The dream of a unipolar world order in which the United States, as a lone, democratic superpower stewards a world at “the end of history,”[1] see

Teetering Between Oppression and Chaos

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2021-07-18 23:00:11

The dream of a unipolar world order in which the United States, as a lone, democratic superpower stewards a world at “the end of history,”[1] seems conclusively outdated. Even the most optimistic proponents of this fading worldview seem to have accepted the likelihood of a more complicated, multipolar 21st century. [2] Aside from the United States, which will remain a global power for quite some time, no other country will be as prominent in the new multipolar world as China. Yet in much the same way that the dream of a unipolar world order has proven illusory, so has the dream of a free and open China. How open societies around the world choose to act next will determine whether the 21st century becomes a closed or an open era. We have a choice, and our options are not merely to surrender to chaos or to adopt China’s authoritarian model. We can choose to reintegrate these technologies into our open society and become stronger for it. The emergence of this future depends on a societal consensus around revitalizing our culture of collective sensemaking, real dialogue, and civic virtue. To do this will first require an understanding of how open societies can coordinate to out-compete closed societies, and why we failed to integrate the internet productively the first time around.

One of the cornerstones of the new, democratic world order was meant to be the information technology revolution that began in the U.S. in the late 20th century, exemplified by the internet. However, as the societal implications of this revolution emerge we see that rather than being a tool of democratic liberation, the internet has been wielded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), among others, as just another tool of state control. At the same time, rather than buttress the emergent order of open societies in the West, the internet has solidified existing divisions and allowed our epistemic commons —our shared public discourse and the norms and worldviews that govern and inform it—to become fragmented and polluted.[3]