Philip Schlesinger, professorial fellow at CREATe, gave a keynote lecture on ‘The geopolitics of digital regulation’ at the International colloquium organised by French universities’ ‘Industries culturelles and création artistique’ consortium.
The meeting was held at the Fondation Paye, Cité internationale universitaire de Paris on 17-18 June. Find out more about the event here. Philip noted that while the extent of state control to be exercised over digital and AI-driven developments was now a crucial policy fixation deeply shaped by questions of national security and national competitiveness, this was hardly new.
The entire period of the Cold War – in analogue times – was shaped by systemic struggles over the flow and distribution of political and cultural content as well as the exercise of control over strategic technologies. His lecture covered present debate over digital regulation in the US, UK and EU and noted the consequences of regulatory inefficacy. He also discussed changing strategies of middle powers in a disintegrating alliance system, new intermediaries’ transformations of public opinion formation, and drivers of regulatory innovation in democracies faced with profound challenges of political and social cohesion.