Life in the twenty-first century depends upon a virtual world. This world is where humans communicate, learn, play, shop, bank, make friends and perhaps meet their future spouses. It underpins the ‘critical

national infrastructure’ of states – their agriculture, food distribution, banking, healthcare, transport, water supply and energy – and their interactions with their citizens.

It is fundamental to the global economy, to international security and influence, and to the global spread of ideas. It is also used by criminals to defraud, terrorists to radicalise, and by states to spy and to seek strategic advantage over their adversaries.

Some argue that future wars will be won or lost in this domain. While each of these activities has a parallel real-world dimension, activities in the virtual world add a revolutionary degree of speed, scale and geographic reach. This virtual world has many shorthand descriptors, some of which are more accurate than others: ‘cyberspace’, ‘the internet’, ‘the web’, or ‘the online or digital environment’.

This virtual world in turn rests upon physical foundations or hardware: computers, microchips, phones, servers, switches, data centres, fibre-optic cables, cellular radio towers and antennae, and communications satellites. Across this hardware run coded software applications (such as Facebook or TikTok). Both hardware and software can be categorised as ‘digital technology’. Some have argued that a ‘fourth industrial revolution’ is already under way, characterised by the use of digital technology to enable the growing automation of human activity.

The United States has so far been the global leader in digital technology, but China has taken measures over the past two decades both to insulate itself from perceived threats from US technological dominance and to increase its own digital influence worldwide. Washington and Beijing appear to believe that digital dominance will bring broader geopolitical and economic power. While the US has made increasingly robust efforts to counter China’s moves in what has been described as a ‘Digital Great Game’, it is possible that the current tactics of both sides may prove counterproductive.