2 experts on the 'design flaws' in today's era of 'capitalism on steroids'

The following is an adaptation of an excerpt from GeoTechnoGraphy: Mapping Power and Identity in the Digital Age (New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2025) by Samir Saran and Anirban Sarma.

With the advance of the 21st century, we’ve moved deeper into the Fourth Industrial Revolution: a tech-driven epoch that “builds on the digital revolution and combines multiple technologies” leading to paradigm shifts in every sphere. This is an era that’s “evolving at an exponential rather than linear pace”, and the blistering pace of change is impacting not just how we do things but who we are as individuals and society.

Big tech firms and a few other large technology companies are among the principal engines of this change, given their global reach, market share and outsize influence. In Lawrence Lessig’s famous phrase, these companies use “code as law” to influence, direct and dictate the behaviour of digital societies. They covertly track every move users make, amassing ill-gotten empires of personal data. They indulge in anti-competitive practices in a bid to quash rivals. In their haste to get to market, they sometimes sacrifice the guardrails that could have made products safer. They pay scarce heed to the climate costs of their technologies. And they create user dependencies in a manner that nearly always makes their services our first recourse for support.

While we draw attention to these tendencies and criticize them, we’re not anti-business, anti-market or even anti-capitalist. What we’re opposed to is the idea of capitalism on steroids that the excesses of big tech have come to represent. We believe that innovation is laudable, but not at the cost of privacy, safety and ethics. We believe too that markets will always be the central channel for delivering innovation and benefits at scale. We suggest therefore that markets be provided with a basic regulatory undergirding for new technologies to remain non-predatory, non-exclusive and locality-sensitive.

Also, while we reflect on certain mechanisms that are helping push back against some of big tech’s incursions (for example, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is enforcing a more transparent and responsible approach to data governance, and India’s digital public infrastructure is levelling the domestic playing field for enterprise and innovation), we’re not advocates of “big gov”. We believe instead in nuanced and agile multistakeholder frameworks, and in light-touch regulations that empower both businesses and citizens.

Four fundamental “design flaws” underlie today’s geotechnographical landscape, and much of the churn in contemporary digital societies can ultimately be traced to them.

First, the political economy of technology – where the values of certain centres of production are being imposed on sites of consumption – is no longer tenable. The ideologies of Silicon Valley are being made to force-fit local markets with a wholly different provenance. Key social media platforms were born and bred in an environment where free speech enjoys strong protections under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. For the most part, the US government cannot restrict what individuals say online, and the press too can publish information and opinion without fear of control or punishment.

But when a platform that encodes these beliefs is transplanted into another geography with a different understanding of permissible speech, the clash of people and values could be immediate and visceral. While most cultures seek the right to free speech, they also set boundary conditions that must be met. By creating spaces whose very architecture allows these conditions to be ignored, the transnational social media have institutionalized the right to offend. At a broader level, as more nations boost their tech capabilities, they’re keen to be recognized as innovators and producers in their own right, and not merely as markets for technologies developed elsewhere.

Second, the concept of citizenship is a product of belonging to a nation, being governed by a certain regime, and having in place a framework such as a constitution that defines the nature and scope of governance. But today this contract between citizens and the state is increasingly mediated by private players. Cloud service providers, giant online retailers, and social media companies provide critical infrastructure in the economic and political spaces. What’s disturbing, though, is that that while these businesses ought to be accountable to the country they’re operating in, borders appear to mean little to them as they act with impunity, with scant regard for local laws.

In 2023, for instance, the Indian government called out Twitter for repeatedly violating national laws and refusing to comply with requests to take down harmful content. And in 2024, WhatsApp and its parent company Meta issued an ultimatum to India, threatening that WhatsApp would pull out of the country if the government continued to require social media companies to break end-to-end encryption in order to assist law enforcement authorities. As private actors vie to provide public utilities on their own terms, they undermine the position of governments and citizens.

Third, the dichotomy between sites of innovation and those of regulation influences how technologies are developed and distributed. Historically, the US has been the world’s leading centre for digital innovation. In the space of AI for example, in 2023 alone US-based institutions produced 61 significant AI models, far ahead of the 21 from the European Union and 15 from China. As of 2024, the country leads AI research and technology, with 60% of the world’s top-tier AI researchers and private funding worth $249 billion.

Europe, on the other hand, is regarded as a pre-eminent centre for tech regulation. It’s no coincidence that the world’s first full-blown AI act and its toughest data protection regime, the GDPR, originated in the EU; nor that the Council of Europe adopted the Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence, the first international legally binding treaty to ensure that AI upholds human rights. These trends empower Silicon Valley and Brussels to drive the global agenda on innovation and regulation, and make tech developers especially anxious to court them. It also means that tech principles that are regarded as “universal”, “responsible”, or “trustworthy” stem from an elite subset of the Global North and serve it, while the needs of emerging economies and developing countries are regarded as marginal at best.

Fourth, there’s a “capabilities asymmetry” between geographies that impacts their response to technology, and shapes trajectories of tech adoption. In some locales, digital developments are an organic part of social evolution, but in others they represent the process of leapfrogging to an advanced product or service without any real precedent. The excitement around leapfrogging notwithstanding, the process also creates institutional log-jams.

For a while in 2016, Thailand banned motorcycle ride-hailing services like Uber and Grab, worried about the lack of legal frameworks to regulate them. Similarly, in June 2021 the Nigerian government suspended Twitter, citing concerns over its limited ability to regulate the social media after the platform deleted a tweet by President Muhammudu Buhari. The shutdown lasted seven months and disrupted political discourse and civic engagement. It reflected a classic bind: How is a nation with meagre tech capacities to manage social media platforms, while trying to uphold freedom of expression?

As these four challenges demonstrate, the “power of place” continues to determine every aspect of tech production and use even today. The relationship isn’t an easy one, and propelled by a desire for autonomy, governments, corporations and citizens often find themselves locked in a three-way contest whose greatest casualty is proving to be the once-hoped-for egalitarianism of cyberspace.

Democracy and technology are more deeply enmeshed than ever before, but the seeds of distrust against big tech and similar companies have been sown. Their concentrated power has begun to resemble the grand industrial monopolies of bygone eras, but they’re too vast, dominant, complex and fast-moving for governments to consider many of the conventional solutions once applied to anti-competitive behaviour.

Innovation is far outpacing regulatory change, and cloud societies and other communities are grappling with digital shifts, disrupted truths, cultural tensions and growing uncertainty. Gradually however, a “techlash” is beginning to break out. After the peak comes the crash, and as this century’s first quarter draws to a close, we must pause to ask: How do we reboot the present to ensure that the future doesn’t repeat the errors of the past?