For twelve years, I was a foreign correspondent covering technology and authoritarianism regimes. I lived in or reported from China, South and North Korea, Myanmar, Vietnam, Russia, Cambodia and Turkey, where I covered authoritarian politics, civil wars and a genocide, as well as their links to technology.
Everywhere I went, the story was the same. Novel technologies like social media, AI, bitcoin and facial recognition weren’t liberating the better angels of governments and their people as many predicted. Instead, dictators and war criminals marshalled their resources—with the complacency of US and EU tech companies—to consolidate power, spy on critics, spread misinformation and commence the largest incarceration of a minority since the Holocaust, as has happened in Xinjiang, China, since 2016.
Our mistake, I believed, was that we had oversold technology. We didn’t think carefully about the fallout of sudden disruptions. As technology raced ahead, our governments fell behind.
I joined TechCongress because I wanted to have a voice at a critical point in America’s history. Returning from overseas, I’ll advise on where technology stands and where it’s headed globally, as America decides what’s next for our foreign policy. I’ll work for the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The field of diplomacy has long been devoid of a technology component. My goal in TechCongress is to help bring more technological thinking into foreign affairs and strategy, a movement that’s still young but has been gaining momentum among our leaders.
These two fields are already becoming inseparable, and will define the events of the coming decades. We’ve seen rapid shifts from old-school diplomacy and warfare towards new forms of technological conflict between US and China, Russian influence operations in Ukraine and the US, and democracy activism in the Middle East, North Africa and Russia. Now the US government has the chance to harness technology for the better, and I hope to be a part of that story with TechCongress.
Geoff is currently serving with the House Foreign Affairs Committee Minority Staff and supporting a range of issues including China, tech sanctions, and investigative work.