In 1916, the Middle East was partitioned by its rulers with ink between Britain and France. A hundred years later, with borders drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, territories continue to contend with claims to legitimacy, sovereignty, and foreign intervention. The Middle East holds a reset, but not in a conference room this time, instead in an open-plan office, very far away. The new lines are invisible. They have been coded in Silicon Valley, an invisible network of servers, algorithms, cloud agreements, and surveillance systems distributed across the Middle East. The old colonial map remains in place but is not effaced; instead, it is digitised. Sykes-Picot established control through geography. Nowadays, control is established through data. Where the data is, where […]
