Private technology power challenges state sovereignty

Dictators and even individual entrepreneurs can restrict access to the internet, testing states’ control over a resource that has become part of everyday life, Kristjan Port writes in a technology commentary published by ERR’s Raadio 2.

Port says the internet has become as familiar and unobtrusive as the air around us. People tend to notice it only when their connection stops working. He argues that human-made systems such as language, money and electricity can also come to seem natural when they are essential to daily life.

Digital networks are not separate from physical reality, Port writes. They use discrete, code-based information, reflecting what he describes as the universe’s underlying information structure.

Port compares the desire to control nature, once expressed through myths of powerful gods, with efforts to control the internet. He says dictators are not isolated figures: societies enable them to rise and remain in power, through social and psychological patterns and different forms of naivety.

Estimates cited in the commentary indicate that 35 countries are closed dictatorships and 57 are electoral autocracies. Around six billion people, or 74 percent of the global population, live under autocratic systems, and that share is increasing, Port writes.