Description
Private technology actors have become powerful players on the international stage. Yet IR literature often ultimately roots this evolution in economic factors and motives, overlooking some of the ways software distinctively constitutes power and embodies politics. A key such dynamic in cyberspace is the so-called ‘disruptive innovation’: an arrangement of software code, if accepted by an audience of users, may break the existing rules of the cyber game while posing an existential threat to actors who depend on the earlier order. This paper proposes to frame this dynamic as a ‘design act’, a software equivalent to securitisation. Mobilising the ‘code is law’ concept by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, I take the Copenhagen School as a starting point for theorising technological design, through speech act theory combined with a Derridean perspective on language. Discourse analysis is then used to explore the 2016 struggle between Apple Inc. and U.S. law enforcement over the encrypted San Bernardino iPhone. By examining how securitising speech and software design leverage their mutual similarities to constitute threats, I strive to show how technology actors have to think in a security logic, opening a way to conceptualise cyberspace as fundamentally an arena for international politics.
