From Sykes-Picot to Silicon Valley: Why Middle East fault lines now run through American tech |
In 1916, the Middle East was partitioned by its rulers with ink between Britain and France. A hundred years later, with borders drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, territories continue to contend with claims to legitimacy, sovereignty, and foreign intervention. The Middle East holds a reset, but not in a conference room this time, instead in an open-plan office, very far away.
The new lines are invisible. They have been coded in Silicon Valley, an invisible network of servers, algorithms, cloud agreements, and surveillance systems distributed across the Middle East. The old colonial map remains in place but is not effaced; instead, it is digitised.
Sykes-Picot established control through geography. Nowadays, control is established through data. Where the data is, where it is interpreted, and where decisions are made regarding its use all determine control. Military presence in a country is no longer the sole determinant of power and domination; access to a platform is what countries seek.
The colonial control apparatus functioned through censuses, identity cards, and intelligence systems. Here, the benign colonial agenda classifies, records, divides, and conquers. Of course, this agenda never ends; instead, it morphs into new forms. As Edward Said shows, empires do have new shapes but not new aims. In the new millennium, cyberspace assumes new forms.
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State bodies in the Middle East are using US technology to control their borders, monitor citizens,........