Technology Archive

Today both states and their challengers face a conundrum. Images of dissent and grievance circulate at lightning speed through the global media landscape, fueling demands for change and even revolution. Furthermore they encourage populations to expect governments to fall in response to people power in ever-contracting timeframes. States are perplexed at how rapidly calls for change can spread through social networks. Their challengers too are concerned: They face a loss of control and message coherence. Political change has always been about the long game, as Egypt and Syria demonstrate today. Nevertheless, there remains the challenge of organizing collective action in […]

A lot has changed in the world of technology since the indigenous Zapatista movement emerged in the mid-1990s in southern Mexico to become a symbol of the fight for global justice. To modern would-be revolutionaries, the communication technologies that allowed the Zapatistas to gain global visibility — highlighted by the then-futuristic-looking pictures of Subcomandante Marcos, the movement’s leader, posing in the Chiapas jungle wrapped in electronic gear — now look obsolete and cumbersome. Communication technologies have since morphed into devices that, despite being smaller, are incomparably more powerful for broadcasting, not only because exponential growth in Internet penetration over the […]

During the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Defense concluded that it was in a “strategic pause.” With the Soviet Union gone and no equal threat on the horizon, the Pentagon had the luxury of doing things like building a “futures” industry to think big thoughts about long-range changes underway in the security environment and the nature of armed conflict. But today strategic futurists face hard times. As the defense budget shrinks, money and time for forecasting and analysis are hard to come by. There is no doubt that cuts in defense spending are needed, but if thinking about the future […]

The United States and Japan are perhaps the two countries for which cooperation on cybersecurity is the most crucial. They are, respectively, the largest and third-largest economies in the world, and two of the largest military powers. Moreover, the economic and military strength of both countries relies on sophisticated intellectual property, military intelligence and trade secrets. As a result, they have more to lose from cyber threats than any other countries in the world. Recognizing the importance of cybersecurity cooperation, leaders in both Japan and the U.S. have advocated bilateral dialogue on the issue. Most recently, during a meeting with […]