For years, American leaders said the internet would make China freer and more like the US. Today, they are more likely to worry about how Chinese money and power are reshaping American tech. Conventional strategic areas, like artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, have received the most scrutiny. But this week the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) reached an agreement after an investigation of a different kind of target: the popular gay social networking app Grindr.

Grindr is based in West Hollywood and has more than 27 million users, including 3.3 million daily users. The Chinese gaming firm Beijing Kunlun Tech Company acquired it over two years, buying a 60% stake in January 2016 and the remaining 40% in January 2018. On its surface, the purchase seemed ordinary enough. Many American tech companies – from Twitter and Facebook to Tesla and Uber – have foreign funders and founders, and Chinese investors have been a major presence in Silicon Valley for years. Nonetheless, under pressure from CFIUS, Grindr’s Chinese owners agreed this month to part with the company by June 2020.

How did a hookup app become a matter of national security interest? The CFIUS investigation, which was first reported in late March, evidently focused on the array of sensitive data Grindr collects about its users: location, sexual preferences, HIV status and explicit photographs that are exchanged while chatting. Even though Beijing Kunlun is a private company, the Chinese government can easily require it to turn over such data. On principle, the US government may want to protect its citizens from prying eyes. But they are particularly concerned about a subset of users: the Wall Street Journal reported that because a large number of military personnel or other US government employees may use Grindr, Trump administration officials believe the Chinese government could obtain Grindr user data to blackmail individuals who hold top-secret security clearances or decision-making power over issues pertaining to China’s interests.

The case of Grindr might seem like a one-off oddity. On the contrary, it demonstrates how two of the biggest stories of our moment are colliding: the rise of the data economy, which sacrifices privacy to profits, and the escalation of US-China tensions, which pundits and politicians are already calling a new cold war. It also reveals the profound problems with that framework.

Who can say definitively what technology is or is not 'strategic'?

The first problem is descriptive. “The new cold war” does not constitute a very accurate or precise account of the challenges at hand. The data economy is just one example: the current US-China competition is taking place amid deep economic interconnection and the dispersal of all kinds of personal data among transnational private and government actors in ways that were technically impossible during the cold war. Transnational corporations that have amassed enormous amounts of wealth and power through commercial surveillance sit uneasily alongside the nation-states that still claim to govern them. This means that the bipolar, state-dominated “new cold war” paradigm cannot accurately reflect the varied networks connecting the US, China, and other countries, nor the dispersed technological domains that will be a central arena of this competition.

In this new era, ambiguities regarding sovereignty intersect with those concerning strategy. In an age of big data and machine learning – when photo editing and sharing apps can be used to train the kinds of vision recognition software deployed by military drones, for instance – who can say definitively what technology is or is not “strategic”? Private desires and everyday relations have become a site of geopolitical interest and potential conflict. An uneasy international intertwining of security, values and technology will increasingly be the norm. The grand US-China competition, usually spoken about in political or military terms, will enter into the most intimate lives of ordinary citizens.

The second problem with the “new cold war” framework is moral. Domestically, the idea of a cold war has often empowered conservative and even reactionary actors – from the moralizing demagoguery of the 1950s to the Reagan-era conservative revival. This current invocation poses many of the same risks.

Rhetoric about a group of compromised US government personnel who are singled out as a source of vulnerability due to their sexual activities powerfully echoes the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. That was the legislative effort to purge the US government of what a Senate subcommittee called “homosexuals and other moral perverts”, devastating the careers and lives of thousands of American citizens.

“Perverts are vulnerable to interrogation by a skilled questioner,” an influential Senate report declared. “The pervert is easy prey to the blackmailer … [E]spionage agents can use the same type of pressure to extort confidential information.” In 2019, these ideas still have traction: “Think what a creative team of Chinese security forces could do with its access to Grindr’s data,” the Washington Post recently wrote, holding out the menace of “leak[ing] compromising photos of gay American generals” and China “send[ing] male honeypots to targets in the American national security apparatus.”

Of course, the US government today is not seeking to purge gay employees. But the idea that they are uniquely prey to blackmail in a way that heterosexuals aren’t also does not reflect the new world of intimate information being held transnationally and privately, in which many millions of Americans have left potentially embarrassing material in the hands of poorly regulated and poorly understood corporations. The special scrutiny paid to the supposed liabilities of gay men reflects lingering conservative ideas that homosexuality must always be a source of shame and danger. It is particularly ironic when two of the most powerful men in the world, Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos, have recently been compromised over heterosexual infidelities.

The risks posed by Beijing Kunlun’s ownership of Grindr are real, centering on the possibility of covert Chinese government influence or expropriation of user data. As Chinese apps like TikTok become ubiquitous on the cellphones of American teenagers, the US government clearly needs to require greater transparency and disclosure from Chinese firms entering the US market. But the issue of how the globalized data economy exposes Americans to new risks extends far beyond the US-China competition, and it requires much more urgent and comprehensive action focusing on data protection than CFIUS actions against Chinese-owned apps.

These risks, however, are accompanied by potential negative impacts of the “new cold war” framing on our own society. Domestically, when framed in a civilizational “cold war” paradigm, concern about the power of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) can fuel racism and discrimination. Chinese Americans describe how these tensions have invaded their everyday lives, from accusations of dual allegiances to demands that they speak in English rather than Chinese. Now American men who have sex with men have evidence of the US government seeing their behavior on a dating app as posing a “national security” risk. This potential demonization of already marginalized groups as part of US-China “new cold war” rhetoric would be profoundly destructive.

American leaders must be able to address US-China tech competition without reprising past “scares” that damage our own society. Doing so will require Americans to interrogate our own biases. If Grindr users are perceived as uniquely at risk for blackmail, this reflects the persistence of homophobia in American culture. Critiques of “Chinese influence” blur the distinctions among the CCP, ordinary Chinese citizens and Chinese Americans, recalling a long history of racism and suspicion about Asian Americans’ allegiances. The CCP itself makes this task more difficult, because it attempts to deliberately blur those same distinctions and is a profoundly culturally conservative force.

At the present, neo-authoritarian movements and their leaders are escalating homophobia, sexism and transphobia worldwide, from Xi Jinping’s China to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Donald Trump’s administration has shown that these forces remain powerful even in the US. Resisting the emerging paradigm of a “new cold war” while also responding to the CCP’s increasing influence is thus also about shaping what kind of society the US will be – and living up to our own ideals of equality in love and before the law.