Silicon Valley tech diplomacy in the shadow of big tech’s relegation power

Big technology corporations have become such powerful actors in global politics that they are compared to or even seen as passing by the state. This ‘rise of big tech’ has been linked to a handful of companies’ control over global digital goods and services, ownership of critical infrastructures, and concentrated influence over information streams and standard setting. This article adds an additional dimension to this power mix in the form of what I call ‘relegation power’. Relegation power is part of the social worldmaking repertoire of tech corporations and refers to their ability to selectively ignore or choose not to engage with state actors. I develop this idea on the basis of ethnographic research in Silicon Valley in the spring of 2024. Here, I followed the daily work of diplomatic stakeholders and how they conduct what practitioners and academics have come to call ‘tech diplomacy’. Fieldwork quickly reveals that the meeting between diplomats and the tech world is a strange one, fraught by clashing professional traditions and mismatched expectations. When we read tech diplomacy through its everyday practice, two faultlines emerge. The first lies in how diplomats strain their professional roles to fit the Silicon Valley ecosystem. The second concerns how they experience being snubbed while trying. Rather than cast in positions of ‘professional strangers’ as international relations literature would have it, diplomats in Silicon Valley experience being ‘relegated’ to a second rank position in attempts to engage with the tech companies. Recognizing big tech’s ‘relegation power’ holds at least two important implications that make the ethnographic insights from the field speak to broader debates about global order and power. First, it empirically grounds ideas that the power of big tech reaches far beyond financial, infrastructural or information control and deep into the fabric and imagination of global politics. Second, it outlines the contours of an increasingly anti-democratic international system that runs not on the diplomatic logics of state-interaction but on an order imagined and guarded by unaccountable private entities.