending hit record levels in January. Analyzing China's economy in Foreign Affairs, Christopher Balding makes a political case for why this trend will only continue: "When a recession strikes a democratic country, voters can kick out the governing party," he writes. "In China voters have no such option, which means that a recession could topple the entire regime." Balding's assessment may sound dire, but with China's economic downturn leading to protests in 2018, it points to a tradeoff Xi is making: citizen-pleasing growth, instead of a more sustainable economic path. | | | Hans Blix, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and UN inspector in Iraq, makes a well-reasoned argument for nuclear energy in Time, writing that while Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island scared the world, carbon emissions pose a much bigger threat than nuclear meltdowns and waste storage. Like disasters involving other technology like air travel, nuclear catastrophes have led to "new, safer designs and dedication to safety culture," Blix writes; with global-warming predictions as dire as they are, we should accept the risk. A recent MIT Technology Review article supports his case: Technological developments including smaller reactors, alternative coolants, and fusion stand to make nuclear cheaper and safer—even if voters and governments have yet to buy in. | | | Much attention has been focused on Brexit's potential outcomes—and on what Prime Minister Theresa May should do if her deal loses, again—but it's worth looking at what Brexit has done to British politics, more broadly. It's turned the UK more radical, Jonathan Lis writes at CNN. While one may have expected cooler heads to prevail in a crisis, the opposite has happened: Britain's traditional parties have hewed more militantly to their positions, and the public discourse has turned more extremist, in the face of Brexit's cliff.
The risk, Lis writes, is that this will only continue: No matter what happens with Brexit, the public won't be satisfied. With Britain's economy expected to take an across-the-board hit, under various Brexit scenarios, there's reason to believe discontent and polarization will outlast Brexit's deadline. | | | | | | |
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