When Russian forces invaded Ukraine, some of the most strategically important communications systems were operated not by a government, but by private companies. Through Starlink, millions of people gained access to a network that proved critical for military coordination, civilian connectivity, and national resilience. This flashpoint highlighted a broader transformation that extends far beyond a single conflict: increasingly, states depend on infrastructures they do not fully control.
For centuries, power was measured by control of territory. States exercised authority through control of land, populations, borders, infrastructure, and armed force, and the modern international order was built upon that territorial logic. Although it still matters — France governs France, the United States governs the United States, and states continue to levy taxes, maintain courts, police borders, and command armed forces — many of the systems upon which modern societies depend are no longer organized primarily along these vertical, territorial lines.
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Instead, communication, commerce, navigation, computation, and information increasingly flow through a borderless fabric of technology — a global lattice of cloud platforms, satellite megaconstellations, digital payment networks, and algorithmic systems that spans jurisdictions rather than remaining confined within them.
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The emergence of this all-encompassing fabric has fundamentally disrupted traditional state power, replacing strict territorial hierarchies with a complex techno-heterarchy. In this new geopolitical arrangement, power is no longer concentrated solely in a single sovereign ruler at the top of a pyramid. Rather, authority is distributed, overlapping, and unranked. Power must be negotiated laterally between nation-states and a tier of hyper-scale private actors whose financial scale has taken on imperial proportions. While comparing a corporation’s market value to a nation’s annual production is conceptually imperfect, the fact that a single chipmaker’s equity value now eclipses the entire annual economic output of a G7 nation like France or the United Kingdom remains a powerful testament to the current concentration of wealth — and leverage — in artificial intelligence and computing infrastructure.
Communications infrastructure illustrates this shift clearly. Historically, governments exercised substantial influence over communications through terrestrial networks, licensed telecommunications providers, and nationally regulated systems that existed within their territory and could therefore be regulated, controlled, or disrupted by the state that governed them. Satellite megaconstellations complicate this arrangement. By delivering internet connectivity through a global constellation of satellites, systems like Starlink reduce dependence on traditional terrestrial choke-points, allowing connectivity that once relied heavily on fixed infrastructure to be maintained through a network operating across national boundaries and beyond many of the vulnerabilities associated with conventional communications systems.
This does not make states irrelevant. Satellite terminals remain physical devices, spectrum allocation remains subject to regulation, launch facilities exist on sovereign territory, and ground infrastructure, manufacturing capacity, and supply chains remain embedded within national jurisdictions. States retain unique powers that private actors cannot replicate, including legal authority, coercive capacity, and democratic legitimacy.
Yet, the balance of leverage still changes. Because the modern fabric of technology is built on global scale, extreme technical specialization, and network effects, its capabilities cannot easily be recreated by government decree. The same dependencies can create security vulnerabilities, as commercial social and fitness applications have, at times, exposed the locations and movements of military personnel through data collected for entirely civilian purposes. A government may possess absolute legal authority over territory while simultaneously depending upon communications infrastructure it does not fully control. If that infrastructure becomes essential to military operations, emergency response, economic activity, or public communication, disrupting it may impose substantial costs on the state itself. The relationship shifts from a straightforward hierarchy to a state of lateral negotiation.
This same heterarchical pattern is increasingly visible across the entire stack of modern society:
Data and computation: Governments and major institutions rely on a handful of commercial cloud platforms to store data, process information, and deliver vital services, while advanced AI development increasingly depends on a relatively small number of private firms possessing the immense computational resources necessary to train and deploy advanced models.
National security: Systems such as the Maven Smart System demonstrate how intelligence analysis — traditionally the exclusive, sovereign domain of the state — increasingly depends upon privately developed AI capabilities. Functions such as processing intelligence, pattern recognition, and operational awareness now rely on software, computing infrastructure, and technical expertise concentrated outside government institutions.
Finance: Financial systems likewise depend on global payment and settlement networks whose operation affects the movement of capital across entire economies. Even cryptocurrencies and decentralized payment networks, despite their limitations, reveal the same underlying trend: value can increasingly move through alternative infrastructures operating alongside traditional financial institutions, proving that economic coordination is becoming dependent upon networks not fully synonymous with the territorial state.
The currency of this techno-heterarchy is infrastructural authority — the capacity to shape political and economic outcomes through control of the systems upon which modern societies depend. Unlike traditional sovereignty, this authority is not exercised primarily through legislation, taxation, or physical coercion. Instead, it operates through access, availability, routing, interoperability, and continuity. In a heterarchical world, decisions about how infrastructure functions — or whether it functions at all — can carry consequences that are effectively political.
The result is a new form of mutual constraint. A government may possess the legal authority to seize a system, only to discover that doing so undermines the very capabilities that made the system valuable in the first place, because infrastructure functions only when it is trusted, interoperable, globally connected, and continuously maintained. Therefore, infrastructure operators possess forms of influence that states increasingly depend upon for daily administration and defense, while operators simultaneously remain dependent upon states for legal systems, physical security, energy, and manufacturing capacity. Each possesses powers the other lacks, and each harbors vulnerabilities the other can exploit.
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This mutual constraint may prove to be one of the defining geopolitical realities of the 21st century. For centuries, geopolitical competition centered on territory — who controlled land, ports, borders, resources, and populations. Today, the more consequential competition may increasingly concern one’s position within the infrastructure stacks upon which those territorial systems depend. Power is still exercised through territory, but it is also exercised through the networks that connect territories to one another.
The critical question is no longer simply who owns territory, but who controls the dependencies through which territory is administered, connected, defended, and coordinated. For centuries, power was measured by control of land; increasingly, power is measured by control of dependency. The sovereign of the future may not be the actor who owns the most territory, but the actor upon whom the greatest number of territories depend.
Andrew Moore is a small business owner and the author of the Primus Aeternus series.
