Societies that continuously upgrade their Technik thrive; the term indicates the ability to successfully implement emerging technologies.
Five thousand years ago, use of the wheel began to spread from Mesopotamia across Eurasia, revolutionizing transport and enabling chariot warfare. A millennium ago, the stirrup enabled Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes to conquer most of Eurasia (coming from the other direction) at unfathomable speed. Paul Kennedy’s seminal Rise and Fall of the Great Powers captures the way technological and economic advances have converted into strategic advantage, and how failure to “lock in” that edge accelerates imperial decline. Over the past three centuries, the spread of industrial technologies gradually weakened Britain while stimulating the United States. The West defeated the Soviet Union not through warfare but by maintaining a superior economic system with higher technological standards. China’s late-20th-century rise is very much the unfinished business of the Industrial Revolution.
The early 21st century looks to be a time when such geotechnology matters more than ever — outweighing traditional power determinants like geopolitics and geoeconomics. Indeed, China is a superpower today not because it has twice as many nuclear weapons as it had two decades ago, but rather because it has come to dominate manufacturing through manpower, ingenuity and espionage, has generated massive surpluses from it, and now invests those profits in military hardware and other advanced technologies. A decade from now we may look back at China’s 12th Five-Year Plan as the seminal document of the early 21st century. It pledges $1.5 trillion in government support for seven “strategic emerging industries,” including alternative energy, biotechnology, next-gen IT, high-end manufacturing equipment, and advanced materials. China invented none of these fields, but outstrips all competitors in attempting to improve and deploy them at scale.
Does this mean China will succeed in achieving geotechnology dominance? That all depends on its Technik. The English language lacks an equivalent for this German word, which denotes not only technologies themselves but also the skills and processes surrounding them. Technik unites the scientific and mechanical dimensions of technology (determinism) with a necessary concern for its effect on humans and society (constructivism). Technik, then, is the technological quotient of civilization.
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This essay was co-written with Parag Khanna
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