“Panopticons and Chokepoints,” an interview with Richard Byrne

A new view of international relations puts global networks – and how they can be weaponized – at its center. What’s the future of regulation in this new landscape?

“The debate we see at the moment is never going to be about trade and open markets in the same kind of way anymore,” says Farrell. “Once the door has been opened to thinking about these things in terms of their consequences for security, different actors will enter into the scene and begin to gobble up this policy area that you think is defined in these terms, and start redefining in it in very different ways indeed…. We’re not going back to where we were – and once you’ve opened up the door to these kinds of concerns, they are going to metastasize through the entire system.

Access the full interview at the Wilson Quarterly

Other Writing:

Essay

Google and the Dread Pirate Roberts Strategy

Using The Princess Bride to explain Google’s corporate policies: A blogpost that I wrote elsewhere, complaining about Google, has led to a disagreement between Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias. Drum Just out of curiosity, did anyone ever really believe that “don’t be evil” stuff? I mean, Google’s a big corporation. They’ve been a big public ...
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Essay

“Democracy’s Dilemma” with responses from Riana Pfefferkorn, Joseph Nye, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Allison Berke, Jason Healey, Astra Taylor and danah boyd, and a reply to the responses by Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier. with Bruce Schneier

The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that is what U.S. policy makers, pundits, and scholars believed in the 2000s. The Internet would undermine authoritarian rulers by reducing the government’s stranglehold on debate, helping oppressed people realize how much they all hated their government, and simply making it easier and cheaper ...
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