by Tom Fletcher
Let’s be in no doubt. The coinage of global politics is now digital.
Human progress is not about IQ but how we collaborate and exchange ideas. Innovation thrives on the ability of smart people to create and compete together. So the faster that we can communicate with people all over the world, the more amazing products and ideas we will be able to invent. The breakthroughs in the Industrial Revolution were the result of a combination of tiny tweaks by a series of inventors.2 The Internet now allows cutting-edge innovators in Mumbai or Mombasa to connect the light bulbs like never before, accelerating a process of stunning intercontinental and intergenerational creativity. We are, in former UK Foreign Secretary William Hague’s words, in the networked century. Our ability to succeed, compete and prosper will depend more than ever before on the quality and quantity of our networks, and our ability to work them.
It is going to be a ride. By 2020, more than 50 billion gadgets will be exchanging information on a continuous basis. Al Gore predicts that ‘there is no prior period of change that remotely resembles what mankind is about to experience. We have never gone through revolutionary change so pregnant with peril and opportunity, nor experienced so many simultaneous revolutions.’3
In an internal Microsoft memo in 1995, Bill Gates wrote that ‘the Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as incredible challenge.’ But it has proved to be much bigger than that. As Google’s Eric Schmidt now describes it, ‘The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.’4
Already, the digital revolution has changed the world faster than any previous technology. Weapons such as spears and axes led to 200,000 years of hunter-gathering. Farming tools led to 8,000 years of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution set off 150 years of rapid technological and social change. It is seventy years since mainframes arrived in academic and military institutions. Fifty years since the arrival of the microprocessor. Twenty years since personal computing started a mass migration of human effort and attention towards digital. Twenty years since Sergei Brin and Larry Page decided to name a search engine after the googol, a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Twenty years since that Bill Gates memo.
Today, more than 3 billion people are connected to the Internet. The number of Internet users has doubled in the last decade (in Britain, 36 million people use the Internet every day, double the figure in 2006).5 The web is no longer for our downtime, but for all our time. These changes are astonishing. We have access not just to more information than we can process, but more than we can imagine.6
Respectable academic research from just ten years ago predicted that cars could never self-drive. Fifty years ago, a committee organised by the US National Academy of Sciences concluded that ‘there is no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation’. Now, Google Translate provides more translations in a day than all human translators do in a year. It is easy to scoff at the futurologists and soothsayers who have so often in history been wrong. But as Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Richard Smalley says, ‘When a scientist says something is possible, they’re probably underestimating how long it will take. If they say it is impossible, they’re probably wrong.’7
And we’re only just getting going. We have got used to the idea of that change as linear. The patterns show us – whether in regard to data, computer-chip advancement, global temperatures, portable telephone size – that change is now speeding up at a staggering and bewildering rate. Every area of life and work will now be opened up to disruption and automation. Digital technology has already transformed just about every industry – ask anyone who used to work in travel agencies, or a video rental, photography or record store. Historian Ian Morris has shown that in just a century we will go through the equivalent in technological transformation of the shift from cave paintings to nuclear weapons. We will feel overwhelmed and unable to keep up.
These trends will rip apart established states, ideas and professions. This creates two major challenges for diplomacy: managing the fallout; while retaining the trust needed to do so from an increasingly empowered and sceptical public. Furthermore, diplomacy is going to be disrupted at a time when it lacks resources, will and energy. We have seen that what it represents – states, hierarchies, the status quo – is becoming weaker. And meanwhile the challenges it needs to confront are becoming greater. Diplomats risk finding themselves in that most awkward of positions: thinking that they are in power long after the rest of the world has realised that they are not.
So in this part of the book, I want to look at what this means for the way power can be built and channelled in the Digital Age. What are the implications of our desire for connectivity and networks, and how can those in power become more responsive to those they serve? What are the challenges presented by the end of deference and the decline of trust? What are the essential and hard-won skills of negotiation and peacekeeping that mankind is going to need to get through the tumultuous period ahead.
But first I want to look at the specifics of how diplomacy itself will change in the next phase.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Diplomats will never be the world’s greatest technological innovators. But they must harvest and adapt the best ideas. The next wave of diplomatic innovation will be driven by big data. It will reshape how diplomats find and use information; how they deliver a service; and how they network and influence.
First, how will diplomats collect information? For the next decade, when asked the question ‘where were you when you first heard x’, the answer will probably be Twitter. More than 90% of data was created in the last two years. The Large Hadron Collider’s computers could store an amount of music that would take me about 150,000 years to listen to. Being the recipient of enormous amounts of information is already a challenge for all of us. Twenty years ago, telegrams from embassies would arrive in paper form, and pass slowly from hand to hand. Now many foreign ministries have enabled instantaneous communication, with multiple recipients receiving reports as soon as the author presses Send. The average UK diplomat now receives forty diplomatic telegrams a day, as opposed to five twenty years ago. Add to this an average of 200 internal emails and he or she is struggling to get away from the desk – even before going online where most of the rest of the world is.
So knowledge management is ripe for innovation. Few senior diplomats have handovers, and – thanks to WikiLeaks and time pressures – less and less of what we learn is written down in a way that our successors can use. When I meet contacts who have been around for several decades, they assume that I have in my suitcase their back catalogue or greatest hits – a distilled version of all their interactions with British diplomats over the years. This is very rarely the case. But new tools such as blockchain technology will allow the creation of databases that store and filter masses of data.
They will also allow news and public-opinion monitoring on a dramatically different scale. The idea is not new – governments, businesses and media have always tried to track and understand public opinion – but traditionally a diplomatic report would make grand claims about popular trends on the basis of two cocktail conversations and an editorial. Now we have the means to look for patterns about how people think in huge amounts of data. The task may seem overwhelming, but the tools, including sentiment analysis, are becoming more efficient.8 The app ‘Ushahidi’ shows the potential. It originally used volunteers to map post-election violence in Kenya in 2008 through monitoring open-source material. Now it can process Twitter content in real time to help humanitarian organisations and NGOs respond to crises – locating those with greatest needs. Of course, big data does not have all the answers. Internet users are not yet representative of the overall population, especially in Asia and Africa. But as more people get online, it will become more representative of society and those answers will be easier to identify.
All that information is of course worthless unless you know
what questions to ask the machine, and how to interpret the responses you get. Those who can curate, interpret, analyse and present it will wield disproportionate influence. To every complicated and entangled international issue there is always one answer which is simple, lucid and logical – but which is invariably wrong. Big data will not put diplomats out of business, if they can show that they have the imagination to identify insights, nuance and responses. We will need diplomats to stop us from drowning.
Even more exciting than accessing all this data will be the potential to use it to predict the future. Notoriously, US store Target knew that a woman was pregnant before she did based on her consumer choices. This can be applied to international relations. The American academic Kalev Leetaru has used a new quantitative analytical method called ‘culturomics’ to retroactively predict the Arab Spring and pinpoint Bin Laden, using big-data analysis of media reporting.9 We will be able to predict where conflict is likeliest, to measure trends in human society, and even to show the likely consequences of policy decisions. Effectively, this crowd-sources foreign policy trends. So, for example, when we talk of ‘rising sectarianism’ or other changes, we can now do so with genuine authority.
We can’t predict the future yet, of course. Human agency, flukes and cock-ups will all continue to play their parts. But there are more powerful historical forces at work than human agency alone. The ability to mine data in much greater detail gives us for the first time the power to better understand those forces. War rooms in ministries will be staffed with people able to track comment and sentiment that influences national interests. In what ways do people’s views of our national brand change, why, and what impact does this have on our core business of security and prosperity?
To some, this may seem sinister. In the wrong hands, it is. We should not open the door to industrial-scale spookery. It is important that we focus on the data that people produce for wider consumption – Facebook, Twitter, etc. – rather than their private information. As I will argue, governments will need to do more to win the argument that they are to be trusted to use all this data wisely. But the reality is that they will have no choice but to do so. Our new opponents aren’t constrained by conventions and silos. If we want to seriously compete, nor should we be.
Vitally, the telescope won’t be pointing in only one direction. The public will be able to use new technology to keep a closer eye on those in power who are using it. And the content that diplomats themselves produce will help define and recruit them. Companies are already using big-data curators to screen applicants based on their digital footprint. There will still be a need to see if a personality and skill set is right, but this can be supplemented by a more accurate picture of ambassadorial suitability than a one-hour interview and a subjective CV. Does the candidate understand how technology influences the world around them, and what is their contribution to that debate? I would think twice about hiring anyone who was on Twitter, and check their posts carefully. But I would not hire anyone who wasn’t on it at all.
Digital technology, and the masses of data it generates, should also make government better at discovering and delivering what people want from it. McKinsey assess that better use of big data by the US health-care sector alone could save $300 billion a year.10 In 2009, Google claimed to have developed a system to track – by crunching search terms – the spread of influenza through the US without a single medical check-up and faster than the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Government monopolies over services such as passports and visas mean that most countries and embassies have not innovated in these areas as fast as we would have done had we been fighting for the space. Yet failures in these areas have a cost. Businesses take their investment elsewhere if they are unable to secure a visa with speed, dignity and efficiency. The countries that are able to innovate fastest to respond to evolving customer expectations will give their businesses and tourist trade a distinct market advantage.
So any serious foreign ministry is going to have to understand the revolution in consumer power, and rising expectations. Social media allows people unprecedented opportunities to share, compare and rate their experiences. They want faster and more personal service. A business used to instant and personalised online responses is not going to wait four weeks and complete multiple forms to secure a government service. An individual visiting a government website is not going to stay on it for long if it is clunky or standardised. We need to design public services in a way that serves the public. This means cutting out the layers, and directly connecting people with the service that they need.
Technological change can also make contingency planning for crises less opaque and amateurish. For example, we could have the ability to know – if they agree – how many people are in Tunisia at any one time, and (through location technology) where they are. This would make an evacuation much easier to plan and execute.
Some non-digital natives will feel left behind by these changes. But we would be mad not to take maximum advantage of these new tools where the benefits are so clear. Diplomats will need to take their services to people, not wait for them to come to them. When a businesswoman arrives in Ghana, she should receive information about how to get help, an offer of what the high commission does, an invitation to get in touch. When a tourist arrives, he should receive a package on how to get help if needed, and advice on where to go. If he is moving into sensitive areas, he should receive a message on his phone telling him that.
Can diplomacy even be automated? Some critics would argue that many diplomats are already robots. Everything that diplomats do will have to pass the test on whether it can be done by new tools. Can a computer generate a fairer deal on climate change or energy, say, than diplomats? Can a machine write a better press summary, or issue a visa faster and more fairly? Like every profession, diplomats will need to be honest as to what can be done better by computers, and focus all their energies on retaining a market lead on what can’t. As Jarvis Cocker sang in the Pulp song ‘Mis-shapes’, ‘We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of, that’s our minds.’
Just as we shouldn’t need detailed plans to tell us how to speak or write, it will become unnecessary in a decade to have plans to tell us how to digitise. Foreign ministries will need to establish staff placements at technology companies rather than businesses or NGOs. They should have a recruitment blitz of Bletchley Park proportions, before the disruptive competition hires all the brainpower. Governments will need to think of technology as an arms race with their opponents.
Greater digitisation also changes the nature of government, dramatically. It should make it smaller, more accessible, responsive and fleet-footed. That is good for government. It is excellent for diplomacy. Bring it on.
But all this technology and transparency is going to have massive implications for the public’s trust in authority, and in particular for one craft that has always been central to diplomacy – secrecy. No area of foreign policy will be hit as hard as that beguiling, seductive and normally misunderstood aspect of statecraft: espionage.
8
The End of Secrecy? Assange, Snowden and the Death of Bond
Jim: Are you telling me the Foreign Office is keeping something from me.
Bernard: Yes.
Jim: Well, what?
Bernard: Well I don’t know, they’re keeping it from me too.
Jim: How do you know?
Bernard: I don’t know.
Jim: You just said that the Foreign Office is keeping something from me. How do you know if you don’t know?
Bernard: I don’t know specifically what, Prime Minister, but I do know that the Foreign Office keeps everything from everybody. It’s normal practice.
Yes, Prime Minister, ‘A Victory for Democracy’, Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn
In one of the later scenes of Skyfall, James Bond pounds through the Whitehall traffic to reach a committee room in which his boss, M, is being grilled by parliamentarians. Unknown to her and the M
Ps, their lives are in severe danger. Pressed for greater transparency, M tells the committee that, ‘Our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They’re not nations, they’re individuals … Our world is not more transparent now, it’s more opaque. It’s in the shadows.’
Our enemies no longer identify themselves with a helpful monologue or an underwater hideout. Of course, Bond gets there just in time to save M from the killer, and – indirectly – from the committee’s suggestion that the spies are obsolete Cold War relics, unfit for the modern age. Point made.
Secrecy has always been an essential element of diplomacy. Diplomats have always pretended to be spies and spies pretended to be diplomats. Indeed, as a recently serving diplomat, there are – rightly – very clear limits on what I can discuss in this book. Experts have checked it carefully to ensure that there is no information that breaches the Official Secrets Act, nor that reveals confidential advice to ministers. Ironically, this is a process I used to help carry out.
Diplomats have also always spied on each other. Envoys like ploys and toys. They have throughout history sought to gain competitive advantage, to understand what their opponents are thinking, and to spot emerging threats. Many of the original embassies were often just buildings in which spies could base themselves undetected.
Innovation in espionage has often been driven by military necessity. Greek historian Herodotus thought the Greek victory at Thermopylae was because the Greeks had developed a form of ‘secret writing’: a Greek in Persia, Demaratus, had discovered that Xerxes was preparing a surprise attack and had warned Sparta. Ancient Egypt also had a sophisticated spying system. Espionage features in the Iliad – Odysseus somehow fooling the Trojans with his horse, condemning them to be remembered for immense naivety. In the Old Testament, King Joshua sends spies to case Jericho before he attacks it. The prophet Moses could even claim that God had instructed him to spy on his opponents in Canaan (some serious political cover). The Chinese diplomat sliced up in my preface would have read Sun Tzu’s treatise on deception and intelligence.