In a report aired by DW Arabic on American influence in the digital world, one question keeps surfacing — and it is starting to keep governments and thinkers up at night: Has humanity become almost entirely dependent on American technology?

This is no longer a question for political columnists or economists alone. It touches the heart of daily life: a state’s ability to run its institutions, sustain its productivity, and remain in contact with the rest of the world.

A small experiment that exposed a structural truth

The report cited a bold experiment by a Chinese journalist who tried to boycott American services and platforms for a single day — email, messaging, search, all of it. The result was startling. She found herself effectively isolated, unable to do even the most ordinary tasks, unable to keep up the minimum level of productivity her job required.

The experiment sounds small, but it exposes something structural: the modern world is built, almost in its entirety, on American digital infrastructure.

From operating systems and cloud computing, through search engines and messaging apps, all the way to email services and AI models — nearly all of it sits under the umbrella of a handful of American giants: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon Web Services, OpenAI.

Why governments fear this dominance

Governments today understand that technological supremacy is no longer simply a tool of economic growth. It has become a form of soft geopolitical leverage. Control over digital infrastructure grants direct influence over several sensitive arenas:

• Information flow and media: shaping public opinion and steering narratives.
• The digital economy: dominating global trade routes and data markets.
• Cybersecurity: holding the keys to either protect or breach critical infrastructure.
• Artificial intelligence and education: drawing the contours of how humans will think and work tomorrow.

This is why we see persistent efforts by several states — China at the head of the list — to build alternative, sovereign digital ecosystems. The technological gap, however, remains wide.

The real secret behind American supremacy

From my perspective as an engineer working in this sector, the decisive factor in this lead is not the abundance of capital, not military might, not even the sheer number of scientists. The secret lies somewhere deeper: an ecosystem of freedom and creativity.

Real creativity needs an environment that holds the human mind: lets it think, experiment, fail, criticize, and dream without constraint. Fear kills creativity. Repression assassinates initiative. Freedom, on the other hand, releases human energy to its outer limits.

I felt this firsthand during my years studying and working in the United States. I watched students and researchers reach extraordinary heights of innovation simply because they felt safe enough to express what they actually thought. When you compare that to other environments, you realize the real difference isn’t in genetic intelligence or human capacity — it’s in the ecosystem the individual grows up in. A repressed person may possess exceptional intelligence, but the ceiling on what they accomplish will always be set by fear.

The race ahead: Washington vs. Beijing

There’s no denying the enormous leaps China has made in recent years, planting itself firmly in strategically critical sectors:

• Advanced manufacturing and electric vehicles.
• E-commerce and telecommunications networks (5G).
• Applied AI technologies.

But the historical pattern shows that “the great technological waves” originate in the United States before spreading out to the rest of the world (China included). We saw this with the personal computer, the internet, operating systems, smartphones, social networks — and most recently, generative AI.

Today we stand at the start of a new historical race for leadership in the age of AI. It will not just produce new products. It will redraw the contours of the world over the coming decades.

Will American dominance hold?

Despite the unprecedented competition and the scale of the challenges, I believe the United States will retain its lead in the digital world for a long time. The reason isn’t only the weight of its economy or the scale of its companies. It’s its renewable ability to attract the brightest minds from every corner of the earth — and give them the safe space to create and to change the world.

That said, the pace of technological change has gone vertical, and the next decade may very well be the stage on which the global map of technological power is redrawn.

— Omar Abuassaf
Computer engineer and AI specialist
Los Angeles, May 2026

May God lengthen the life of my university professor — Professor Gbarfsky — who used to wish out loud that he would live long enough to see this era: the era of real artificial intelligence.

He would say it often: “I hope we live long enough to see the day of true AI.”

In those years, cloud storage hadn’t matured into what we know today, and AI required computational and storage resources that simply did not exist. It was hard for most people to imagine the kind of progress we now see. And yet, there were scientific theories that predicted AI would one day approach the human level in certain capacities. That is exactly what we are watching unfold today — at accelerating speed.

Now, after this enormous leap, I believe the next few years will bring near-total reliance on AI across every field of life.

From drug development, to what arrives on our breakfast and lunch tables, to food production, to university education, to scientific research, all the way to the smallest details of daily life.

And the difference between someone who uses AI and someone who doesn’t will not be subtle. It will be a difference of “light years” in productivity, scientific output, and economic strength.

The gunpowder analogy

I have long compared AI to gunpowder when it first appeared in history.

The mistake of being late to it could resemble the mistake of the Mamluks, who were late to adopt gunpowder and firearms. The result was their defeat by the Ottomans and the loss of their state.

In my view, lagging behind into the AI age could lead to similar outcomes — at the level of entire states and entire peoples.

From invention to dominance

I expect that America’s monopoly over the major advances in AI will lead in the future to a form of global control that we have not seen before.

Control over AI means control over drug development, over food, over education, over the economy, over production, over scientific research — over almost anything you can imagine.

China remains a serious competitor that should not be underestimated. But I see the United States as still being several stages ahead in this field — especially if the American claims hold up, that some Chinese models depend on imitating or copying American innovations and technologies.

If those claims are true, history may repeat itself in a different form. It would resemble what happened during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union pursued American nuclear technology through espionage and stolen blueprints.

The widening gap

American dominance over AI may give the United States enormous superiority over the rest of the world — not just militarily or economically, but scientifically, educationally, and technologically. That could open a vast civilizational gap between the United States and the rest of the world over the coming decades.

— Omar Abuassaf
Computer engineer and AI specialist
Los Angeles, May 7, 2026

Introduction: an occupation without soldiers

Colonialism no longer arrives by ship the way it does in our history books. Today it arrives through notifications.

Imagine a state that has not occupied your land, sent a single soldier, or raised its flag over your cities — yet knows everything about you. It knows what you love, what you hate, when you get angry, when you’re about to buy something. Does such a state still need to invade you militarily to impose its influence?

The old colonialism was explicit and loud. The digital kind is soft, silent, and comfortable.

From ports to platforms

In the past, colonial powers fought to control ports and maritime gateways. Today the battle has shifted to control over digital platforms.

The old goal was extracting natural resources from beneath the earth. The new goal is extracting resources from beneath our minds and our behavior — what we now call “data.” The fundamental difference is in how it feels. You don’t feel restrained, because you’re enjoying the free service. You don’t feel dependent, because the speed of access pleases you.

The sovereignty question: who owns the foundation we live on?

Stop and ask yourself: if the global apps you rely on every day disappeared tomorrow, do you have a local alternative? Does your country own its own digital infrastructure? Or is the entire world tied together by invisible threads whose source is a very small number of giant companies in Silicon Valley?

This is the essence of digital colonialism. Total dependency produces tributary status, and tributary status is the deepest form of influence there is.

Algorithms: occupying consciousness, not territory

Algorithms today do not occupy your geographic borders, but they may very well occupy and shape your consciousness. They decide:

• What you see first when you open your screen.
• Which story spreads and becomes a “trend.”
• Which truth gets buried in the shade where no one sees it.

This is not political fiction or conspiracy theory. It is an economic and technical reality we live in every minute.

The paradox of power in the digital age

We are living a strange paradox. Technology has given individuals unprecedented power — a single person in a small room can influence the world. At the same time, never before in human history have power and data been concentrated to this degree in the hands of so few companies.

And that is where the real question announces itself: Is this a natural evolution of globalization, or the start of a new era of control without soldiers?

The bottom line: the difference between a tool and a dependency

This isn’t an argument for demonizing technology. Not every platform is a colonial instrument. But there is a vast difference between owning a tool and using it, and depending on a tool entirely with no alternative.

The argument isn’t against technology itself. It’s against unawareness. If we don’t own the technology, do we still own our decisions? Is the language of “digital colonialism” intellectual exaggeration, or are we simply unwilling to look at the full picture?