The "tech companies as governments" metaphor is getting popular. Then what's the equivalent of diplomacy between these governments? (A valid answer is "None, you're abusing the metaphor".)
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Replying to @devonzuegel
Ok, this has me stumped, but a cautious take: tech companies don't need diplomacy between each other yet bc it's mostly still tech cos (digital gov'ts) vs. regulators (physical gov'ts). Even tech cos who war w each other are still doing so based on national borders (China, etc)
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Replying to @nayafia @devonzuegel
Which makes me wonder: what else needs to happen before we start seeing conflicts *between* tech co's that will require diplomacy?
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Replying to @nayafia @devonzuegel
Finally, if tech cos are cooperative rather than competitive (nobody's infringing on each others' territory), does that collectively make them more like a single country (e.g. give it a seat at the UN), rather than an entirely new political paradigm (online vs. offline world)?
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Replying to @nayafia @devonzuegel
I attended many meetings at Google with representatives from, e.g., Apple that sure felt like diplomacy to me. I think that 99% of
@slightlylate's job is diplomacy.1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
do you think that diplomatic role is a generalizable job function within a company (ex. "corporate relations"), or is it dependent on the product in question?
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I think to some extent this is what corpdev is at big companies.
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Not sure if this is what you're getting at, but in national diplomacy there is this whole art/skill of communicating compatibly with lots of other cultures, so that aren't misunderstood, don't offend, etc.
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I always felt this acutely when dealing with other companies at Google. Like it was painfully obvious how different our cultures were, how different our starting assumptions were. I always felt like I was about to accidentally start an incident.
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Google-Wikipedia and WhatWG-W3C diplomacy are two examples from my career where diplomacy between clashing cultures went on, somewhat badly, and often would have benefited from a George F. Kennan (or professional sociologist!) to explain the cultures/goals to each other.
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In the past few years, the W3C/WHATWG thing has resolved well thanks to a *lot* of patient involvement by all parties: https://www.w3.org/2019/04/WHATWG-W3C-MOU.html …
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Replying to @slightlylate @aboodman and
Oh, I know! But it took the better part of a decade and a lot of hard work to get there. Successful diplomacy at its best.
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