• 24 Dec, 2025 *

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I have been hinting at and talking about a lot of the themes and issues in this essay elsewhere, but increasingly it is apparent that the central conflict ongoing within GAE between the Imperial Centre (the US homeland) and its former first-tier vassals (the UK and EU) is currently not being acknowledged let alone discussed or scrutinised. Indeed, what this essay speaks about is the central animating intra-Western conflict of the 2020s and is an attempt to put it altogether in one place with references. In writing this I have tried to make the style more accessible.

Planetary Computation and the Question of Sovereignty

The contemporary internet functions as a planetary apparatus of governance. It consists of protocols, hyperscale compute, energy systems, juridical regimes, financial abstractions, and logistical infrastructures that together determine what can be seen, inferred, predicted, and acted upon. Computation no longer supports governance as an auxiliary instrument. It constitutes governance as a material and epistemic condition.

The Western splinternet emerges within this apparatus as a conflict over sovereignty, rent extraction, and epistemic authority. It names an internal struggle within a shared digital order over who retains the capacity to legislate reality through code, infrastructure, and data. Jurisdictional fragmentation appears here as an effect of deeper contests over control of computational systems rather than as a primary driver.

The United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom remain bound by interoperable infrastructures, undersea cables, cloud stacks, and standardized protocols. Their divergence concerns how authority is asserted over platforms, data flows, and algorithmic decision-making. This divergence unfolds within a declining liberal order in which sovereignty is increasingly exercised through infrastructural control and profit accrues through the expansion of surveillance-intensive environments.

From Cypherpunk Idealism to the Militarization of Cyberspace

Early internet imaginaries associated with Web 1.0 were shaped by cypherpunk idealism. Texts such as Eric Hughes’ Cypherpunk Manifesto articulated cryptography, decentralization, and anonymity as techniques for preserving autonomy against institutional power. This imaginary framed cyberspace as an escape vector from sovereignty rather than as its extension.

That horizon collapsed as networked systems became integral to state capacity and economic coordination. Cyberspace was absorbed into national security doctrine, reorganized around data as a strategic asset, and embedded within planetary competition between civilizational blocs. Infrastructure, cloud capacity, energy grids, and access to rare earth minerals now bind digital sovereignty to geotechnical control. The internet functions as operational terrain within a broader strategy of postmodern conflict incorporating elements associated with fifth-generation warfare and cognitive warfare, where perception, inference, and behavioral modulation are treated as strategic instruments.

Phase	Dominant Imaginary	Core Technical Form	Primary Actors	Political Function
Web 1.0	Cypherpunk autonomy	Encryption, decentralization	Hackers, cryptographers	Individual insulation from power
Platform Web	Network openness	Platforms, APIs	Venture capital, startups	Market expansion
Surveillance Web	Behavioral optimization	Tracking, recommender systems	Big Tech, advertisers	Attention extraction
Splinternet	Jurisdictional sovereignty	Regulation, compliance	States, megacorps	Territorialization of data
Planetary Stack	Geotechnomic control	Cloud, energy, AI	State–corporate blocs	Governance of reality

The Militarized Genealogy of Network Freedom

A longer historical timescale clarifies this transformation. The strategic genealogy of the internet runs through military research and security engineering, from packet switching and ARPA coordination to the normalization of cyberspace as an operational domain. Scholarship on the internet’s origins emphasizes its role in resilient communications under conditions of conflict and survivability.

Technologies often treated as emancipatory inherit this lineage. Onion routing emerged from a concrete security problem addressed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory: mitigating traffic analysis to protect intelligence communications. This lineage is explicit in the NRL paper by Syverson, Goldschlag, and Reed on onion routing and in the laboratory’s historical documentation. The Tor network preserves this architecture. The Tor Project’s own history and the MIT Press Reader’s reconstruction describe how anonymity gains strategic value through cover traffic, rendering intelligence activity statistically indistinguishable from civilian use.

This expresses a structural regularity. Once networked life becomes decisive for coordination, the techniques of conflict migrate into protocols, platforms, and cognitive environments. Population-scale data, inference systems, and influence operations become ordinary instruments of security. War diffuses into civilian life through everyday communication infrastructure, transforming perception and behavior into operational variables.

Domain	Civilian Function	Strategic Function	Resulting Condition
Social Media	Communication	Influence operations	Cognitive warfare
Algorithms	Personalization	Perception shaping	Behavioral modulation
Encryption	Privacy	Traffic camouflage	Dual-use anonymity
Cloud Computing	Enterprise IT	Military infrastructure	Strategic dependency
Data Analytics	Optimization	Prediction & preemption	Pre-emptive governance

From Liberal Convergence to Techno-Feudal Accumulation

The post-Cold War expectation that markets, technology, and governance would converge into a unified liberal horizon relied on an ontology of openness. Platform consolidation dismantled that ontology. As platforms transformed into rent-bearing infrastructures, data replaced labor and land as the primary substrate of power.

Digital space reorganized around access to clouds, compute, and behavioral surplus. This condition has been theorized as techno-feudalism, where platforms function as landlords extracting tolls from social life rather than firms competing within markets. Control over digital territory becomes more decisive than production, and enclosure replaces exchange as the dominant economic logic.

The splinternet arises where states attempt to reassert sovereignty over these infrastructures while remaining structurally dependent on them. Divergence among Western powers reflects competition over legislative authority, infrastructural leverage, and rent capture within panoptic systems.

Platform Capitalism, Vectoralism, and Attention Extraction

At a deeper level, the splinternet is structured by accumulation dynamics. Platform capitalism organizes value extraction around data ownership and control of network effects, as analyzed by Nick Srnicek. McKenzie Wark’s concept of vectoralism further clarifies how class power migrates toward control over informational vectors rather than production itself.

These dynamics intersect directly with cognitive warfare. Social media algorithms function as influence infrastructures, amplifying emotional salience, polarizing content, and informational asymmetry. Studies on algorithmic amplification and political polarization demonstrate how platform design shapes collective perception, rendering cognitive terrain a site of continuous contestation.

Hyperfinancialism and the AI-Driven Growth Regime

Under hyperfinancialism, these rents are capitalized forward into asset prices and national narratives. U.S. macroeconomic data increasingly shows that headline GDP growth is disproportionately driven by the AI and data-center build-out. Multiple analyses indicate that AI-linked investment accounted for a significant share of real GDP growth in 2024–2025, with economists noting that growth would have approached flatness absent data-center expansion (Barron’s, Fortune, S&P Global). This pattern aligns with a K-shaped economy in which asset holders and high-income sectors capture gains while distributional stress persists.

The AI build-out is materially grounded in energy systems and critical mineral supply chains. The International Energy Agency frames data centers and AI as rapidly growing electricity loads dependent on rare earths and concentrated refining capacity. As a result, splinternet dynamics intersect with hemispheric conflicts over resources and infrastructure siting.

Regime	What Is Controlled	Extraction Mechanism	Financial Logic	Social Effect
Industrial Capitalism	Labor, production	Surplus value	Profit	Class antagonism
Platform Capitalism	Data, network effects	Surveillance rents	Monopoly valuation	Attention capture
Vectoralism	Information flows	Coordination rents	Rent capitalization	Structural dependence
Hyperfinancialism	Future expectations	Forward pricing	Speculative growth	K-shaped economy
Parasocial Economy	Affect, identity	Engagement monetization	Asset inflation	Cognitive exhaustion

The libertarian myth and the American governance substrate

The popular portrayal of the American digital ecosystem as libertarian and free-speech maximalist collapses under scrutiny of its governance substrate. Encryption, often positioned as the technical anchor of expressive liberty, faces sustained legislative pressure through initiatives such as EARN IT and STOP CSAM, which civil liberties organizations argue would structurally incentivize surveillance-by-design through liability regimes (EFF on EARN IT, EFF on STOP CSAM).

Identity infrastructures deepen this trajectory. The REAL ID framework operationalizes identity verification as a prerequisite for movement through critical infrastructures - indeed the new visa requirements for entry into the GAE heartland increasingly resembles a prototypical implementation of a social credit score based on media consumption and habits that of course is being collected indiscriminately by known GAE state contractors. State-level age-verification regimes further erode anonymity by mandating identity checks and database formation under the banner of child safety, with documented chilling effects on lawful speech. Attempts to restrict VPN usage in these contexts reframe privacy tools as circumvention threats rather than civil liberties This of course has longstanding precedence with the way GAE moved to militarize their entire media consumption tech stack in an effort to build vast surveillance machines.

Speech governance reveals similar constraints. Anti-BDS statutes conditioning public contracts on political pledges remain operative following Supreme Court non-intervention, embedding compelled speech into economic participation. Federal efforts such as the Antisemitism Awareness Act have drawn sustained criticism for eliminating protected political speech critical of Israeli state policy.

These developments unfold within a political economy dominated by megacorporations operating simultaneously as platforms and state (military) contractors. Defense and intelligence procurement has fused hyperscale cloud providers into the national security substrate through programs such as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability. Earlier CIA–AWS arrangements already signalled the maturation of this public–private surveillance infrastructure. Research on the surveillance-industrial complex documents how state power and corporate platforms co-produce panoptic capacity through procurement and data integration, all whilst being hidden under layers of kayfabe culture war bullshit.

Law as Technical Form: The European Cosmotechnical

The European Union responds to this condition through law as a mode of technical intervention. Computation is treated as a civic domain whose legitimacy depends on juridical inscription. Platforms are framed as systemic actors embedded within public order, subject to obligations extending into transparency, risk governance, and epistemic accountability.

This orientation is formalized through the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act. These frameworks operate directly on platform architecture, translating legal authority into constraints on system design. Data flows are governed through adequacy determinations that condition mobility on regulatory alignment.

Open Source as Tactical Sovereignty: The German Case

European awareness of infrastructural dependency increasingly manifests through open-source strategy. Germany provides a salient example. The decision by the state of Schleswig-Holstein and elements of the German federal administration to migrate away from Microsoft software toward open-source alternatives reflects a tactical assessment of sovereignty rather than actual ideological opposition. Historically speaking American megacorps have frequently used open-source as a way of catching opponents off-guard.

The European Commission’s Open Source Software Strategy frames open source as leverage within intra-bloc competition. Open infrastructures function as counterweights to American platform dominance, enabling partial reterritorialization of digital control without severing interoperability.

Procedural Sovereignty and the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom occupies an intermediate position shaped by post-Brexit recalibration and limited scale. Its Online Safety Act establishes enforcement powers oriented around harm mitigation through codes of practice and audits administered by Ofcom. At the same time, UK digital sovereignty remains constrained by dependence on EU data flows, reflected in the renewal of the EU–UK adequacy decision in 2025 (European Commission). In AI governance, the UK has aligned more closely with U.S. safety initiatives rather than EU-style binding regulatory maximalism. Increasingly, the UK position in the coming years will collapse as populist right wing actors make a calculated move towards abandoning sovereignty to the GAE Imperial centre in exchange to desperately save London’s place as a hyperfinancial hub. The UK at this point inevitably due to decades of anaemic policy and hubris will become de facto absorbed into the GAE splinteret as an outpost buttressed against the EU - an Israelification of UK.

Cloud Empires and the Geotechnomic Horizon

The Western splinternet it should be noted, coexists with an infrastructure-level rivalry between the United States and China. Research associated with the Oxford Internet Institute conceptualizes this rivalry as the emergence of cloud empires, where hyperscale infrastructure becomes a territorialized resource embedded in land use, energy systems, and sovereign planning.

Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack situates this shift within planetary-scale computation, where sovereignty migrates into infrastructural layers that exceed the state while conditioning it. Work on geoeconomics and technological statecraft and weaponized interdependence clarifies how control over network choke points enables coercion without overt military confrontation.

Layer	Primary Object of Control	Dominant Actors	Mode of Power	Structural Outcome
Geotechnomics	Energy, minerals, compute, finance	States + megacorporations	Industrial policy, sanctions, subsidies	Resource competition
Cloud Empires	Hyperscale infrastructure	US and China	Territorialized compute	Infrastructure rivalry
Platform Capitalism	Data, attention, behavior	Big Tech	Rent extraction	Market concentration
Vectoral Power	Informational vectors	Platforms + states	Coordination control	Systemic dependence
Splinternet	Jurisdiction	US, EU, UK	Legal inscription	Fragmented governance

Panoptic Convergence and the Diffusion of War

Within the Western bloc, fragmentation proceeds through law, governance, and platform design within shared physical infrastructure. Western powers are increasingly consolidating and converging around the necessity of agentic governance architectures encompassing digital identity, programmable money, predictive analytics, and pervasive surveillance. Ideological narratives function as legitimating interfaces, while competition unfolds through procurement, standards, subsidies, and infrastructural control.

The splinternet thus appears as one dimension of a broader diffusion of war into public life. Cyberspace becomes a site where economic coordination, perception management, and opaque national security doctrine converge. Civilian infrastructures absorb the logics of conflict, rendering governance continuous with war by other means.

The Great Western Splinternet Civil War names this condition and clearly calls out the charade: an intra-bloc struggle within a once-unified liberal order, structured by elite competition, hyperfinancial imperatives, and megacorporate sovereignty. Differentiation among actors emerges from position within an evolving hierarchy of digital panopticons and the rents they enable.

At its core, the splinternet is a struggle over who will remain sovereign and who will reap the financial surplus generated by digital panopticons. There is little fundamental conflict of values, in fact there has never been a strong moral consensus around the expansion of panopticon capacity - libertarians such as the Rands and Massies of an age gone by are relics.

The United States, the EU, and the UK are converging on agentic governance architectures encompassing digital identity, programmable money, predictive analytics, and dragnet surveillance. Ideological narratives function largely as legitimating interfaces for publics, while the decisive conflict unfolds through procurement, competing over legislative standards, subsidies, and control over computational futures.

The End of Innocence

The internet has exhausted its early sense of utopian optimism or perhaps more accurately has revealed its original warlike tendencies. Every remaining appeal to openness, decentralization, or digital emancipation now circulates as a residue of an earlier historical moment whose material conditions no longer exist. What persists is an infrastructure optimized for surveillance, prediction, and control, administered through corporate-state assemblages that treat populations as datasets and behavior as a variable to be tuned and manipulated. The splinternet does not represent a deviation from this trajectory but the final realization of cyberspace as another means of total war.

The language of freedom attached to platforms, encryption, and networks functions today as a stabilizing myth. It masks the fact that cyberspace has been fully absorbed into regimes of power that treat computation as a strategic resource and society as an operational environment.

The splinternet in the Western context is the juridical and administrative surface of a deeper transformation in which sovereignty migrates into infrastructure, finance colonizes attention, and war disperses into everyday life. Platforms govern affect, cloud empires govern territory, algorithms govern perception, and law arrives afterward to stabilize what has already been operationalized. The West’s internal conflicts over regulation, speech, and sovereignty unfold inside this apparatus rather than against it.

Those who continue to invoke the cypherpunk imaginary misunderstand the scale of the transformation. The early dream of cryptographic escape emerged within a narrow window before computation fused with energy systems, logistics, and national security doctrine. The same anonymity architectures once imagined as shields for autonomy were developed to protect intelligence assets through population-scale camouflage, as the history of onion routing and Tor makes clear.

What presents itself today as ideological conflict between free speech and regulation, innovation and safety, openness and sovereignty serves primarily to distract from the real axis of struggle. The decisive contest concerns who commands the vectors of information, who owns the infrastructure of inference, and who captures the rents generated by continuous surveillance. This is the logic McKenzie Wark identifies as vectoral power, now elevated to the level of statecraft.

Europe’s turn toward open source, exemplified by Germany’s withdrawal from proprietary American software stacks, signals awareness rather than resistance. Open infrastructures operate as counterweights within an intra-bloc struggle over leverage, however they do not negate panoptic governance. They redistribute its control. The United States’ fusion of platforms with security doctrine, the EU’s juridical inscription of computation, and the UK’s procedural enforcement mechanisms all converge on the same outcome: agentic governance at scale.

The splinternet civil war unfolding across the Western bloc belongs to a larger geotechnomic conflict in which finance, infrastructure, cognition, and war collapse into a single field. Data centers draw energy from contested grids. Algorithms shape perception across populations. Capital flows anticipate futures that computation promises to render governable. Conflict no longer announces itself through declaration or rupture but continuous cybernetic modulation. This indeed is the formative stage for future hyperconflicts that may very well become biopolitical (the question around transhumanism).

There is no return to innocence available here. The internet has become one of the primary instruments through which power organizes reality. The only remaining question concerns who will command this apparatus, and at what cost? Everything else is narrative management. And where does this leave O Ishmaelite, the woefully vulnerable Old Islamicate? Destined to be cattle amidst perpetual war?

My small if naive hope is that Islamicate Political Theory starts taking seriously the questions and themes raised in this piece, that this realization and acknowledgement of the century ahead is the foundation and ground upon which politics is ordered. The old politics of classical Islamism are not just woefully inadequate but represent necrophiliac masturbation par excellence. We must grapple with what this century will throw at the Old Islamicate.

And truly God knows best

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