Abstract
This interview focuses on the academic journey, research achievements, and insights of Manuel Castells across various fields. His academic trajectory spans multiple locations and disciplines. He initially studied economics and law before shifting to sociology. His research on the development of the internet has evolved through three stages: initially, he explored societal transformation driven by technological revolution; subsequently, he analyzed the internet and related enterprises; more recently, he has focused on the political changes brought about by the internet, including social movements, political processes, and the impact of social networks on society. Through his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, he proposed the theory of the network society, arguing that globalization is a network of networks, that power relations within the network society are complex and hierarchical, that power and networks are intertwined, and that identity remains of crucial significance in the network society. In addition, he elaborated on his views regarding issues such as the governance of super network platforms, the application of artificial intelligence in warfare, and the China–U.S. tech rivalry, providing diverse perspectives and theoretical references for research in related fields.
This dialogue article is based on three interviews of Prof. Manuel Castells conducted by Prof. Xingdong Fang at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. These interviews were conducted on September 6, 2018, April 23, 2019, and January 14, 2024, respectively.
I have known you for a long time, but we’ve never really touched on where all the stories actually began—Like where and when you were born. Could you tell us about that?
I was born in a small town in central southern Spain, but this is not an indication at all. Because I was only there for one year, the first year of my life; I left and never went back. However, if you’ve read about it, you will know. It’s a little town, and I’m happy to be from there, I mean, to have it as my origin. But it means nothing. I have not been back to that town in my entire life, Except for the first year.
I went to Madrid. I went to Cartagena—that’s in southeastern Spain—a small town, and actually, maybe that’s my base. Then I went to Valencia. After that, my adolescence and university years were in Barcelona, which is the city that I personally consider myself close to. Since then on, I have regularly returned to Barcelona throughout my life. So, let’s say I’m from Barcelona, but I spent my first 12 years somewhere else.
When you were in Paris, what was your major at university? How did you first decide to transfer to Communication studies?
Yeah, first in Paris, I finished the studies that I started in Barcelona, where I was studying economics and law. I finished my degree in economics and law at the University of Paris, and after that, I did my PhD there as well. In broader terms, because I did law, economics, and then sociology, I eventually became a professor of sociology. Later, I became a professor at Berkeley, holding a joint appointment in Sociology and City and Regional Planning.
The issue is, all my life I have not respected the intellectual boundaries of disciplines. Discipline means “discipline” that you have to obey. I never obey, anywhere for anything. So, I move freely, following what is important and interesting in the world. I found sociology closer to reality than economics, because economics has become a completely abstract mathematical world whose practitioners don’t understand the real economy. So, I moved to sociology, which was more open and free.
And then from there, I became very much interested in all the urban, environmental, and regional problems emerging across the world. That focus was present from the very beginning of my career. That’s why Berkeley, in fact, first knew me as a leading urban sociologist at the time—a sociologist specializing in global urban issues. They had a chair in sociology, so they offered it to me and I accepted, because Berkeley at that time was the best department in urban studies in the world. It gave me a platform to study not only what was happening in France or Europe, but across the world at large. After that, my work grew increasingly interested in technology, the internet, and the transformation of communication through the internet, which carried huge economic and political implications.
When I arrived in Berkeley in 1979, I was immediately impacted by the explosion of Silicon Valley and all the new technologies that were appearing. And I realized that there was a true social and technical revolution going on. So, I decided at that point to concentrate on the study of the transformation of society, centered on the internet and based on information and communication technology.
As my interests in these areas developed further, they grew increasingly distant from the work being done at Berkeley. The sociology department had no interest in the internet. And sure, the students who were interested in the internet would not come to Berkeley to study it. While Berkeley, along with MIT and UCLA, helped invent the internet, they were not interested at all in understanding the internet.
Actually, many people thought—and still think—that the internet is a capitalist conspiracy, more or less. So, what I decided was simply to continue my work on it anyway. A few years later, I was, at the same time, serving as a professor and director of an institute in Barcelona. There, they understood the importance of the internet much better, and at the University of Catalonia, they created an interdisciplinary internet institute that I was tasked with establishing.
So, I was between Berkeley and the Internet Institute. Then, at one point, there was a school at UCLA, which, as you know, is a graduate of perhaps one of the most important and prestigious schools of communication in the world. They were developing a much deeper interest in the internet and the issues related to the internet.
While you were working at Berkeley, when did you first get your hands on a computer? What was it like when you actually got a computer and started working on it? What was it like versus the Internet and computer usage patterns nowadays?
Oh, 1980. I think a critical moment was the introduction of computers into cultural and media production environments—still largely offline and tool-oriented rather than networked communication. A different kind of turning point came later with the development of Mosaic, which introduced the graphical WWW to the public, something more than processing or calculation. We could start going around the world with Mosaic on the basis of the Internet. Of course, Netscape came later and was commercialized in 1992.
But from the very beginning at Berkeley, most of the professors using the internet early on were not investigating our intent to use the Internet. Instead, something else developed around the Bay Area that was very important for me: a community of pioneers, of users, who were creating virtual communities. “The Well” was the first one of these. It was a community that organized communication networks and shared activities among people who had already discovered the internet in the early and mid-1980s. It was the first group to which I was connected, in which there were both technical and social discussions on the internet. Its underlying ideology was that the internet would strengthen the community, not weaken it, which means that we were having parties at the same time. We were exploring the universe of possibilities on the internet. But at the same time, we maintained personal contact. We used to call this “hi-tech, high touch.”
Would you like to summarize a little bit about the different phases of internet history?
The first phase of the internet was the technology, as you know, deployed first in 1969. And therefore, people continue to think it’s a novelty and a new technology. So, the first phase—the formative period—was really the 1970s. That’s the first phase, which lasted for quite a long time.
The creators of the internet, the development of the first networks, the war of the hackers, all of which, literally I would say, almost spanned 20 years from the mid-1960s till they were already something to the mid-1980s. The internet was really. . .more a world of people, a world of users. It was not an exploding technology at the time. So that is what I call the formative period which is actualized by idealism, incredible innovation, incredible discoveries, and people who really wanted to do it for the good of the world, with the exception of Bill Gates. He thought the good of the world was his money, not his technology.
The second phase, I would say, was the development of a dependency on the internet industry, which is the rise of the major companies linked to it. Particularly, this includes the companies that produce computers for the internet, such as Apple. So, this is the period of the formation of the internet industry, marked by its diffusion into the business world. That would go almost basically all the way to the 1996. It is important to emphasize that there was never a period defined by the internet’s military use.
The big mistake of so many people in the world is that because DARPA financed the internet at the beginning, they always thought it was a military technology. Never. DARPA financed computer science, but there was never a phase of military uses of the internet. The military only started to use the internet in the 1990s, when everybody started to use it. No more than other people. In fact, less so, because they were scared for security reasons due to the interception of messages.
Therefore, the late 1980s and 1990s saw the development of the internet, mainly driven by the formation of the internet industry. However, its use in business was still not on a massive scale in the world. The first worldwide survey of internet users was conducted in 1996.
The third phase truly emerged in the 2000s, with the creation of social networks. And that is what has diffused absolutely everywhere in society, creating really a new form of social interaction of culture, of everything. This new layer existed over the layer of face-to-face society, interacting with it constantly. Not separated but very different. It was the formation of a world on its own: the world of the social network or the internet. That is the moment in which the internet reaches out to the entire world. And the more the internet includes people from all cultures, the more the internet was being transformed itself.
Now, I think we have already entered in a fourth phase, which has two levels. The first level is the explosion of technology, exemplified—somewhat misleadingly—by the internet of things. The term is still important because it means that the internet has become what I call a collective cyborg. It connects humans and non-humans, machines to machines, and links machines with all kinds of objects. And therefore, the network has expanded incredibly exponentially and included all kinds of other things. And this is linked to the second level: the explosion of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been a long-term promise and a science fiction topic. For a long time, artificial intelligence was “artificial stupidity” because there were not many really intelligent robots. They were taught to do very simple things and with very little autonomy in processing or taking initiatives. But this has changed.
Now, for the first time, we have semi-intelligent machines—though they are not autonomous in terms of decision-making. Consider the much-discussed self-driving car: with it, we have given, for the first time, a machine the power to kill humans without the consent of humans. The logic is embedded in the program, but it is the program itself that makes the lethal choice. The program gives a series of criteria, and the machine makes the decision on the basis of its own combination of all these criteria. So, while the internet and robots are not the same, robots are now part of the internet—a globally connected system. This integration has huge political consequences. At this point, social networks decide electoral campaigns and shape politics. They are essential. So, this is what I call the fourth phase of the internet and, or more broadly, artificial intelligence-based networks. Some of these operate on the internet; others are not based on internet protocols and therefore are not part of it.
So far, you have been trying to tackle the area of internet research from many different perspectives. How would you summarize and categorize the different phases of your research?
Well, talking only about the issues of the internet, there have been basically three major phases in my research since 1980 to now. The first was to study the transformation of society on the basis of the technological revolution, as well as to study the revolution itself. Because I had easy, personal access to Silicon Valley, I started very early—in the early 1980s—studying it both as a social organization and as a hub of technological innovation. I knew the innovators. I was close to many of them, and I was part of that culture, which is very important. The second phase involved the specific analysis of the internet and internet companies. The third began only in the 2000s. One of the main reasons I moved to the Annenberg School was to focus on the political transformation linked to the development of the internet.
This analysis covers both social movements and the political process, and how social networks changed everything. I may have actually written three books in a row. Communication Power in 2009 articulated the analogy of how power is a fundamental process in any society, and how the exercise and construction of power—not only political power, but all power—is largely dependent now on the ability to organize and manipulate social network based on the internet.
For a long time, I was considered a Marxist. Um, I stopped being a Marxist in the traditional terms in 1982, when I did The City and the Grassroots (University of California Press, 1984). I may explain why. For me, theory is great. It’s not religion. Uh, if I can use it to understand what we want to understand, I use it; when they cannot, I use it anyway. I can change it a little bit, but it can be indirect too. When I cannot, I have to do something else, something different. You know, quite fundamentally. If you want to understand many of the social movements, social change, social struggles, everything that’s important in our world, you must realize that the large majority are not class struggles, and even fewer are working-class struggles. Class is one part of it. It is an important part, but it is certainly not the main thing. How can we understand the feminist movement in traditional categories of class struggle? I know there is a lot of what’s called Marxist feminism. In all fairness, I have to say no. Why do you have to twist Marx’s theories for something different to say that you are still a Marxist? No. Be a feminist and develop a feminist theory for feminism, which is distinct.
Well I want to know more details about how you actually conceptualized and did the research for The Trilogy of The Network Society.
First, I didn’t start with concepts; I started with observations. This is what is called grounded theory. I even didn’t try to understand networks first, and the title of the book was not networks or anything. I found the networks by looking at the different processes of transformation everywhere. In all countries, there were networks: business networks, cultural networks, industry networks, entertainment networks, political networks, and social networks. Everything was based on the network.
This creates a whole system in which nodes can articulate themselves and evolve with both activity and scale infinitely because they are based on the internet. So, my conceptualization on the basis of networks came from my observation of networks and then realizing that the technology—specifically internet technology—was itself based on the networks. The internet is a network.
That’s it: globalization is a network of networks. From this observation, I became aware that both socioeconomic and cultural processes were based on networks, and that the technology founded on microelectronics and digital transmission was also based on networks and inter-network networks. This convergence of a society evolved into network and the technology that made these numbers be possible that transformed the world.
The origin of that is 1982. And it took me 14 years until 1996 to complete their trilogy. And then from there, I went back to analyze more specifically the internet and the process of power, because what I did was not fully developed in the trilogy—a point some people rightly raised.
The reason is very simple: I had enough work dealing with the overall structure. But of course, power is central. So that’s why the most important project after finishing the trilogy was to study power in the network society. This led to Communication Power, which took me 7 years. For me, in theoretical terms, it is the best book I have written. It’s also empirical, but in terms of theory, there is really a theory of power.
And while the theory is quite complicated, people are using and debating it. Traditional political scientists have lost in relation to this theory. Because it is a feeling that power is not anywhere. Power resides in the network, and there are many networks. Furthermore, there are hierarchies of power between networks, as well as counter-power within each network and its internal hierarchies. So, it’s really a quite complex theory. But I think by developing and spelling it out, I’m convinced that down the line it will be probably my most important theoretical contribution.
The thing is, when I was really working on the network society on globalization on the economic and technological side, suddenly I observed that something different was equally important: identity. Its importance stemmed from the fact that the power of networks and globalization was removing the capacity of people who would not agree with the logic of business or the logic of technology to do anything. They would become marginalized, isolated. So, people would start reacting in terms of what matters to them. They say that technology was very important for power, business, and everything at a high level. However, for individuals, technology is important only if it can enable self-expression.
In your own assessment, which book is your most important work?
Clearly, the Perception of the world at large is my trilogy, which is one book published in three volumes. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 1999). I was not very very well known or influential before this, but that book is the one that made everybody interested in my work. The simple reason is that there was not—and still is not—another book that offers a comprehensive understanding of all these interrelated transformations. In this sense, it is an overview of the new world emerging, not emerging from technology, but emerging from the interaction between social, technological, economic, and cultural transformations. That is what I tried to explain in that book. Originally, it was conceived as a single volume. However, my wonderful editor at Blackwell—when it was still Blackwell, not part of John Wiley that absorbed Blackwell—persuaded me to publish it as a triology.
He was a fantastic editor, John Davey, who was so important for social scientists who were not conventional. He was the one who discover David Harvey and me. He was the editor who really produced the new intellectuals. I told him, “I will send you the book. And here is the table of contents. And in three years, I will give you the book.” His response was, “This is not one book, because if anyone tries to read such a book on the subway, her back will be broken as it’s too heavy. It will be at least fifteen hundred pages.” And that’s exactly what it became: 1500 pages. However, when people ask why it is so long, my answer is, “actually not.” It’s a synthesis. It’s a summary. Because trying to put all the things in this book together, you will not be able to make it less than 1500 pages. So I actually cut a lot.
Anyway, it became a trilogy, but one that is a single, unified book. How do we know people and publishers understood it as one book? In my contract with Blackwell, there is a clause that no translation into Chinese, Spanish, or any other language could be undertaken unless all three volumes were translated simultaneously. The original language was English, remember? You could not translate just one volume and then perhaps the second later. No, no. If you want any part of the three volumes, you had to commit to all three because they share an intellectual connection.
Many people would think, well, my volume one is this. But then what happens about identity? Well, go to volume two. What happens about the different societies that were transformed? What about China? Well, go to volume three. So, clearly, that trilogy, to a large extent, will remain the fundamental work among the 35 books that I have published. It is fundamental one. My idea is always that 1 day I will be able to have such a genius idea that with a 100 pages book, everything would be clear. But that has not happened yet. Therefore, the book that is the most important and the most complex for me is Communication Power.
Therefore, I found that communication was the critical component and the nucleus of power. I then organized that intellectually, even suggesting a theory of power at the end of the book, which no one understood. But I think it’s a good theory when people will understand. I think it’s my fault that they don’t understand it. I cannot simplify more. I thought that we found mathematics could be easier, but no. With mathematics, we’d be more explicitly rigorous, but fewer people will understand. So anyway, the simple answer is Communication Power. And my favorite book is the most complex and the most important book to me, not the most fun. And the trilogy is the most important overall. Many of the key developments of the last 20 years can be explained by the theory of the trilogy. For instance, just as with the Industrial Revolution, I had already observed the emergence of the network society in the late 1990s, but it took new technologies like the smartphone to fully develop it throughout the entire world. Now we are a fully developed network society. Even if this has been the fastest transformation of technology in history, it still took some time to unfold.
I compare how many years were necessary for a given technology—say, the internet or social media—to reach 50 million users, contrasting it with technologies like commercial aviation. The difference is huge. The internet took 12 years to gain 50 million users, showing an acceleration. ChatGPT, in 2 months, reached 100 million users. So the main thing that has happened is that there was an embryo as a new form of society. Now, it’s our life. My students, who are 20 years old now, treat the history of the internet as something totally normal when I teach it. It is their life. They were born with it. So, the transformation is complete.
But there are a number of things about my own theory that have to be adjusted. For instance, just to give you one example, as many of the utopians who envisioned the internet before anyone else in the 1960s and 1970s, we thought, and it was true, that there was the coming of freedom, of free communication, and of participation in social movements. We anticipated a new era in which people were in power. And people were in power. Absolutely. The problem is we forgot how bad people can be. So people were in power to do bad things, such as fake news, disinformation, and all kinds of bad values, such as anti-feminist, sexist, and racist inclinations. So, in other words, the prediction was correct. People were in power. People are able to freely communicate now. But we have forgotten human nature itself.
If you’re visiting this country for the first time, what is your most useful way to get to know it?
It was very simple. There are two parts to this question, one, the real research, but before that, trying to understand the country. That was earlier when I was still in France. The first time when I arrived at the airport was in my middle age. Later on, in 1975, I was invited for six months to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which is the best in sociology in America. People might think it’s Berkeley or Harvard, but no.
That was in 1975. The moment I arrived was during an economic crisis that had just started in America. The crisis really marked the end of a period of capitalist accumulation, what’s called the Keynes nation period. Okay, at that point, I had never written a book in English. I wrote them in French. I knew how to give a talk or a lecture in English. But a book? No. Not even a long article.
People ask: “how can I learn to write a book in English?” Well, by writing a book in English. So, I decided to take all my corrections in 6 months. Oh, and how can I understand American society? By writing a book in English on American society. And that’s what I did in six months. No one would like a book. And that was a massive book.
I always get ideas from my observations and my interests. I don’t get ideas from books. There are books, but ideas come from what I feel, and what I see. There were two very strong realities, new realities, not in Berkeley, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes, of course, Silicon Valley. The two realities were obvious. One was the formation of a major gay community. It was very political as it would take municipal power and start a movement of cultural transformation, spreading its values throughout the world from the 1980s onward. And now we see the importance of the gay movement getting less and less. That was one, obviously. And the other was Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was at the center of a new technological revolution that worked on the formation of innovation. It integrates a set of elements in a regional context, creating productivity and innovation through the synergy of their interaction.
That was Silicon Valley. So, both my students at Berkeley and I started to work on it. I completed the study on the gay community study relatively quickly, in 1 year. I then started a much more serious study—not of Silicon Valley per se, but of the broader technological revolution, which ultimately led to my future work.
I did the gay community analysis in 1980–1981, and it became part of the book The City and the Grassroots that you mentioned, which I finished in 1982. I then moved on to study not just Silicon Valley, but also the technological revolution. I first studied Silicon Valley and then related it to the theories of post-industrialists such as Daniel Bell. They were the only ones who really had seen the structural transformation linked to new forms of production.
But, immediately, my criticism was that these theories in the 1970s explicitly presented a Western focus. They will say, well, we are going to analyze the transformation in the United States and Western Europe. And Bell said explicitly that the rest was for the 21st century. Okay, well, first, we are in the 21st century. Second, uh, the implicit assumption is that what had happened in the United States and Western Europe would then be reproduced by the other countries. Because only by adopting this model of technology, economy, institutions, and the free market, the other countries could develop. So because of my experience in Latin America, I immediately said no. It is not going to be like this. So I studied very seriously Silicon Valley as the original model. That is what we are doing now with you using Shenzhen and the region as a different type of innovation. And that really created an analytical model to understand how new technologies were linked to new social structure, culture, and media. All these things emerged and became clear to me between probably 1982 and 1985.
As someone once put it, I could be called the first global social scientist because I crisscrossed the world. My work took different forms: sometimes dedicated research, sometimes just being there—teaching, interacting, and being involved in social movements. That’s why my global perspective developed very earlier on. And you can see I was in China when people were asking what to do with China. I taught twice for several months in Hong Kong, China, in the 1980s, and I taught in Singapore.
I taught at the National Taiwan University. I lectured in Korea. I did research on technology and economic development in Korea. I wrote a book on the comparative development of Hong Kong and Singapore, and then I taught for several months at the best social science university in Tokyo, Japan, much better than the University of Tokyo, which was always a training ground for the bureaucracy, created by the Meiji restoration. Ultimately, I felt I had to see how it went with the Soviet Union, because they did find a fundamental impact. The Soviet Union disintegrated mainly because of its inability to adapt to the information age. Everyone thinks the disintegration of the Soviet Union was because of its political program. No, it disintegrated because it was not able to adapt to the information age.
I’m curious: since teaching may be the most important thing for you in another country, and you mainly interact with students in a classroom, how can you get a connection with the other groups in society? How can you have a whole, deep feeling of this whole culture and whole society?
That is very interesting. Well, teaching is the entry point. But first of all, remember that professors at schools and universities are more than teachers. They are fully integrated with government. Second, let me be clear about that because that explains also why I’m still at an American research university. In the 1980s and 1990s, when I went to China or to Brazil, coming from Berkeley meant that the government would be very interested in meeting with me. Because there was this idea that professors from Berkeley knew technology, the economy, and the real world. If I had come from Madrid or Paris, it would not have been the same. It wasn’t about intellectual category; it was the impression associated with institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, and MIT in China at that time. If you were from one of these universities, Chinese government officials and experts would immediately like to meet with you.
In 1987, I was invited by the state council to this. That would be absolutely impossible in Madrid or Paris. They belonging to it, one of the few leading universities in the world. It’s opened the door for many things. That’s why in addition to Berkeley, I taught at MIT, at Oxford and Cambridge, diversifying my affiliations while remaining fundamentally based at Berkeley.
You have to be part of society in many different ways. For instance, I made very good friends in academia, some of whom were former students of mine. I think you’ve heard of Professor Xia, who is a very famous scholar in Taiwan, China, and now holds a professorship in Nanjing. Do you see that? Over the years, he has been an informant about China. He really showed me the restaurant in which he was trying to persuade me to eat chicken heads. He said, “you will never understand the Chinese culture if you don’t eat a chicken head.” My reaction was, “I don’t care about Chinese culture—I will not eat a chicken head.” So you see this kind of thing. Then, I have to know that in certain areas in China, they like to eat chicken heads.
And I’m also curious if there is any misunderstanding you have about our country before arriving. But when you get to know this country, you just change your idea which you think was false? Is there something like this?
Absolutely. They may change what they write and say about the country, not the facts. Most intellectuals do the opposite. I went recently to China, and I’m determined to go every year, not to lose track of the China game.
I never go to a country with preconceived ideas, because I learn from observation am ready to change my interpretation based on what I feel when I am there and as the country itself changes. Take China as an example. I shared the American, academic opinion that while Chinese companies were very good and had very strong manufacturing etc., they were not capable of cutting-edge innovation. However, based on the information I got later, it became clear that they were innovating. And now I want to know more about that and how it’s happening. The United States still considers that if Chinese companies head the United States, it’s because they spy. That’s their basic interpretation, and it is a very easy one. You are better than them because you’re spying on them, it’s still what we know. We are clear about this, about the game.
My passion is understanding the world at large and communicating it to the world at large. That’s my passion. Some people have a passion for music or theater; My passion is to understand the world and its changes and to communicate what I have learned to the entire world. That’s my passion. As you said, I have to be part of the societies I study. And I’m deeply part of at least two societies, Spain and the United States—specifically, California. I have friends back in France for many years. For the rest of the world, I know it by reading. And I follow contemporary works on different countries. I not only read the classics. I read the classics when I was in my twenties, or even earlier. After that, I read the new things. I have developed a huge network of friends who trust me, and I trust them. Whenever I find something I don’t understand, I contact them about what is going on here. And I can have the whole story within three days.
And then I use these to help other people. As for my focus on certain countries over others, the reasons are simple. On the one hand, it’s about a country’s objective importance. I always think China is an extremely important country, not only for China, but for the world. That’s one thing. Russia is a decisive country, more than China, in the last 30 or 40 years. On the other hand, there is a sentimental side—countries that move me, countries that I love, and that I wish to see develop and stabilize. Bolivia is a clear example: a small country, but so moving. Or India, with its unique culture, striving to develop and create new things. They’re totally revolutionary. They do revolution for over 70 two or three years.
Right now, even the trade war between China and the United States stems from this. The United States is reacting as if it’s thinking, “Now we don’t have the market anymore.”
Well, exactly because they underestimated China. Ideologically, what we were trying to do, besides the technical part, was a world in which people and country would cooperate. China and the United States would cooperate and Europe would cooperate, and we were always trying hard to have to create networks of cooperation rather than competition.
But then these political interests and national interests got in the way. I must say the Chinese have been much more honest in all these than the Americans. Now, China is the one that is trying to do fair development and to create an infrastructure for the developing world. In terms of global economic and technology policy, China is really a much more positive force in these days than the United States in Europe. They recognize that they are ready to work with China rather than with the United States.
A central issue in U.S. economic policy, impacting both companies and the government, was ultimately racist prejudice, literally. They always thought that these guys would never be able to do anything. One thing is my more academic research on the effects of the internet on the transformation of the social structure and the information age. But I have done a lot of other matters like technology policy, and one of the things I’m most proud of is technology policy in relation to China.
I also did the first market technology policy strategy and plan for Spain and for the European Union. In the United States, we tried with Berkeley colleague Laura Tyson, who was Clinton’s technology and economic adviser. We wrote together a series of articles on how to help the world to develop, which will also help the United States and stabilize the world economy. And Clinton bought this idea. But later on, his financial adviser says, who cares about technology? This is their famous statement of one commerce secretary in the United States. One million dollars chips and one million dollars potato chips are the same. That’s the way in which the financial guys always consider technology and the internet.
What governance strategies should super-network platforms adopt to ensure their healthy, secure, and sustainable development? How to evaluate the performance and differences between China, the U.S., and Europe in digital governance?
Regarding Good governance strategies by super-network platforms, there’s one major point here. It’s almost impossible, but this is the only important thing. They should find another business model. Because if the business model is to take our data and sell it in different ways, it’s not sustainable. Governments are going to clamp down, and people are revolting.
What could be an alternative business model? Much more complicated. Zuckerberg has decided that this was not sustainable. And he’s trying now to go into the metaverse and stop selling data. Yeah. It’s not working. Metaverse is not working. I think the era of social media platforms as they are is finished. Not sustainable, politically or socially.
Europe has many democratic procedures that China does not have. And at the same time, it preserves the public interest and not just the market interest. Europe is really trying now seriously to regulate the platforms and to regulate artificial intelligence. China, I think, will be trying to control artificial intelligence. But if you control rather than regulate, you kill innovation. On the other hand, China is much more technologically advanced than Europe nowadays. It’s time for the Chinese government to let Chinese companies compete, because they are better than European companies, and they are at the same level as American firms.
TikTok has seriously challenged Facebook. Huawei is the leading company in connectivity in the world. Our friend Pony Ma has about 70% of the world market of video games. When we talk about technology and technology business, they are ahead. Therefore, at this point, China has an interest in competing rather than regulating.
What are the specific manifestations and trends of the application of AI in war, especially in the Russian–Ukrainian conflict and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? What are your views on the U.S.–China tech war that started in 2019?
Well, the specific manifestations of AI are absolutely fundamental. This is I have been working on. It’s a chapter in my book on the matter, particularly in the Ukraine war. AI is the decisive technology for war-making. What is the key war technology now? We know that. There are two and they are combined: missiles and drones. They are all based on artificial intelligence. In addition, AI is central to cyber warfare and interfering systems on which we rely. And this is what AI knows how to do.
When I met with Ren in 2019 precisely, we agreed that the U.S.–China cooperation in technology would be a great benefit for humankind. The problem is that the U.S. is now convinced that the only power that can challenge U.S. dominance is China. They don’t respect Russia too much. Yes, Russia can send many missiles, but they would have more missiles, more bombs, and more everything. But China is different. Particularly, they see that China is penetrating the entire world. Latin America now is completely linked to China. It’s escaping from the United States and going into China.
I think this is a catastrophe. There’s no reason. China’s not going to invade any country. The U.S. should do the same: China’s cooperation, technology transfer, and investment in railroads in Africa and in Latin America, but it doesn’t. Rather than being afraid of China, the U.S. should reinforce American technology research and waste less time in useless wars, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and now the war in Ukraine. They are all catastrophes, nonsense. The war in Ukraine, for instance, cannot be won by anyone. Everybody knows. And I talk to high-level people. It will end up in negotiations. And Russia will keep a chunk of Ukraine. But Trump will do it. In the first week, they will sign negotiations with Russia.
I think the U.S. is so scared of Huawei. And it has been trying everything to destroy Huawei. Knowing the European Union well, the U.S. has put tremendous pressure on European countries to block Huawei. The notion, as you know, is that Huawei is an agency of espionage, so its network, 5G, 6G are spying. Of course, there are connections between Huawei and Chinese companies. And there are connections between American companies and the U.S. government. Of course, Huawei is a major innovative company. Huawei is a great company. Do you think they are spies? I don’t think they are spies. I think they connect to the government as every company connects to the governments.
What are the future directions and priorities for innovation in Asia? What are the suggestions for innovation in Asia?
Regarding future directions for innovation in Asia, I’m very pessimistic because it’s not happening, but it’s clear what should be: innovation for the people. And what does it mean by “for the people”? It means health, medical support, public health, education, culture, and stop doing stupid things like a smart city.
The most important market in the world is education and health. Education, for instance, is completely backward in terms of technology. Completely. In my book, there’s one chapter that shows on the basis of the evidence of the OECD, that computers at the school provoke negative results for the students. Negative, not positive. Why? Because computers would automate bureaucracy and become more bureaucratic if you don’t change the teachers, the environment, the teaching system, or the program, you. So, the most important innovation is innovating the human–machine interface. Rather than devote everything to the machines, it is more important to have a better interaction between humans and machines.
That has a consequence for university programs. For me, the most important program to be developed in the universities anywhere is what we know here as the science-technology-society program, STS. MIT was the first. I taught there at MIT. I taught science-technology and society programs. USC now has an important program in the beginning. So, Chinese universities should be able to start science-technology and society programs, fostering interaction among engineers, scientists, sociologists, political scientists, and cultural creators. This is very important.
Regarding China, innovative breakthroughs, and higher education: the principle is actually quite simple to state but quite difficult to implement. The focus should be on what the Western universities have really not been able to do: interdisciplinarity. We have to eliminate the disciplines. The disciplines have no scientific basis. What is the difference between physical chemistry and chemical physics? Or political sociology and political science? The solution is to create interdisciplinary programs focused on concrete problems. Physical communication is okay. Urban planning is okay. Business is okay. We need to bringing the disciplines together to analyze concrete problems and to solve these problems.
The second thing is important for Chinese higher education: there is an established system in China of hierarchy within universities and between universities. I like Tsinghua and I like Beida, but they cannot be the only ones in the world. Like in England, Oxford and Cambridge have to go beyond that. Anyway, it is important to open up the field and start to fund universities depends on merit and not on the traditional power of the university.
What are the major paradigm shifts in communication studies brought about by the advent of the age of intelligence, and what are the impacts and implications of the development of AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) technologies on communication studies?
In terms of the paradigm shifts in communication studies brought by artificial intelligence, everything has to be redefined. Everything will change. It’s changing. Artificial intelligence allows the production of avatars on the basis of taking the faces and the work of the artists and writers and automating that. The recent Hollywood strike is very important to be examined. Because ultimately what happens is this. You take one actor or actress, you film for one day and have enough information to then put aside the real person. The entire media industry and the entire communication industry will be run by artificial intelligence.
But artificial intelligence could be very good and very important to develop communication studies. If we use it to develop scripts, draft of scripts, to use it to experiment, and then we can ultimately decide what works, what doesn’t work. So, we can use AI to our service and for the service of the creators and researchers rather than the other way around. It all depends on how you use it. Therefore, it’s not artificial. It’s social. The uses are defined socially. And it’s intelligent only when applied intelligently. You can do very stupid things. The most important thing is the connection between the human mind, the machines, and the sociocultural conditions of humans. We absolutely need an interdisciplinary work between neuroscience, computer science, and social science.
Communication is central, as I wrote, to power relations. And power relations are central to society. Second, this technological revolution is the largest technological revolution in history based on transforming communication. I came to communication not through the media but through the internet. You have to bring different theories and different perspectives. The most interesting fields are interdisciplinary.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The transcription and proofreading of the oral history interviews in this study were an arduous and meticulous process. I would like to express our sincere gratitude to Wei Wang, “Hundred Talents Program” Research Fellow at the College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University, as well as doctoral students Ben Wang and Mingjia Si, for their dedicated support. The three collaborators devoted significant time and effort to verifying the interview transcripts, categorizing the content, and refining the details, ensuring that the primary materials are presented in a systematic and standardized manner. Their patience and professional rigor have greatly enhanced the accuracy and usability of the data. Their contributions are most gratefully acknowledged.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.