Dick Pountain /Idealog 357/ 08 Apr 2024 01:09
Unless you live permanently as an avatar in Second Life [does that even still exist?] then it can’t have escaped you that the world we actually live in has become very much more ‘interesting’, that is dangerous, over the last few years. What with epidemics, wars and deepfakery, the dot-com boom begins to feel as remote as the Middle Ages. A couple of incidents last week pushed me toward these reflections…
The first was the announcement that the US DoJ (Department of Justice) was launching an antitrust lawsuit against Apple Corp, for restraint of trade and monopolising the smartphone market. The DoJ’s complaints all arise from the ‘walled-garden’ attitude that Apple has maintained ever since its very first days under Steve Jobs, with strict control over software development and peripheral manufacture so as to completely exclude smaller companies from entering, and restrain the businesses of their larger competitors. Some of the charges are aimed at contractual restrictions, fees and taxes on the creation and distribution of ‘super apps’ for daily functions like social media, payments, banking and video messaging; hindrance of streaming apps like Spotify, Netflix and Google Photo; restricting crucial API access in the smartphone sector and excessive control over how smartwatches operate on the iOS platform, and control over digital wallets that restricts cross-platform wallets on the iPhone.
I’m very far from being an Apple fanboi: the last one of their machines I owned was an Apple IIe and I was an enthusiastic early adopter of the open architecture IBM PC – which is how I ended up here. Wearing my other hat as a commentator on politics I’m an equally enthusiastic advocate of antitrust regulation, an admirer of the Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen whose theories about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class were influential during the last great bout of US antitrust action in the 1890s which curbed the excessive power of ‘robber baron’ industrialists like the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, Vanderbilts and J. P. Morgan, ushering in a century of industrial growth and lessening inequality in the US (admittedly helped by two world wars). That progress went into reverse in the late 1970s, to a point where even Forbes Magazine now believes regulatory action is justified and that ”Apple’s business will be fundamentally changed by this lawsuit”, citing the example of Microsoft which “successfully rebounded from its own tumultuous years with regulators and has become the most valuable company in the world, ironically by becoming more open and embracing open source rather than shunning it”.
If the DoJ were to win this suit they would almost certainly then go after Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest, but as Forbes also points out the case will run for years – and the Democratic Party has at best a 50:50 chance of retaining the presidency after this November. It’s impossible to predict what a second-term, enraged Trump would do, but pursuing the case may not be high among his priorities. A horrible vision arises of Silicon Valley giants panicked into allying with him to create a doomsday authoritarian plutocracy, administered by AI robot warriors out of a Vaughn Bode comic…
Which brings me to my second event. I’m something of a fan of the quirky, German, ex-particle-physicist-and-YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, who last week posted on her channel a remarkable lament/confession about why she left academic physics. She’s already written a book, ‘Lost In Math’, excoriating her contemporaries for being seduced by pursuit of mathematical beauty away from experimental verification. In the new video she paints a gloomy picture of a profession where young physicists have to tramp the world taking short-term posts, forced to churn out less-than-important papers on topics enforced by credit-stealing superiors, all originality snuffed out. And addiction to ChatGPT and its ilk looks set to make this deadening toil worse still.
And my point? Regardless of whether Biden or Trump is POTUS this time next year US relations with China will continue to deteriorate. America will keep on withholding leading-edge semiconductors from China and attempting to repatriate fabrication abilities from Taiwan to the continental USA. China will continue to build its own semiconductor research and fabrication (even if it doesn’t actually grab Taiwan) and will prevent its best students from winding up in the USA. The decline that Hossenfelder depicts in Western academic physics will therefore become an alarming strategic deficit. I’m not of the party that hungers for war against China, and I’m sceptical whether China and Russia could ally to start such a war, but I recognise that Western physics is likely to depend ever more on Silicon Valley and less on academia, which will make the handling of regulation a matter of some delicacy and diplomacy.
[Dick Pountain is pretty handy with chopsticks]