The Great Tech Game comes with a promise to explain one of the pre-eminent challenges of our times, which concerns the rapid growth in the technological domain and its implications for the economic and strategic sectors in countries across the world. The fact that a book on geopolitics is written around the theme of technology underscores the high stakes now attached to the gadgets and algorithms that were once dismissed as a domain for ‘geeks and freaks’. And surely, this is not the last account being penned on the subject—with each passing day, one sees a flurry of publications, think tanks and institutions being set up to engage with the themes of IT and society, ranging from the future of digital silk routes to the promise of Digital India and such initiatives at home.
For the author Anirudh Suri the motivation to write this book seems to be his own background in finance and there is no doubt that his own experience as a venture capitalist places him within the ambit of the subject he has taken up. Perhaps intended for others working in the financial world but with an interest in wider issues, the book does provide a good overview of the hallmarks of the emergent form of capitalism without going too much into debates that inevitably surround such topics. What we get is a framework of ‘great games’ to analyse the historical context and also to estimate the scale of change taking place in our own times.