I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The current atmosphere is febrile with hideous wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the looming possibility of a re-elected Trump and an escalating confrontation between China and the US/UK axis (if one can still call it that). Making sense of the various powers, their possible alliances and the global consequences is all but impossible. What almost forces me to comment on this impossible mess right now is an event that many may regard as peripheral, almost trivial, and that is the announcement by the US government that it’s to launch an antitrust case against Apple Corp for monopolising the smartphone business.
I’m not an Apple fan and use products of its rival Google, like the Android operating system and phone, in my everyday affairs. I’m also a fan of antitrust legislation, being an admirer of Thorstein Veblen (as mentioned in this blog several times) and the role his theories played in taming the monopolist corporations during the USA’s ‘Gilded Age’ in the late 1890s, and starting its brief Progressive Era. However that doesn’t help to quell a certain foreboding about this case, and to explain why I need to sketch my own perception of current geopolitical realities.
I see three principal actors in the USA, China and India, three secondary ones in Russia, The EU and the IT moguls of Silicon Valley, and then the rest of the world. If you have a problem accepting Silicon Valley as one of the world powers, then this video from Nvidia might perhaps persuade you. The next few years will be dominated by the extent to which China actually allies itself with Putin’s Russia (whose economy it supports by purchasing oil and gas) to try to overturn the post-WWII world order. Another critical factor will be whether Trump gains re-election, cripples NATO and permits Putin to threaten the EU.
But the third factor, and one perhaps better understood by techies than political scientists, is the extent to which the US has a monopoly over the most leading-edge silicon chip technology, of which it’s currently attempting to deprive China, but whose material basis lies not on the US continent but the tiny island of Taiwan. Biden has stated his intention to repatriate chip fabrication capability from Taiwan to the continental USA, but the time, expense and effort involved in rebuilding all these ‘fabs’ (chip fabrication factories) is something few really appreciate. And China has of course long ago stated its own intention to eventually grab Taiwan.
So finally I arrive at the punch line. The founders of the Silicon Valley tech revolution were nearly all inclined (even if only peripherally) to the 1960s counterculture, and though their corporations have since grown into unprecedented wealth – greater than that of many small countries, and able to exert pressure even on the US government – most have remained pretty much on what Americans describe as the ‘liberal’ wing of politics, leaning toward the Democratic Party (and yes I am aware of the big exceptions like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer). The nightmare scenario would be for this antitrust case to turn Apple toward a renewed Trump presidency, catalysing a similar shift throughout the whole sector, merging their interests with an authoritarian state and creating the basis for the sort of techno-feudal plutocracy that’s been prophesied (and criticised) by many leftwing commentators like Yanis Varoufakis and Evgeny Morozov.
