Will Tech Oligarchies Be The Death Of The Nation-state?

The speed limit that Elon Musk’s SpaceX imposed on Starshield terminals in Ukraine may have, on its face, been a technical parameter, but in practice, it was an act of sovereign consequence.

Ukrainian drone operators, men who had spent months pushing back Russian forces with little more than ingenuity and Star-link terminals, suddenly found that their machines would lose connection the moment they exceeded roughly 160 kilometres per hour.

A senior Ukrainian commander told The New York Times that the restrictions cost his unit more than one million dollars and delayed missions by three days. One commander, known by the call sign Flint, described a drone losing contact “in an instant” as it picked up speed, falling to the ground and aborting its mission, its technology potentially falling into enemy hands. “It’s a knife in the back,” Flint said of the ostensible withdrawal of support from a single company, controlled by a single man, whose decisions had become indistinguishable from the strategic posture of a superpower.

The Westphalian state, that hardened shell of territorial authority that has organised global politics since the 17th century, is being systematically unbundled from the outside in and from the top down. Where states once struggled to project power into cyberspace, corporate actors have mastered the reverse: they use digital networks as a lever to exert influence over terrestrial governance.

The Starlink speed limit was a warning shot. It showed that a private company could degrade the military capability of a sovereign state in the middle of an armed conflict, and that the state’s recourse was to plead, to improvise, and to wait for the owner’s mood to change.

Such vulnerability in strategic operations is a product of the state’s dependency over foreign corporate houses. The same vulnerability exists in the information domain, where algorithms can be weaponised to amplify or suppress political movements, and in the economic domain, where control over cloud computing and AI can determine which countries can compete and which cannot. Governments that depend on foreign-owned cloud infrastructure, foreign-owned satellite constellations, foreign-owned social media platforms, or foreign-owned AI models are not fully in control of their own decision-making. They can be slowed down, switched off, or algorithmically disadvantaged by a private actor whose interests may or may not align with their own.

The tools are, in themselves, value neutral. The same qualities that made the Internet a force for unprecedented progress — its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed — also enabled wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Seven of the 10 richest people in the world are now technology oligarchs, and their combined wealth equals roughly eight per cent of American GDP. They control the digital infrastructure on which people, governments, and economies depend. The entire technological network of a state can be throttled by a billionaire with a grievance or a political preference. The tech oligarch does not recognise the legitimacy of any authority higher than his own judgment or that of his home government, and he commands the infrastructure to act on that judgment at global scale.

The historical record of this entanglement is not hidden. In June 2009, as protests filled the streets of Tehran after the disputed election results and the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan circulated as a symbol of state violence, Twitter was planning maintenance that would have taken the service offline during the Iranian daytime. The US state department officials reached out to the company and asked it to reschedule. Twitter delayed the maintenance until the middle of the Iranian night, and the company noted in a blog post that the delay was made because of “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran”.

Hillary Clinton later confirmed the episode in her memoir, describing how the state department tracked the online efforts of the Iranian Opposition and intervened to keep the platform available at the decisive moment. The strategic communication environment of a foreign nation had become a variable that could be adjusted by a phone call between a government official and a technology executive.

The pattern repeated itself, with greater sophistication, during the Arab Spring. Social media platforms were actively shaped by American programmes designed to train activists in their use. The State Department’s TechCamp initiative, launched in 2010, brought together technologists, civil society organisations, and journalists in countries like Ukraine, providing training in digital literacy, fact-checking, and the application of technology to political organising. In Bangladesh, the US Embassy awarded grants to young journalists trained at a TechCamp on “Empowering Journalists, Ensuring Truth”, funding projects to combat misinformation and promote media literacy.

In Ukraine, a TechCamp was held in Kyiv in 2012, two years before the Euromaidan revolution would reshape the country’s political trajectory. These programmes, presented as benign capacity-building exercises, established a framework in which the digital public sphere of foreign nations became a domain of American strategic interest, populated by local actors trained, funded, and networked by the US deep state.

The implications for sovereign regimes, democratic and authoritarian alike, are profound and immediate. For democratic states, the threat is insidious because it operates through the very channels that democracy depends upon. When a billionaire CEO can restructure a social media platform to fit a political agenda, or when another platform can announce the shuttering of fact-checking programmes and the loosening of hate speech policies at the whim of its founder, the information environment that citizens rely on to make political judgments is being shaped by private preferences rather than public deliberation.

The disenchantment and discontent at grassroots that all governments suffer, by the course of human nature, are transformed and escalated into political movements through platforms whose owners may have their own reasons for wanting a government destabilised.

The response cannot be reduced to firewalling or regulatory safeguards, though both are necessary. A nation that relies on a foreign private company for satellite communications, cloud computing, artificial intelligence models or social media platforms has effectively outsourced a dimension of its sovereignty to an actor that is accountable to only its shareholders and its founder. It is not enough to regulate the oligarchs who already control the infrastructure; sovereign states must build and own the infrastructure themselves, from basic communication networks to social media platforms to the artificial intelligence systems that will mediate everything from healthcare to warfare in the coming decades. The tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are too important to be left to the whims and fancies of billionaires.