What is it to belong to, and yet be in distinction from, a broader environment? Recurring to earlier discussion of Mingei, this chapter discusses the aesthetics of form in relation to individuals and organizations, using examples of Gestalt theory (Kurt Goldstein), architecture (Peter Zumthor) and poetry (Rilke (via Rodin)), as well as craft workers Mary Watts, Gary Fabian MIller and Gertude Jeykll. It culminates in a study of Ethel Mairet’s weaving workshop The Gospels, and her sustained and arguably utterly original attempt to blend the biotechnic thinking of urban planners like Geddes and Mumford, the aesthetic sensitivity and skill of weaving and an enduring and vibrant small business venture.

As he developed his technological interests in the setting of the Musée de l’Homme, Leroi-Gourhan was particularly attentive to the description and documentation of material objects. Cardboard fiches (index cards) with standardized entries – name, function, material, location of finding, etc. – served to ‘bring the milieu of the object’ back into the museum. During his fieldwork in Japan from 1937 to 1939, Leroi-Gourhan refined his documentary approaches, combining ethnographic photographs and object collections. Back in France, however, following the defeat and German occupation, this mass of accumulated fiches became less compelling, especially when Leroi-Gourhan discovered Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) with its élan vital and intuitionist philosophy. This notably inspired him to develop the distinction between technical ‘facts’, which are unstable and localized, and technical ‘tendencies’, which are stable, wide-ranging and deterministic. These two concepts, outlined in Evolution et techniques (1943, 1945), characterized his approach to technical phenomena and material civilizations.

The book concludes by bringing the different themes of this work together, considering the potential futures for the EU as the Geopolitical Union, reflecting upon how regulatory mercantilism could be a useful framework for analysis of policies beyond technology, and beyond the EU, and potential future avenues for research based on these reflections.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Commission as a technology regulator, outlining the development of the EU’s technology policies and laws, from their beginnings in the late 1970s until the late 2000s. Reflecting on the limited interventions of the Commission during the period referred to as one of ‘Eurosclerosis’, and the beginnings of distinct technology policies and positive acts of integration around technology in the 1990s. It explores how during its development, EU technology policy was marked by a distinction between economically oriented developments, such as around intellectual property rights, and security-related ones as in the case of cybercrime and cybersecurity. However, in the period of the late 2000s/early 2010s and the EU ‘polycrisis’ of financial crisis, legitimacy crisis, and populism crisis, and concerns over the power of the private sector in technology governance, the groundwork was laid for seeing technology control in terms of interlinked economic and security goals, a growing distrust of ‘Big Tech’, and concerns about the need to externalise the EU’s rules and values, including through the Brussels effect.

Chapter 7 considers the developments that have taken place since the beginning of the von der Leyen II Commission, identifying how there has not only been continuity in the EU’s approach to technology control and its links to digital sovereignty but also an expansion and reinforcement of the approach. Faced with increased instability and geopolitical threat, the linkage of security and economy has become even more explicit for the von der Leyen II Commission, with the Competitiveness Compass taking an approach that appears to be a more assertive form of regulatory mercantilism, in which the element of defence is specifically incorporated into the EU’s rationale for action, with an expansion of technology controls including the development of an explicit push for defence technology industrial policy, the increased control over external dependencies and supply chains through its Preparedness Strategy, and an AI policy for Europe that includes significant investments for AI gigafactories.

Chapter 1 is the theoretical basis for the rest of the book, fully outlining the regulatory mercantilist framework, its origins, distinctions from other modes of regulatory governance, and its characteristics. This chapter considers the approach of regulatory capitalism and how it has been the Commission’s approach to technology regulation until relatively recently, aligned with the idea of the regulatory state and the reliance on expert-led forms of self-regulation or regulatory networks as a means of achieving economic goals based on a logic of efficiency rather than one of security. It outlines the ideas of mercantilism and its core features, expanding on how regulatory mercantilism draws from these principles, representing a changed paradigm in technology regulation in which the logic is one of security, with security and economy being mutually constitutive policy objectives, motivated by concerns over external dependency and guaranteeing sovereignty. It highlights the more interventionist approach to regulation that is adopted within a regulatory mercantilist approach, the renewed emphasis on industrial policy, and the regulatory export of standards as global standards.

Chapter 3 moves to the global level, exploring the history of technology control and its historical links to geopolitics. It begins by considering control of technology in the context of the Cold War and technology as being explicitly considered a security issue in terms of the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. It covers the CoCom technology restrictions imposed by the US, and Soviet Union attempts to gain access to critical technologies through Comecon, before considering how the approach to technology changed substantially with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the belief in the triumph of the liberal international order and globalism as reflected by the World Trade Organization and ‘free trade’. It then explores the multifaceted crises impacting upon this conviction in the benefits and resilience of the global trade system, the increased economic conflict between the US and China as a rising technological power, and a move from multilateralism in a ‘unipolar’ system to increased nationalism and protectionism in a ‘multipolar’ system, and what this meant for the EU’s sense of insecurity and vulnerability in the context of geopolitical reordering.

This chapter traces the role of folk music in the changing mediascape in North America from the 1940s to the 1960s. Beginning from Jürgen Habermas’s well-known notion of the ‘public sphere’, the essay locates the folk revival at the intersection of new spaces (Greenwich Village) and new media (the long-playing record). It shows how the technology of the LP made possible juxtapositions of songs from all over the world. With the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul and Mary, we see the emergence of folk music for a largely white college-educated public. This history shifts with the emergence of folk ‘stars’ Joan Baez and then Bob Dylan. At the same time the manipulation of the recording studio, in the work of Paul Simon and the Byrds, gives folk a new relationship to rock music. We then see how the comedy duo of the Smothers Brothers picks up on the political energy of folk music and blends it with the new medium of television at the end of the 1960s. These technological developments shape folk music as a force in the political culture of the era, from Martin Luther King to the Women’s Movement.

This introduction to the book sets the context for the larger work – the European Commission’s declaration of the existence of the Geopolitical Union and the approach to technology it is taking. This approach, more interventionist and assertive, can be framed as regulatory mercantilist – combining economic and security goals, promoting increased regulatory oversight and industrial policy inside the EU, and seeking to promote its rules, values, and norms externally, in a form of ‘regulatory balance of trade’. This part of the book provides a structure for the rest of the book to allow for the development of its theoretical approach, case studies, and consideration of the future of the Geopolitical Union.

In Chapter 10, we conclude with an overview of the broader themes seen throughout this work, showcasing the tell-tale signs of innovation failure. These patterns go to the core of our work, lessons learned from past innovations that can help us to avoid repeating similar mistakes in the future. No one, not even the cagiest upgrader, is going to be able to predict every new technology that will succeed or flop. But with this mindset, you can avoid some of the more obvious traps that investors, politicians, and the public continue to fall for, while valuing the evidence-based alternatives we so often neglect.

This chapter explores the significant impact of the digital age on the realm of literature, focusing specifically on Hebrew poetry as a distinctive case study. This focus is driven by the declining status of literature within Israeli culture and the dynamic state of its reviving literary landscape. The study is structured in two phases: the first delves into practices and phenomena, while the second aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the field’s logic and values by examining different participants and levels. The chapter claims that the necessity of the second phase arises from the current state of the field, where the adaptation of media has become so ingrained that it conceals its influence on literary themes, forms, and language. The chapter addresses this gap using the theoretical framework of mediatization, which explores long-term changes associated with media evolution.

Chapter 5 focuses on the labor process to analyze what industrial modernization meant for the workers and how coercive practices and welfare measures were employed to curb workers’ mobility. It depicts the industrial transformation and mechanization in the Imperial Arsenal under the supervision of American, and then British engineers. It examines the labor-management policies and practices that developed in response to the formation of a heterogeneous labor force, and examines the regulations and instructions on the production process issued by the naval bureaucracy in the early 1870s. In parallel with the increasing division of labor and the desire of the state elites to control the labor process, the Arsenal administration attempted to consolidate capitalist relations through top-down supervision of the labor process, time discipline, and the spatial-administrative reorganization of the labor force. In addition, intending to halt the problem of turnovers and increase workers’ loyalty to their workplace, the administration implemented policies aimed at bonding civilian workers to the arsenal, including the social security benefits as institutionalized in the mid-1870s.