LONG before Pakistan’s latest hybrid regime imposed its unannounced ban on the social media site X, TikTok was shut down four times between 2020-21. YouTube was also temporarily banned by Pakistani authorities in the recent past. But the TikTok story takes us far beyond our own uniquely militarised context.
Earlier this week, 81 per cent of members in the US House of Representatives voted in favour of a bill to ban TikTok. The only way the fastest-growing social media app amongst the young can avoid being kicked out of the US market is for its parent company, ByteDance, to divest entirely within six months. The layperson has been led to believe that China owns — and hence controls — ByteDance. In fact, like most contemporary tech companies, it is mostly financed by global investors.
The bill still has to be cleared by the US Senate before going to the White House, but the fact that it has been floated shows how the contradictions of a complex global political economy have become acute and will likely intensify.
On the one hand is the fact that capitalism is a fully globalised economic system in which China and many other non-Western economies are major players due to the outsourcing of the manufacturing industry from Western countries after the end of the Cold War. On the other hand is the increasing insularity of politics in the face of fallouts due to the unfettered globalisation of capital.
Globalised supply chains supersede any particular ‘national interest’.
The far right in Western countries grew out of the global financial crisis of 2007-9. But today, it is a supposedly ‘liberal’ Democratic president in the US that is ratcheting up geopolitical tensions between the pre-eminent global superpower and its emergent rival, China.
Cutting-edge digital technology embodies these contradictions. The world’s most profitable tech companies include Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Meta. All of them are headquartered in Silicon Valley and can, on the surface, be considered ‘American’ companies.
But to take just one example: Apple’s most well-known and marketable commodity, the iPhone, is largely manufactured in China by an outsourcing company named FoxConn. While there have been attempts to shift some production to India after Covid, the vast majority continue to be manufactured in China.
At an even more molecular level, China is the world’s biggest market for semiconductor chips — the single most important intermediate good in the manufacturing of electronic devices. The US is highly reliant on Chinese companies for materials that are vital for semiconductor production, like gallium and germanium.
Long before the prospective TikTok ban, the Biden administration articulated its plans to roll back China’s growing influence by announcing trade bans which equate to ‘choke points’ in the semiconductor supply chain. But the problem is that globalised supply chains supersede any particular ‘national interest’. For most of the modern era, Western dominance has been sustained despite contradictions generated by the interests of Western traders, merchants and manufacturers to seek profit across the world on the one hand, and the imperatives of empire-building in the name of individual nations — whether Dutch, British, French or American — on the other hand. But in our hyper-digitalised, globalised present, contradictions are of a different magnitude.
Where does that leave the mass of the world’s people? First of all, we must avoid the binary that technology companies and their social media platforms are harbingers of democracy while the state — whether US, Pakistani or another — is exclusively the bad guy. Most tech companies facilitate states when the latter impose censorship and demand access to our data for surveillance purposes. Tech companies also use data to make us into dumbed-down consumers — this ‘platform capitalism’ has earned these companies trillions, turning them into the most profitable businesses in history.
Yes, it is essential that we fight for the freedom to use social media apps for anti-establishment causes. We must resist the ban on X, which is all about suppressing disclosures against post-poll rigging and repression in Pakistan. We must defend TikTok’s mostly unfiltered algorithm, which has allowed the most pro-Palestinian content since Oct 7, 2023. In a similar vein, we must not to be drawn into geopolitical wars such as that which Washington is propagating against China.
But there are also other wars — class, ethno-national, patriarchal, ecological — in which the mass of the world’s people are pitted against both capitalist technology firms and the coercive surveillance state. These are the wars which will ultimately determine our collective fate. It is this long-term horizon which must guide our battle of ideas on social media.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, March 15th, 2024
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