Throughout the process of writing this manuscript, the involvement of technology in international politics has become ever more visible. These encounters range from the hopeful, to the unexpected, to the frightening, to the absurd.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 was widely documented on social media with discourse that took on a strange, bimodal quality. On the one hand, international media played to the image of the Taliban as a band of backward luddites, who posed a significant danger (especially to women and girls) but who were simultaneously incapable of running the new, modern Afghanistan that decades of international aid had created. Early stories and social media updates from Associated Press portrayed young Taliban fighters as ‘awestruck’ by ‘modern office buildings’, shopping malls, ‘plush furniture’, and gym equipment (Associated Press 2021; Gannon 2021). A video of Taliban fighters cheerfully attempting to navigate elliptical machines and other equipment at a gym in the presidential palace was widely circulated online and became a source of mockery (Lock 2021). Yet these narratives sat alongside serious reflection about the fate of biometric databases that contained information on millions of Afghans, including many who had worked with US forces and other international agencies (Guo and Noori 2021; Klippenstein and Sirota 2021). Commentators rightfully questioned the damaging effects of allowing these materials to fall into the wrong hands and pondered whether this was a reflection on the judiciousness of collecting this information in the first place.

In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele oversaw the adoption of bitcoin as a national currency on par with the US dollar in 2021. Early reports suggested that the bitcoinization of the country was marred by popular discontent, technical issues, volatility, and fraud. The government-sponsored Chivo platform, which promised an electronic wallet and a small amount of startup funds to all Salvadorans who created an account, was plagued with reliability issues. The lure of free money further incentivized fraud, as criminals used stolen identities to create accounts (Gerard 2021; McDonald 2022). Protests accompanying the bitcoin rollout in autumn 2021 demonstrated citizens’ concerns about financial instability – but also about rising authoritarianism and the rapid, top-down way in which bitcoin was being deployed (Pineda 2021).