Are we really living in the age of a “cyber arms race” and an “information Iron Curtain?” Cold War vocabulary is back and leading the headlines. The escalating trade war between the U.S. and China has resurrected the metaphors as politicians and TV pundits try to draw meaningful parallels between the nuclear and the technology eras.

But the issue is these analogies have expired for a reason; they just don’t apply anymore and as Justin Sherman writes for Wired, it’s possible that militarized, Cold War language is producing “overly combative policies on emerging tech.”

There are a number of reasons why these metaphors are obsolete and our latest piece by Charles Rollet gets at what I think is the most telling difference — while the Cold War was defined by borders and competing political ideology, our tech age is more often borderless and apolitical. This is especially obvious when we look at collaborations between Western technologists and China.

Why did Anil K. Jain, a rockstar in biometrics research at Michigan State, present a paper in Xinjiang the same month that a UN human rights panel described the region as a “massive internment camp”? A 30-second Google search could have told Professor Jain — one of the world’s most influential computer scientists — that the ethnically Uyghur president of the university sponsoring the conference was arrested in 2017 and is facing imminent execution.