The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age. Tom Fletcher
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key argument: between those who want to live together and those who don’t. Their publicity machine thrives on Donald Trump, burkini bans, and any measure that makes Western claims of openness, tolerance and respect seem a sham. In the battle for modern Islam, we rely heavily on the moderate voices prevailing. Yet too often we undermine their message by not sticking to our deeply held values. There isn’t a twenty-first-century problem to which the answer is another brick in the wall. Post-US election, there is a bigger battle at stake for all of us: to ensure that it is harder for the next Trump to weaponise intolerance in the way he has.
Secondly, we will see a division between libertarians and control freaks. This will pit the prophets of complete freedom against those who argue we need secrets, in our personal lives and as governments. So we have Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at one end of the spectrum and the North Koreans at the other. Most of us will find our position, issue by issue. But there will be surprises too. Former Commander of Joint Special Operations Command Stan McChrystal is right that it is now more dangerous to share too little information than too much. Governments are beginning to recognise that without opening up they cannot establish the trust necessary to govern. Chapter 8 looks in more detail at this balance between security and liberty.
Thirdly, the line will be between those who want to make the problem bigger and those who want to make it smaller. This book argues that technology has created a significant shift in the power balance between global, regional, national, local and individual. All the talk in Britain at the moment is about our relationship as a nation with Europe. Yet these two entities – the superstate and the nation state – are the two that are going to lose power fastest in the twenty-first century. We’ll need better global systems; more powerful local systems; and we’ll want more individual control. That doesn’t leave the nation state or regional organisation with much. We will need to make the case to a more sceptical public that it is sometimes in the national interest to pool sovereignty.
Finally, we will see a growing chasm between ‘on demand’ winners and ‘on demand’ losers. Many of us are going to love the ‘on demand’ economy. We’ll get more of what we want when we need it. But it will take a lot of people to service that. Their time will be on demand so that ours can be our own. Make that gap between winners and losers too wide, and we create peril. Growing inequality is the biggest geopolitical risk today.5 If displaced people had a country, it would be the twenty-first largest in the world.6
We better mind that gap.
So how do we survive the twenty-first century as businesses, individuals and countries?
We can start by getting out of our echo chamber. I only realised the day after the US election that my Twitter timeline had no Trump supporters on it – maybe that’s a sign I’m pretty closed-minded too. One of the ironies of the final twenty-four hours of the campaign was seeing Hillary Clinton’s team singing along to ‘Livin’ On a Prayer’ – I fear Gina and Tommy voted Trump.
Maybe the silver lining of 2016 is that more good people will become activists. As the murder of the inspirational British MP Jo Cox reminded us, we have to defend the progress and freedoms we took for granted with greater urgency and passion.
So the most influential generation in history, empowered by access to information and networks previous generations could never have imagined, will need to summon up fresh will to protect what my generation took for granted. They will need to establish checks and balances on the new emperors, from tech giants to tyrants, just as we learnt to do on the old ones.
Second, we can thrive by investing in education. If America changes tack on climate change, the life expectancy of the next generation just got shorter. Instead we need to better equip them with curiosity, creativity and courage. And kindness. Let’s not forget kindness. For moral and pragmatic reasons, our greatest challenge now is making more people less poor. And an individual’s freedom of opportunity should not be defined by where they are born. Right now it is easier to destroy than to build. But we need to build a global education system that can reach the seventy-five million children not in school, and give everyone equal access to the best we can teach them. Someone needs to write the first global curriculum, with global citizenship at its heart – now there’s an idea …
Third, we can survive by shifting our mindset from maps and chaps to networks and coalitions. If our world view is shaped and defined by hierarchies, organograms and titles, we need to see the world afresh. I tried to apply these lessons in a review of the UK Foreign Office, released by the government in April 2016. Much media reaction focused on a suggestion from one envoy that diplomats should become more like the characters in 24 or Spooks. Hacks imagined an army of social media-savvy, digitally literate e-nvoys, new Internet pioneers putting the OMG into HMG.
But the more important message of the review was that in the Digital Age we need to move our organisations away from prioritising competences, hierarchy and inputs and towards those based on skills, networks and outputs. I hope the future Foreign Office will be less male and pale, more digital, more expert, and more flexible. The buccaneering diplomats on the walls of King Charles Street will soon be joined by portraits of pioneering modern diplomats: the first female and minority ambassadors; the local staff who keep embassies running when events force UK colleagues to flee; the consular staff who rescue Brits in the most difficult of circumstances.
I am now trying to apply similar lessons to innovation at the United Nations. How can we use solar drones for better peacekeeping and provision of education? How can we create digital citizenship to increase security and reduce identity fraud and international crime? How can we use social media to engage and build a new generation of global citizens? How do we build the online rights to match the offline rights we have codified? How do we overhaul the global system for humanitarian giving? How do we respond to the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence? We need to find new ways to make the huge amounts of great work done by the UN more meaningful and accessible to the public. That takes more than a hashtag and a civil society side event. And leaders need to get much better at executing global policy, not simply announcing it.
Fourth, a successful century depends on us winning the argument for openness. There will be a temptation to pull up the drawbridge and focus purely on domestic security or nationalist politics. Let’s be in no doubt: a retreat from the world is the path to irrelevance and drift. Our national interest now depends on our internationalism. Countries are strongest when outward-looking, pioneering, exploring, welcoming. So we must marshal our best national instincts and values, and not our worst. In the battle with more isolationist and intolerant opponents, we have to show that our societies have not themselves become intolerant or isolationist.
This is not just posturing. We need a world view based on actually viewing the world, because our ability to keep pace with the dangerous political and social implications of technological change depends on our brightest minds coming up with ingenious solutions to problems, from climate change to economic instability. We should be unashamedly backing freedom of the Internet, so that the smartest people in the world can create together the extraordinary ideas that we don’t yet know we need. We should be proud when our countries are magnetic, and smart enough to recognise the economic potential of migrants and refugees, from Einstein to Jobs. We were all migrants once, and the twenty-first century might make us migrants again. This will be a century of people on the move: improved communications, the Internet, climate change and conflict will create more migration than any previous era. So we need to learn how to absorb, assimilate, coexist.
However insecure we will feel at times in the coming period, the answer to modern security threats is in fact more liberty, equality, fraternity. Not less. Or as Benjamin Franklin put it at a time of similiar uncertainty: “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
The gadgets we marvel at today will not seem marvellous for long. The changes we wonder at won’t seem wonderful for long. The predictions we think are crazy won’t seem crazy for long. At moments in 2016, it appeared that technology had disrupted democracy. But used properly it still gives us the means to tackle inequality, improve cyber and economic