“When I consider Life, ’tis all a cheat / Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit”*…
We live in a time of extraordinary grift. In an excerpt from his book, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, Finn Brunton shares the history and explores the culture of an OG, the 419 (or Nigerian Prince) scam– and reminds us that fraudsters have long told stories of imprisoned nobles and hidden fortunes, with desperate pleas for help. The internet and email simply gave their messages a perfect medium….
A message arrives: a panicked plea referencing a desperate situation in an exotic location. It might be a wealthy refugee family trying to make it out of Zimbabwe, or the widow of an aide to Saddam Hussein in a hospital in Chiang Rai, or a Russian oligarch’s daughter hiding in the Czech Republic and communicating through her London solicitor.
They are looking for a compassionate soul — “whom God will use to assist me and my family” — who can help them get themselves and their assets — “US$45,000,000.00” — out of this difficult moment in geography and history. The phone and fax numbers work, and the web addresses point to real news sites — “You can go to google in internet and check my clients name and information” — and many of the government bureaus and banks check out online.
This is what’s known simply as the advance-fee fraud, or the 419 scam. It is so unmistakable that it embodies its own parodic genre, casually appearing as a gag in television comedies like “30 Rock” and “The Office.” It always starts with the same canonical line, trotted out in conversation over the phone, or perhaps over email: “Hello! I am a Nigerian prince.”
It is easy to see 419 merely as a tired cliché — and to mistake that familiarity for understanding. But doing so often leads to facile assumptions about the risks, motives, and imagined rewards on both sides of the exchange. To see the scam clearly, we need to treat it not simply as spam, but as a cultural myth, or even a motif. These scams are not ads for products — for porn or mortgages or relief for masculine anxiety. They are part of an enormous web of narratives, running back centuries, about corruption, politics, and the failures of globalization, from which you, the reader, can allegedly profit.
Advance-fee fraud dates back to at least the 19th century, with the emergence of the Spanish Prisoner confidence trick. It goes like this: There is a beautiful, rich woman incarcerated by the cruel King of Spain for complex political reasons. You have been contacted because you could help her escape. In return, she will give you a portion of her fortune (and possibly more). The escape is complex: There need to be bribes for the guards, hired guides, supplies for the trek through the mountains, and help for the inside man. You receive pleading notes from her and letters of credit that will make you wealthy once she and her assets have been reunited.
You choose to assist. However, things do not go smoothly because Spain is a far-off foreign country in turmoil, politically confusing, and corrupt. Perhaps there’s a change of authorities and a new set of bribes is needed; the muleteers have to be paid off. Or maybe negotiations have broken down, or the prisoner has fallen desperately ill and needs a doctor, which the prison won’t provide — but you can help.
It is a persistent con, changing to suit the times and political circumstances…
[Brunton recounts some historical examples…]
… While all advance-fee scams share the same narrative contours, they have, over the centuries, been seamlessly retrofitted to the technological platforms and practices of spam. From letters and telegrams in a world of newspapers to email messages in a 24-hour news cycle, 419 works where the spammer’s capacity to generate evidence exceeds our individual capacity to evaluate it — given some willful suspension of disbelief.
Not too much suspension is required, though, for reasons anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith has described. After all, the structure of 419 messages is predicated on a general understanding of how a profoundly corrupt society operates. This is apparent to both the sender and the receiver.
From the perspective of the senders, working in internet cafés at 70 cents an hour (or $2 for a full night’s use), the messages are a natural enough business practice in a society that is, in fact, profoundly corrupt. It is common knowledge among them that the country’s elites do actually move millions, and even billions, of dollars out of the country covertly, in collusion with Western business partners and banks; there are plenty of African industrialists and dictators who cut deals with people overseas to send money abroad in return for a kickback. Furthermore, the countries these elites run are so thoroughly corrupt that any significant advancement — any construction of a building, resource extraction project, even getting a phone line or a lease — involves some palm-greasing and “additional costs.” If that’s the case, how do you expect to make any real money without following their lead?
On the recipient’s side, it takes a deeply cynical (if ill-informed) understanding of politics — not necessarily Nigerian, as the messages are often set in other presumably chaotic and corrupt environments — that views the world as including these covert machinations from which you are finally in a position to profit. This cynicism is combined with an almost touching naïveté on the part of the Westerners responding to these messages: Not only are they taking it for granted that someone would actually work with them to smuggle millions in gold or launder some huge sum in dollars, but they are also laboring under the assumption that their sudden windfall would not attract the attention of Interpol, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the IRS, or the FBI.
All told, this strange dynamic between sender and receiver in 419 messages contains a perverse kind of brilliance: They turn the very fact of Nigeria’s history of exploitation by Western interests and its own leadership into a resource that can itself be exploited — as a place in which outsiders can be convinced that they, too, can take advantage and make a fortune.
But who is actually doing the exploiting? Not the writers of the messages themselves; they are merely fishing for marks, who are then passed up the chain to a smaller group of bosses. Rather, it is the kind of people with the resources and expertise to procure fax messages, letters, credit cards, time-stamped photos of gold bars, and so on. As Smith — who has lived in Nigeria for a number of years and is married to an Igbo spouse — quotes a young 419 writer he interviewed: “The people getting rich from this are the same people at the top who are stealing our money. I am just a struggle-man.”
These low-level, somewhat educated scammers, like the one Smith interviewed, live in a society largely bereft of opportunity for those without connections by birth or patronage. They have ended up as components in a strange kind of writing machine. This machine is made up of young people and old computers telling and retelling stories from templates circulated by email and thumb drives, with names changed and details updated with fresh material from the news: U.S. soldiers have found a cache of Saddam Hussein’s gold; a natural-gas oligarch needs to spirit his money out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Meanwhile, the higher-level bosses — with their stolen or manufactured stationery from Nigeria’s U.S. embassy, NGO offices, and central banks, and the money to arrange settings for plausible overseas meetings — are drawn from the ranks of white-collar professionals such as attorneys, accountants, and engineers…
[Brunton further explores the ethnography of scamming, recounts the history of the mail fraud that immediately preceded spam, then considers some of the higher-profile examples of 419 frauds…]
… Thanks to these — and other — high-profile incidents of skullduggery, the international cultural impact on Nigeria has been striking. No other country has become so synonymous with spam, even though the vast bulk of the volume has come from the U.S. and (much less so) from China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. As Smith points out, 419 messages have only added to the deep unease among outside investors toward Nigeria, reinforcing the perception of a country of thieves. Within the country, “419” has a much broader meaning, referring to general fraud, much of it directed against other Nigerians. 419 can mean the vast frauds perpetrated against the population by political and business leaders working hand in glove with foreign corporations, small-time quack medical experts, and everyday scams like selling or renting homes under false pretenses.
An entire subgenre produced by the thriving and astonishingly creative “Nollywood” — a portmanteau of Nigeria and Hollywood — industry has devoted itself to 419 videos, featuring the many travails, disasters, and moral turpitude of the scammers who prey on one another and their own people. “The Master” is a representative example: Its star, actor and comedian Nkem Owoh, wrote the song “I Go Chop Your Dollar” for the soundtrack, emphasizing the thrill of winning at 419, which is “just a game” that everybody plays (“Everybody dey play am.”).
To be sure, Owoh’s song is not an endorsement of scamming, as he himself has made clear. It is simply an illustration of the world as it is. It is a vision of a society of institutionalized corruption in which everyone — from the lowest hustler to the highest official — has been made a part of the game…
Crime as a symptom (of larceny in the system, fed by larcent in the heart): “A Brief History of the Internet’s Favorite Scam,” from @mitpress.bsky.social.
###
As we dwell on Diogenes, we might recall that it was on this date in 2009 that Irving Picard, trustee of the assets seized from Bernie Madoff when he was convicted of a $69 Billion Ponzi scheme, sued Madoff’s wife Ruth in an attempt to recover from her $45 million in Madoff funds that were being used to support her “life of splendor” on the gains from the fraud committed by her husband.
On November 25, 2008, she had withdrawn $5.5 million, and $10 million on December 10, 2008, from her brokerage account at Cohmad, a feeder fund that had an office in Madoff’s headquarters and was part-owned by him. In November she also received $2 million from her husband’s London office. She has been seen riding the N.Y.C. subway, and did not attend her husband’s sentencing. In May 2019, 77-year-old Ruth Madoff agreed to pay $594,000 ($250,000 in cash, and $344,000 of trusts for two of her grandchildren), and to surrender her remaining assets when she dies, to settle claims by Irving Picard. She is required to provide reports to Picard about her expenditures often, as to any purchase over $100, to ensure she does not have any hidden bank accounts. The case is Picard v. Madoff, 1:09-ap-1391, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
– source
“Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception”*…
Indeed. And that’s especially true of the institutions that guard the archives that are our cultural heritage. The ongoing transition from physical media sales to digital licensing markets has unleashed a new wave of archival ephemerality, which endangers these memory institutions’ core operations and threatens to plunge society into a digital dark age.
The stakes are high. As Haruki Murakami observed: “Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It’s a crime… If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten – we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.”
Michael Menna (a Stanford Law Fellow who co-authored the “Our Future Memory” manifesto) and Lila Bailey (Senior Policy Counsel at one of the world’s most crucial repositories, The Internet Archive), call for four digital rights that would allow libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”) to uphold their shared public service mission of preserving history and providing access to information…
… We are living through a troubling paradox: Digital technologies have enabled the production and distribution of more information than ever, yet access to that information isincreasingly fragmented and fragile. These technologies should permit us to engage and learn from all the digital content at our fingertips. Instead, many of the basic rights we grew accustomed to in the physical world are now being overtaken by aggressive market tactics that do not reflect the public-interest values the law was meant to protect. If copyright, privacy, and other regulatory frameworks were designed to balance the interests of creators and users with the public’s need to access and contribute to the wealth of human knowledge, then our increasingly digital information economy has thrown that balance out of whack.
In this new media environment, publishers and other content providers have unprecedented power to control knowledge and culture with technical restrictions and exclusionary licensing terms. Governments also have an easier time censoring what people can see by scrubbing their websites and pressuring commercial platforms to do the same. These sudden changes will feel familiar to anyone who has logged onto a streaming service or social media app to find a movie or news story suddenly missing. But for libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”), it poses an existential risk to
their core public service mission of preserving culture and protecting history. When these organizations can no longer collect and provide access to digital materials, members of the public cannot place their trust in a stable record—which affects their ability to confidently participate in democratic discourse.
We write this paper from our perspective at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit research library that specializes in web archiving, digitization, and the preservation of media in all forms. We feel the harms from these shifts firsthand and hear many of the same complaints from our partner memory institutions around the world. That shared frustration with today’s digital landscape has given rise to an emerging consensus among libraries, archives, museums, and their allies, calling for better legal protections and practical options to continue their services and preserve cultural memory in today’s information age.
This two-part paper (1) presents the looming threat of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis, and (2) discusses the key role that libraries and other memory institutions can play in meeting that crisis.2 In the first part, we examine the underlying causes of vanishing culture and trace its ripple effects along several different facets of modern life: (a) educational resources, (b) journalistic integrity, (c) civic engagement, (d) religious study, and (e) environmental policy. In the second part, we reintroduce a framework of four rights that would ensure memory institutions’ ability to work together to collect, preserve, and provide access to digital materials. This framework rests on the simple proposition that memory institutions should be allowed to do the same things in the digital world that they’ve historically done in the physical world. It originated in the 2024 statement titled Four Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online3 before it became a global rallying cry for the Our Future Memory movement and its growing list of library, archive, and museum signatories. Together, these memory institutions are striving to combat the political causes and effects of vanishing culture by speaking with one voice to the importance of memory work in an age of digital ephemerality. That is why we call on all memory institutions, large and small, to sign onto the Statement and join the movement. Individuals and communities need memory institutions to educate themselves and freely participate in civic life, and every time a content provider lets critical information disappear online, it offers further proof that today’s digital markets alone do not constitute a viable alternative. If things do not change soon, we risk sleepwalking into a future where both memory institutions and the public they serve will become passive consumers, rather than active stewards of human knowledge…
Menna and Bailey explain the situation; unpack the four rights they propose: collection, preservation, access, and collaboration; then issue a call to action.
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory” (PDF here)
See also Vanishing Culture (full PDF here)
And consider joining me in supporting the Internet Archive.
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As we preserve and share, we might send open birthday greetings to a man who would surely have understood the importance of Menna’s and Bailey’s arguments: Sir Karl Raimund Popper; he was born on this date in 1902. One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Popper is best known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments. (Or more simply put, whereas classical inductive approaches considered hypotheses false until proven true, Popper reversed the logic: conclusions drawn from an empirical finding are true until proven false.)
Popper was also a powerful critic of historicism in political thought, and (in books like The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism) an enemy of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (in which role he was a mentor to George Soros).
“To coin a phrase”*…
Elliot Thornley nods to Shakespeare as the prodigious coiner of words (and phrases) that he was…
And then reminds us that Jeremy Bentham was no slouch with a neologism himself…
It’s pretty amazing. Shakespeare really shaped the English language!
So did Jeremy Bentham. He’s best-known for inventing utilitarianism and the panopticon [see here], but he also coined the words:
- Minimize
- International
- Percentage
- Pluralism
- Monetary
- Locating
- Marginalize
- Codify
- The prefix ‘self-’
- Maximize
- The prefix ‘post-’
- The prefix ‘infra-’
- Exhaustive
- Insurable
- Collaborator
- Alleviating
- Unaffordable
- Exclusionary
- Inexclusively
- Antagonising
- Deontology
- Disambiguation
- Eudemonic
- Evidentiary
- Characterizable
- Perusable
- Preferability
- Remediation
- Astuteness
- Uncalculating
- Uncoerced
- Unbridgeable
- Subvariety
You can find even more Bentham coinages at my source [lots more].
And as if all that weren’t enough, Bentham kind of invented jogging:
Bentham appears to have been a regular jogger—or, as he put it, ‘circumgyrater’. According to the journalist George Wheatley, who stayed with the eighty-one year-old Bentham in March 1831, before both breakfast and dinner Bentham would take ‘a few turns in the garden, which … he calls circumgyrating’, which Wheatley described as a ‘trotting or taking up a kind of trotting step’.
So not only are you quoting Bentham, you might be mimicking him too…
The second-greatest coiner of English words? “You are quoting Bentham.”
More coinage (and source of the image at the top): “Coined Words Acknowledged.”
* idiom
###
As we commend contrivers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that another colossal coiner of phrases appeared: the Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies animated short “A Wild Hare”– the first “official” Bugs Bunny cartoon– premiered (though long-time readers will recall that Bugs [or at least, his prototype] made his inaugural screen appearance two years earlier). Directed by Tex Avery, “A Wild Hare” was nominated for an Academy Award.
“Never trust people who promise to make you rich in a day. They are generally crazy swindlers”*…
Scheduling note: as a consequence of visitors and attendant obligations, (R)D will be off tomorrow and Sunday. Regular service will resume on Monday.
Last month we lost Om Malick. The journalist, investor, and blogger who chronicled Silicon Valley was a collector of fine pens. In one of his final posts, he mused on one of his last acquisitions and on its inspiration…
I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. I grew up reading the tales of Pinocchio, but only read the non-Disneyfied version as a grown-up. The book left an indelible impression on me. It is a great parable for modern times.
In case you were wondering, I did get the pen. It is one of the most beautiful and underrated pens in the Montblanc Writers Series. I have been mildly obsessed with it for a long time.It is not overwhelming, gaudy, or over the top. It tells the full story, not just of the pen but the story behind it. And it starts with the clip, that subtly hints at Pinocchio’s nose.
The cap is where Montblanc’s craftsmen did their most serious work. It is cylindrical, dark resin, topped by the Montblanc snowflake, wrapped in a silver and platinum skeletal overlay, a filigree of characters and scenes from the story, the dark resin visible beneath through the cutouts. The effect is like looking at a shadow puppet theater contained in your hand. The barrel is restrained by comparison, dark resin with horizontal platinum ring banding, letting the cap hold the eye. The nib carries its own engraving tied to the story.
Holding it in my hands recently, I found myself thinking about the story of Pinocchio, and how it throws the names that dominate our headlines into sharp relief — the ones who shape our zeitgeist of half-truths…
… The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests.
I can only imagine the outrage and horror over this story should it have been published today. I am old enough to have been smacked for my stupid mistakes as a kid. So this was actually not a bad story to read. Still, I can understand how much anxiety it might cause today’s parents.
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
The Fox and the Cat are the novel’s most modern characters. They persuade Pinocchio to bury his coins in the Field of Miracles on the promise that they will multiply overnight. Exploit impatience, exploit greed, frame skepticism as a failure of imagination, and dismiss skeptics as lacking vision. Remind you of someone? Space Cowboy for example?
That structure is so familiar I barely need to name it. But let me name it anyway.
Everyone from Jensen Huang to Sam Altman to Elon Musk spent a decade accumulating what I have called symbolic capital, the reputation, the prestige, the weight of being seen as someone who understands the future better than the rest of us. Now each of them seems to be running some version of the Field of Miracles, with promises that keep not arriving, timelines that dissolve, products that exist primarily as announcements, and platforms run as machines for generating more reputation regardless of what they actually do. They don’t need to be right. They need to be believed. Velocity is the new authority, and no one has weaponized that more effectively.
We are living, as I wrote years ago, in the golden age of half-truths.
Your average influencer flogging a supplement, a course, a skin cream, or a crypto token on TikTok and Instagram is running the same operation, just cheaper. The confidence is the product. The audience wants to believe. The Field of Miracles is open for business everywhere you look.
Collodi in 1881 was writing about all this at a point of major societal inflection. So perhaps now you understand why I am drawn to this story. Pinocchio is a story about a society organized around deception.
The Land of Toys is the sequence that haunts me most, especially now. Children abandon school and responsibility for a place of permanent amusement. They play. And then, gradually, they begin to change. They grow ears. They grow tails. They become donkeys, beasts of labor and exploitation, stripped of language, used until they break.
This is a parable of who we have become, a BNPL-fueled spectacle in itself.
Collodi was writing during rapid industrialization and the early emergence of mass entertainment. He understood, earlier than most, that distraction offered as pleasure can be a leash. The children who choose the Land of Toys over school are not liberated. They are owned more completely than any schoolroom could manage.
The algorithmic feed is the Land of Toys. It is built to keep you there past the point of nourishment, past the point where you are even enjoying it. Outrage travels faster than understanding. Spectacle beats judgment. The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true. It cares whether it moves. And it keeps you scrolling, reacting, and returning in ways that benefit the platform, not you.
The political system has learned the same lesson. Governance is slow and grinding and unsatisfying. Performance is fast and shareable. We have built media and political economies that reward entertainers over administrators, and the clean story over the complicated truth.
Collodi refuses to assign blame only upward. That is what keeps the novel from collapsing into moralism. Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
The Fox and the Cat is how the whole thing works.
Pinocchio becomes real, becomes human, only after he accepts obligation. Collodi is saying that it is important to have self-governance. It is necessary to choose the difficult truth over the easy satisfying one. That doesn’t jibe with everything the attention economy is selling, dopamine hits delivered so frequently that it becomes hard to distinguish stimulation from autonomy.
There is an obvious irony in a luxury pen commemorating a story about the seductions of wanting things you have not earned. The Montblanc Collodi is made to be admired, displayed, collected. And it honors a puppet who had to lose everything, friends, coins, his own body, before he understood what was actually worth having.
I am not sure Collodi would find that irony disqualifying. A beautiful object that makes you think seriously about the spectacle we are living in. It makes you think about what is the cost of being real. It is a more interesting pen to own than one that simply confirms your taste.
The clip is shaped like Pinocchio’s nose because the nose is the one honest thing in a world built on performance. It grows because the body keeps the score even when the mouth doesn’t.
When I hold this pen, I try to remember what that means…
A story for our times: “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World.”
* Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio
###
As we know that the nose knows, we might remark that today Rhys Frake-Waterfield‘s horror film reimagining of Collodi’s tale, Pinocchio: Unstrung— featuring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund as the voice of “Cricket” (Jiminy!)– opens in theaters around the U.S.
The trailer is here.
“As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful”*…
Technological sovereignty is a nation’s ability to create, control, and own (or reliably source from reliable alllies) the technologies, infrastructure, and data essential to national security and economic growth.
Concerns with technological sovereignty date back to at least the 17th century (when, for instance, European mercantilist states banned the export of textile machinery to protect domestic monopolies and maintain a favorable balance of trade). They characterized much of the 20th century (as nations built up indigenous defense industries to ensure military independence).
In our 21st century, the one-two punch of the Trump tariffs and his attack on Iran (and the effective closure of the Straights of Hormuz), with the supply chain disruptions attendant on them, have raised the issue of technological sovereignty anew– and with a vengence. In our interconnected, interdependent– thus vulernable to disruption– world, China and the U.S. are in the lead; but experts project slow advance in national tech sovereignty over the next several years.
But this time around, Francesco Crespi and his co-authors argue, the Big Tech corporate monopolies/oligopolies in both China and the U.S. have emerged as even more important players (than their historical analogues have been). Their increasing dominance of private R&D, the increasing centrality of privately-controlled digital technology, their resultant control over knowledge, infrastructures, and key technologies such as telecoms, cloud computing, and AI. have made them central to nation’s futures, even as the Big Tech players (as corporations) have different imperatives.
Crespi, et al. unpack this state of play and propose a typology of technological sovereignty that takes into account the degree of technological dependence on Big Tech, the nature of the relationship between states and digital companies, and, consequently, a nation’s capacity to align the activities of these companies with its own strategic objectives. They summarize:
This paper has examined TS at a historical moment in which the control of critical technologies, infrastructures and knowledge is increasingly concentrated in a limited number of digital corporations. Its starting point was a conceptual tension in the existing debate. TS is commonly defined as the capacity of a state, or a federation of states, to access and provide critical technologies without incurring one-sided structural dependence (Edleret al., 2023). Yet this definition implicitly assumes that sovereignty is ultimately held and exercised by public authorities. The argument developed in the present paper is that this assumption has become increasingly problematic. In core domains such as cloud computing, AI, data infrastructures, satellite systems and digital services for defence, the effective control of technological capabilities is often exercised by private corporations whose interests, strategies and governance mechanisms only partly overlap with public objectives.
The empirical evidence discussed in the paper points to three connected transformations. First, the long-term retreat of public research and the expansion of intellectual property regimes have shifted the centre of gravity of innovation systems towards large private actors. The rise of ICT and platform-based business models has reinforced this tendency by allowing a small group of firms to accumulate data, proprietary knowledge, network advantages and infrastructural assets on a global scale. Second, the hierarchy of corporate R&D has changed substantially since the early 2000s. Digital firms, especially from the United States and China, now occupy the leading positions among global R&D spenders and dominate strategic technological areas such as AI, cloud and software ecosystems. Third, this concentration is infrastructural as much as technological. The control of data centres, cloud availability zones, platforms, operating systems and search engines gives Big Tech firms a systemic role in the functioning of economies, public administrations and security apparatuses (Coveri et al., 2025).
As a result, this concentration of techno-economic power modifies the relationship between the state and private capital. Public authorities no longer simply procure technologies from firms operating in competitive markets. In many cases, they depend on proprietary ecosystems that set standards, store data, provide computing capacity, update software and mediate access to essential digital functions. This produces a form of structural lock-in that is particularly severe in dual-use and security domains. The state can retain formal authority while losing part of the operational capacity required to exercise it. Under these conditions, TS cannot be evaluated only by measuring the presence of advanced technologies within a territory; it must also be assessed by asking who owns, controls and governs the infrastructures and knowledge through which those technologies are produced and deployed.
The analysis of the military-digital complex further strengthens this conclusion (Guarascio and Pianta, 2025). The digitalisation of warfare has made the capabilities of Big Tech increasingly indispensable for military and intelligence activities. Cloud infrastructures, AI systems, cyber-defence tools, satellite connectivity and battlefield data services have become essential components of contemporary security systems. At the same time, public procurement, defence contracts and battlefield experimentation reinforce the technological and market position of these firms. Hence, the resulting relationship is one of mutual dependence, but it is not necessarily symmetrical. Governments need access to digital infrastructures and capabilities that they often do not control internally, while Big Tech firms use military and security demand to consolidate their technological advantages, expand proprietary ecosystems and increase their bargaining power vis-a-vis public authorities. This gives concrete substance to the notion of privatised TS (Abels, 2026).
Building on this analytical and empirical framework, the paper proposes a typology for interpreting the notion of TS according to these structural transformations. In particular, it distinguishes between strong and weak technological sovereignty and between private-driven, public-driven and public-private-driven governance arrangements. This distinction matters because the same technological capability may have different economic and political implications depending on the distribution of control across states, domestic firms, foreign firms and hybrid institutional arrangements.
They conclude:
Taken together, these findings suggest that TS should not be assessed only by asking whether a country possesses advanced technologies. It should also be assessed by examining how control is distributed and governed across the state, domestic firms, foreign firms and hybrid governance arrangements. The broader implication is that private-driven TS is not neutral from a welfare standpoint. It may increase innovation speed and geopolitical capacity, but it can also redirect technological change towards rent extraction, militarisation and proprietary lock-in. On the opposite, public-driven technological sovereignty can better preserve public-good objectives, but public institutions should possess adequate technical, financial and organisational capabilities, while public-private technological sovereignty can work when public conditionality is strong; otherwise, it may degenerate into the socialisation of risk and the privatisation of control. A welfare-oriented strategy for TS should therefore prioritise public and collective control over essential technological infrastructures, strengthen public R&D and procurement capabilities, impose interoperability and open- standard requirements, and ensure that critical data, patents and infrastructures generated with public support remain accessible for public purposes.
The central policy question, therefore, is not simply how to become technologically sovereign, but how to prevent the pursuit of sovereignty from becoming a vehicle for the privatisation of the very capabilities on which welfare, democracy and long-term development depend. Technological sovereignty can strengthen resilience, strategic autonomy and collective welfare only if it is embedded in institutions capable of governing technological change in the public interest. Without such institutions, the language of sovereignty may legitimise new forms of dependency: dependence on domestic monopolies in some countries, dependence on foreign platforms in others, or dependence on public-private arrangements in which public authorities finance
strategic projects while private actors retain control over their future trajectories. A research and policy agenda on TS should therefore place ownership, governance and accountability at the centre of the analysis, alongside capabilities and geopolitical positioning.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Technological Sovereignty, Big Tech, and the Military-Digital Complex” via @ssrn.bsky.social. (Full PDF here.)
See also: “Technology sovereignty as an emerging frame for innovation policy. Defining rationales, ends and means” and “Reconciling open science with technological sovereignty“
And for a look at one of the moving parts of the puzzle, one that underlines the importance of Crespi’s closing suggestions: “Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Futurist Coup.”
(Image above: source)
* J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
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As we develop deftly, we might might send connected birthday greetings to a man who was instrumental in the development the promise/threat of Big Tech as today we know it: Mark Weiser; he was born on this date in 1952. A comouter scientist and CTO of Xerox PARC, he is is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988, when he described a future in which personal computers would be replaced with tiny computers embedded in everyday “smart” devices and their connection via a network.
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