After reading Anne Applebaum's Autocracy Inc which lays out ways in which the word's autocracies (China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Hungary, El Salvador and increasingly the USA, amongst others) provide services to and support one another on the world stage, I began to muse on Ian Bremmer's thesis that the world has new major strategic actors, namely the megatech companies we all know and love to hate but cannot do without. Then I read a review in the Economist of a couple of books about Yevgenii Prigozhin, Wagner Group and its successor entities (most notably the Afrika Corps, currently enjoying semi-autonomy in central Africa).
The big state powers sense the threat, hence Xi Jinping's decision to disappear Jack Ma of Alibaba a few years back and also to take other steps to make sure others don't experience similar rises. Pony Ma of Tencent has kept a low profile to avoid a similar fate.
Elon Musk, even aside from his DOGE doings, has already become a semi-autonomous political actor, alternately providing and withholding Starlink service to the Ukrainian armed forces depending on how he felt it would impact his relationship with Putin (but really, presumably, with Russia's sworn butt-buddy China, which is large enough to meaningfully impact Musk's business strategy).
What if, I mused, the megatech companies were to dispense with the mediation of nation-states and just pursue relationships with private security firms like Afrika Corps or, to dredge one up from the not-too-distant past, Blackwater?
I discussed this over dinner with Graham and Mary last week and Graham argued convincingly for an impressive number of reasons that it wasn't feasible. I had thought that at least it would bubble up in consciousness in art: books and movies, just as the Blackwater-Halliburton relationship was contemplated back in the days of the Iraq War.
On this, at least, I was not wrong. Cue this weekend's release of Mountainhead on Max.
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