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American policy describes threats to technological innovation in classic national security terms as a threat to the foundation of American economic strength and, subsequently, its national power. A series of National Security Strategy (NSS) statements have stressed that economic wealth is central to national power, American leadership, and the future of American global primacy. The 2010 NSS stated that, ‘Simply put, American innovation is the foundation of American Power’ (White House Citation2010, np, 2, 28, 51), while the 2015 NSS noted that the United States sought to ‘advance a model of American leadership rooted in the foundation of America’s economic and technological strengths and the values of the American people’ (White House Citation2015a, 1, 21). A shift in tone occurs under the Trump Administration towards more combative and pessimistic language, although the underlying message is the same, as is the underlying policy (Wolfe Citation2018, 202). The 2017 NSS stated that ‘Losing our innovation and technological edge would have far-reaching negative implications for American prosperity and power’ (White House Citation2017, 21; OSTP Citation2019). Contemporary socio-technical imaginaries of innovation in American policy are not reflective of the short-term drifting desires of policy experts (cf. Jepperson Citation2020, 52–53), but rather articulate the long-standing idea that technological innovation is central to the competitiveness of the American economy (Berman Citation2013, 417). Fears about the erosion of US economic power through the decline of its technological leadership centre primarily on the vulnerability of intellectual property rights due to the insecurity of digital networks (White House Citation2018a, 2, 16, passim; US Department of Justice Citation2018, 65; White House Citation2013). China is identified as the single most important source of threat to intellectual property rights – and thus technological innovation – in American policy, as it has been for nearly three decades. US security concerns around innovation are intertwined with the broadest possible geopolitical anxieties surrounding China’s rise and America’s decline. American officials stress the substantive economic shock of IP theft, in lost revenue and lost jobs. For instance, the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) asserts that some 45 million jobs, or 30% of the American labour market, are in IP intensive industries (IPEC Citation2016). Estimates of lost revenue are hard to accurately determine, but are substantial by any account; the US government estimates losses between 1–3% of GDP per year, or roughly 600 USD billion dollars a year, while President Trump suggested a figure of 300 USD billion dollars a year (United States Department of Justice Citation2018, 28; White House Citation2017). While clearly conscious of the present impact of cybertheft on the US economy – reversal of harmful trade practices and IP theft was a central plank in the permanent campaign of the Trump Administration – American policy discourse conspicuously focused on the future impact of present threats. Former director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command General Keith Alexander called cyber-enabled IP theft ‘The greatest transfer of wealth in history,’ asserting ‘that our future disappearing right there’, a view endorsed by the Commission on the Theft of Intellectual Property (Rogin Citation2012; IP Commission Citation2013; Blair and Alexander Citation2017). Cyber-enabled intellectual property rights theft is not merely a threat to present corporate profitability. While present threats to lost corporate revenue and lost jobs are certainly significant in US discourse (White House Citation2019a; IPEC 2019, 2, 6, passim), IP theft is imagined as targeting and undermining the very incentives that, in the causal narrative of US socio-technical imaginaries, are required to drive innovation forward into the future. The 2018 National Cyber Strategy (White House Citation2018a, 16) succinctly states this long-held policy view Strong intellectual property rights ensure continued economic growth and innovation in the digital age. The United States government has fostered and will continue to help foster a global intellectual property rights system that provides incentives for innovation through the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights such as patents, trademarks and copyrights. The theory of technological innovation disclosed in American policy has as its core institutional feature the protection of private property rights. These rights generate the incentives, and pressures, required to motivate actors to undertake technological innovation, as absent these innovations will not occur. A pithy turn of phrase by Abraham Lincoln – that intellectual property rights add ‘the fuel of interest to the fire of genius’ (White House Citation2011, 7; IPEC 2016, 2) – is the bedrock assumption on which the institutional apparatus of the United States government innovation ecosystem is built. In US imaginaries IP theft is an existential threat to American innovation because it damages the incentive structure required for technological innovation by making it unprofitable, removing the fuel that generates the combustion necessary for technological progress. Prominent strands of American culture inform these imaginaries. The prototype of the ‘lone genius,’ with Thomas Edison as its exemplar, remains prevalent in wider US socio-technical imaginaries around innovation (Lemley Citation2012; Pfotenhauer and Juhl Citation2017; Bix Citation2000, 11). The lone genius trope hold that the genius ‘can solve problems that stump the experts’, beetling away in home laboratories to build their inventions and reap their material reward (Lemley Citation2012, 710). Donald Trump’s high-profile comparison of Elon Musk to Edison (and the inventor of the wheel) captures, in a slightly mangled and exaggerated form, this wider notion: ‘[…] he’s one of our great geniuses, and we have to protect our genius. You know, we have to protect Thomas Edison and we have to protect all of these people that – came up with originally the light bulb and – the wheel and all of these things’ (CNBC Citation2020; White House Citation2018b; White House Citation2011, 9). Lone genius prototypes focus policy attention on threats to individual incentives in the marketplace rather than threats to innovation capacities that exist, for example, due to restrictive immigration policies. The theory of social action presented in US policy derived from the lone inventor myth thereby focuses on markets as the source of innovation in American society, with the private sector identified as the location of invention. Explicitly acknowledging the central role of state support to the process of technological innovation, Trump Administration Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross asserted that ‘Many of these innovations [the Internet, smart phones, and medical science] got their start with the help of Federal R&D funding. But it was the private sector that spun these technologies out of the laboratory and into the economy’ (Ross Citation2018). In other words,‘The private sector is America’s innovation engine’ (White House Citation2011, 9). American cybersecurity policy is designed to enabled the state to take steps to address market failures, particularly through the establishment of public-private partnerships designed to meet cybersecurity threats. Yet the point of this practice, enabled through these specific imaginaries, is to enable market-led innovation in the economy as a whole; the state’s role is always conceptualised as supportive of, and external to, the innovation process (White House Citation2011; cf. Pfotenhauer and Juhl Citation2017). The impact of these imaginaries is to reproduce the institutional separation between the public sector and the private sector, or that between politics and economics, within American society as a whole. In pursuing the security of technological innovation American policy makers are attempting to maintain a series of existing boundaries between what is, and what is not, political. In the causal account of technological innovation outlined above, American pursuit of the security of innovation is merely a means to the end of American national security, defined in conventional terms as economic and military power. This is an account of how technological innovation occurs, demonstrated through American exemplars, and, in turn, how it is threatened by cyber-enabled IP theft. It links a micro-level theory of human action linked to the broadest questions of world order and American global leadership. Yet, while these aspects of the US imaginary disclose something resembling instrumental rationality, the security of technological innovation is not valued solely for impact on national power and cannot be encapsulated in these terms. Intertwined with apparently generic means-ends calculations is a normative account of how and why the continued security of technological innovation is of signal importance to the American way of life. It is to this facet of US socio-technical imaginaries that we now turn. Protecting ‘our way of life’: market-led innovation and American national identity In contemporary US national security policy actualising the creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit of the American people is understood as central to the American way of life. Threats to technological innovation threaten the very practices that comprise American’s ways of ‘being in the world’. US imaginaries articulate the processes and products of material culture as central to the identity of the national community. Securing market-led technological is thereby understood as a normative project, rather than merely the instrumental pursuit of other values. American politicians’ sense of the United States as uniquely creative and entrepreneurial is well captured in a 2016 speech by Barack Obama (Obama Citation2016; White House Citation2015b, 65). Speaking about the role of technological innovation in revitalising the city of Pittsburgh, he stated And that’s consistent with this nation, who we are – a nation born from an idea that became the world’s laboratory. There aren’t a lot of countries where one of your Founding Fathers has an idea to fly a kite in a thunderstorm and helps to fundamentally change how we think about electricity. A place where the women who solved the equations to take us into space, even though they weren’t always acknowledged. A nation whose engineers brought us the Internet. Innovation is in our DNA. Here, popular culture tropes and a mythic presentation of America’s political development intermingle to produce a powerful encapsulation of the dominant national identity constructed in US socio-technical imaginaries. The reference to Benjamin Franklin’s kite ties together innovation with the foundation of the American state. In an image that, while possibly false – the veracity of Franklin’s kite experiment to research electricity remains uncertain – nevertheless suggests that innovation is an essential aspect of the national character. ‘Who we are’, in this context, is a political community that finds its expression through a specific form of scientific and technological innovation, an understanding present throughout US policy in which market-led innovation allows the United States to realise its character. Narratives of American political development support this common-sense sociology of innovation, as contemporary US policy is linked to the historical founding of the republic. Section 1, Article 8§8 of the United States Constitution granted Congress the power ‘To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries’ (Constitution of the United States Citation1788). American officials highlight this clause as responsible for the subsequent success of American capitalism and its track record of technological innovation (IPEC 2020, Citation2018; White House Citation2017, Citation2015b). Collapsing two different historical contexts separated by 230 years into a narrative of the historical development of a national community, this idea of simultaneity – the identity of past and present – is of signal importance in producing a techno-nationalist identity (Anderson 2006 [Citation1983], 22–36). Inter-societal comparison is, of course, of central importance in these imaginaries. In the same Obama went on to stress that ‘And it is the thing that sets us apart; that ability to imagine and hypothesise, and then test and figure stuff out, and tinker and make things and make them better, and then break them down and rework them (Obama Citation2016; White House Citation2017, 2, 21). American cultural identity has always been constructed, in part, via the relational-comparative register of technological culture, with societies framed as modern, traditional, civilised or barbaric through American’s contrast of technological artefacts (Adas Citation1989; Citation2006). From the initial colonial settlement through the closing of the frontier at the end of the 19th century white European settlement was justified through technological comparison with indigenous political communities. Taking up the imperial mantel in the 20th century, American global dominance was conceived and conducted in technological registers, particularly in foreign development policy as the United States attempted to physically remake the world in its own image (Ekbladh Citation2010; Adas Citation1989, 402–418). Obama’s indicative statement highlights the weight these comparisons retain in the composition of American nationalism. Indeed, American ingenuity in creating the Internet is an oft-noted point of comparison (White House Citation2018a, passim) used to justify contemporary cybersecurity strategies, its national character materialised in information technology. These comparative exercises are couched in distinctively normative terms. Built around popular historical narratives and myths, the socio-technical imaginaries of innovation disclosed by the American state ascribe specific normative values to the US system of market-led innovation. At one level, these values are closely linked to the broader relationship between private property and political liberty that is foundational to American political thought (Foley Citation2008, 213–237). Private property ownership incentivises innovation but, just as significantly, it provides a sphere of liberty in which individuals are free to decide for themselves how to dispose of their possessions. Thus the causal story in US socio-technical imaginaries, expressed above in the notion that innovation requires fuel in the form of IP protection is buttressed by the normative argument that this reward is also an expression of justice (Delrahim Citation2018; IPEC Citation2016, 32), a view derived from a Lockean justification of private property rights as filtered through the Founding Fathers. The hard work of American entrepreneurs morally justifies property in the product of their labour and its associated material benefits (White House Citation2017, 21). More surprisingly, however, is the framing of technological innovation, and intellectual property rights, in the language of individual and national self-realisation. The most striking example comes from Dana Gioia, Poet Laureate of California, in her ‘Preamble’ to IPEC’s 2016 Report Supporting Innovation, Creativity, & Enterprise: Charting a Path Ahead. In a passage worth quoting at length, Gioia (IPEC 2016, np, italics in original) writes When Walt Whitman wrote, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” he was not discussing literature. What Whitman praised so prophetically was the vast and transformative creative energy that characterized his young nation and, indeed, democracy itself. The Greek root of poet means one who makes, creates, fashions, composes. The United States created itself – politically, socially, culturally – from the pieces of a colonial empire, and that early appetite for growth and experimentation has never been sated. American history is an achievement woven from innumerable threads of individuals acts of imagination and innovation. For Gioia, the American national character is expressed through its self-making innovations. American individualism and the ‘innumerable threads’ of everyday lives create something greater than their parts. Disclosed is a notion of the self-realisation and self-fashioning of America characteristic of Hegelian normative justifications of property rights. This passage – and the wider US discourse – suggests that the United States cannot realise its own national essence unless it can embark on market-led forms of technological innovation. Threats to intellectual property rights emanating from weaknesses in cybersecurity threaten the practices allowing Americans to express their ‘pioneering spirit’ (White House Citation2019b, Citation2018b; Citation2017, 21). This ethical concern for collective self-realisation captures the security of innovation as a project of national becoming. The teleological conception of American society, understood in terms of fulfilment of a pre-existing national character, belies the otherwise open-ended and contingent future-oriented temporalities that characterise technological innovation as a social practice. Conclusion The process of creation as an expression of American national identity sits at the heart of US national security imaginaries of technological innovation. In addition to fears about the disruption of technological innovation and its impact on geopolitical competition with China US imaginaries articulate a vision of market-led, private-property based innovation as central to the American ways of life. The latter encompass ideas about the nation, its values, and the material practices through which these are brought into being. In this way, US socio-technical imaginaries disclose a comprehensive pre-theoretical world view of the relationship between the everyday lived experiences of Americans and wider questions of geopolitics. In these broader terms, US socio-technical imaginaries are productive of American national security and foreign policies which seek to universalise its way of life through the extension of its preferred form of technological innovation. The practices undertaken to meet these goals – pursuing strong intellectual property rights protection at the World Trade Organization, pursuing technological closure around norms of appropriate Internet use, enacting trade tariffs against China, and so forth (McCarthy Citation2015, 122–147; Jablonski and Powers Citation2015) – are oriented towards reproducing the power and authority of private sector actors domestically and extending their reach globally. The causal and normative facets of US socio-technical imaginaries of innovation frame the institutional separations of American socio-technical orders – between the political and the economic, between democracy and technology, and between the public and private sector – as integral to the expression of the American character. In turn, these institutional separations reproduce the authority of certain segments of American society to design, develop, and maintain its technological infrastructures, with the reproduction of corporate power of particular note. Securing technological innovation thereby reproduces deeply rooted structures of power within American society. Conceived in these terms, innovation is designed to prevent social change, a conservative rather than revolutionary process.