It’s a little-known fact that, prior to the late 90s/early 2000s, the most intense period of globalisation occurred in the second half of the 19th century. For much of the 20th century, in fact, globalisation was in retreat. Walls and trade barriers went up and stayed up well into the 1980s. The great catalyst of the latest wave of globalisation, the World Wide Web, was born at the end of 1990.
WWI effectively killed 19th century globalisation. The New Cold War is doing the same to the globalisation of a century later.
Globalisation as we have known it has ended. Why?
Unrestricted cross-border data flows — internet traffic –has been the primary enabler of globalisation in the twenty-first century.
Of all things, an apparently frivolous app whose stock-in-trade is teenagers filming themselves doing silly dances, is the biggest canary so far to drop off its perch in the globalist coalmine.
Because what that app – TikTok – is really about is harvesting information, the currency of globalisation. President Trump’s “Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok” spells out the national security case for treating personal data as a national security asset.
This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.
Whether you agree or disagree with this concern specifically in relation to TikTok is irrelevant.
The substance of the TikTok saga is that real or perceived unrestricted cross-border data flows are no longer acceptable to the United States on national security grounds.
End unrestricted cross-border data flows and you end the key enabler of globalisation in the twenty-first century.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is currently pretty blase about TikTok, but that attitude will inevitably change. As Britain, Canada and New Zealand have previously realised, adopting a contrary attitude to the US regarding Chinese data-harvesting apps is not a viable strategy.
Trump’s executive order makes clear that “mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China” are a threat to “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States”.
Just as the other Five Eyes countries, some more reluctantly than others, woke up to the threat posed by Chinese telco Huawei, Australia must inevitably wake up to the threat of apps like TikTok.
Perhaps ironically, the internet originated as a Cold War US defence project, but became co-opted in the “end of history” era by utopian globalists. As a new Cold War freezes the globe, globalist utopianism is quickly getting iced.
The utopian vision of the internet enabling the free flow of data, ideas and liberal democratic values lies in ruin in 2020.
Governments in countries such as China and Russia have ironically been transparent about restricting cross-border data flows. Western politicians have simply hoped for the best.
China erected its “Great Firewall” because it knew that freely-flowing information threatened its “Harmonious Society”: it would never do for ordinary Chinese to learn that Beijing had lied through its teeth for 70 years. Russia is also disengaging from the World Wide Web.
Whether you call it the “splinternet” or internet multipolarity, the trend is the same and the trend is data sovereignty.
The internet is more clearly becoming delineated between the internet of western values, the internet of CCP values and the internet of Putin values[…]
Globalism in the form of hawking personal data has made a handful of Silicon Valley plutocrats unimaginably rich, and separating personal data will be very costly for firms, for most of whom personal data is a significant amount of the data they handle. But “cross-border data flows” (or, more correctly, rampant Chinese theft of intellectual property) is a massive cost. US agencies estimate that Chinese data theft costs the country between $300-600 billion every year.
Globalisation as we have known it has ended.
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