Science Is Not Apolitical. Neither Is Technology.
Why every transistor, tool, and theory is downstream of power.
Every line of code you ship rides on a supply chain that spans continents and power struggles. Chinese rare earths fuel your hardware, Taiwanese fabs etch your logic, and decades of U.S. defense R&D shape your compilers and chips.
Your build pipeline isn't just technical - it's geopolitical. Whether you see it or not, you're deploying into a world shaped by treaties, tariffs, and tensions.
Scratch the surface of any codebase, and you'll find a map of the world.
Your dependencies have dependencies on nations.
The Comfortable Myth of Neutrality
We like to think we’re “just solving technical problems.” Write the code, push to production, and let the facts speak for themselves.
Code, math, physics - we tell ourselves these are neutral, objective, apolitical. That is a comforting story, but it’s false.
The second a system touches the real world, it touches power. And power is never neutral.
"Facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media" - Bruno Latour
The history of science and technology shows that supposedly “pure” innovations often emerge from very political goals.
The moment any technology scales beyond localhost, it collides with power. Technology is politics by other means.
Science, But Make It Strategic
The early packet-switching networks that led to the Internet were funded by DARPA, not to spread academic knowledge freely, but to create communications that could survive combat disruptions. In fact, in 1966 the director of ARPA redirected $1 million from a ballistic missile defense program to fund the ARPANET.
Researchers like Paul Baran at RAND had pioneered the concept of distributed, nuclear-war-resistant networks - the Pentagon saw strategic value in resilient comms, and that drove the design. We didn’t get the Internet purely for love of knowledge; we got it because the state wanted a network that could withstand conflict.
China’s chip program isn’t about semiconductors - it’s about sovereignty.
NVIDIA didn’t build CUDA for elegant GPU computing. They built it for lock-in.
These aren’t side effects. They’re design goals.
Physics Has Always Served the State
Many foundational advances in physics, computing, and math were wartime projects. Alan Turing’s codebreaking at Bletchley Park, for example, is estimated to have shortened World War II by as much as two years.
Von Neumann ran implosion simulations for the Manhattan Project, pioneering digital computing not for curiosity, but for better bomb yield.
Radar research in WWII led to breakthroughs in microwave physics (the cavity magnetron) to detect enemy planes.
Postwar, fluid dynamics became classified infrastructure: crucial to supersonic jets, missile trajectories, submarine stealth.
Nuclear fusion research was military-funded long before it was green.
These weren’t neutral discoveries. They were state priorities.
Science scales when the state sees strategic advantage.
Today’s compute infrastructure follows the same arc.
Math Is Never Just Math
Elliptic curves are beautiful - and weaponised by the NSA.
Number theory moved from chalkboards to encryption protocols.
PDEs now simulate everything from drone strikes to epidemic response.
Pure math becomes infrastructure. Infrastructure becomes leverage.
Engineering Is Never Neutral
Control theory powers HVACs, satellites, and surveillance.
SCADA systems manage the grid — and are cyber-warfare targets.
Compiler chains (LLVM, GCC) are optimized not by elegance, but by corporate budgets and political alliances.
Your “build” step is shaped by geopolitics.
Consensus Protocols = Governance Models
Proof-of-work: favours cheap power, fossil fuels, and mining capital.
Proof-of-stake: entrenches wealth.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance: often assumes trusted validator sets — like Cold War blocs.
Every protocol encodes a worldview about trust, threat, and control.
Architecture = Ideology
TensorFlow wasn’t open-sourced for goodwill - it was to control the AI stack.
Apache 2.0 vs. GPL isn’t just legal theory - it’s power theory.
Export restrictions on GPUs invalidate “compile anywhere” dreams.
Toolchains, licenses, even file formats — all are political instruments.
Who Gets to Use It? Who Pays the Cost?
Every system encodes answers to:
Who can access it?
Who maintains control?
What happens when it fails?
Which dependencies gain leverage?
These aren’t “edge cases.” They’re the blueprint.
You’re Already Voting
When your code decides:
Who gets housing
Who gets a job
Who gets surveilled
Who can build on your repo
Technology is not neutral, and never has been.
Once we embrace that, we can at least ensure that the code we write aligns with the future we actually want to see, rather than blindly amplifying the status quo or someone else’s agenda. In a world where it’s geopolitics and corporate strategists all the way down, the most radical thing a technologist can do is to be aware, be intentional, and act accordingly. Neutrality is a myth, but agency is very real –-use yours.
Suggested read - Do Artifacts have politics?
I was curious how europeans got so much knowledge out of sudden, later i realised they got maths from arab and persian and who got from ancient Indians. Most physics started with astronomy bcoz europeans were confuse how much astronomy knowledge persian/arabs have.[ which again came from India ].
there too most physics results were achieve my elites, for ex. one guy who was working in lens [ his family was wealthy ] and he discover/helps lots of innovation.
English got their wealth from Indians and they did most discoveries during that time when they rule India and other colonies. It was same for dutch when they had colonial money and they build ships and all.
Later this went to america and we see they doing discoveries. You will not see americans building anything before they had oil money in 1880s. That was period of decline UK.
My theory is power and technology follows wealth. India as civilisation had wealth they build system and culture. Same with Chinese. modern science coincided with decline of both. What I'm suprise is USA/UK/Dutch never build culture when they had wealth.
So in conclusion I think modern USA/tech don't have culture and they have build this control kind of system where need to have power to maintain this coz unlike India they have insecurity of someone who is inexperince in power [ usa ] vs India/China who have seen this many times.
Love you work and blog. Helping me to form better opinion.