| Sumario: | Since the 1990s, Singapore has developed a steady reputation as a high technology and communications hub. Being 100 percent urbanized seems to have been an asset in the city-state’s top-down transformation from a diversified manufacturing and services economy to an increasingly digitally-oriented service node for the region and world economy.1 Indeed, Singapore has realized its digital ambition as a “Smart City” through dirigiste (interventionist) developmental policies, its authoritarian-technocratic democracy, and the strategic obsession with constructing hub capabilities where little or none existed before. This achievement is highly commendable but runs the risk of running up against contradictions in its soft power applications. Singapore is, after all, a small state with a population that is a fraction of the size of historic high technology centers such as San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and this limits its pool of information technology talent. It has also demonstrated weaknesses in cybersecurity and experienced frustration with offline Asian regional geopolitics inimical to digital economic confluences. In sum, the Singapore experience in growing its digital hub offers lessons for other countries on leapfrogging an unfavorable offline local geography by leveraging global city status.i
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