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Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Industry, Global Competition, and Federal Policy (Congressional Research Service, October 26, 2020), 47–49, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R46581.pdf. 179Hefty government subsidies by many countries: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Measuring Distortions in International Markets: The Semiconductor Value Chain,” OECD iLibrary, November 21, 2019. 179U.S. chip manufacturing declined: SIA Board of Directors, letter to President Joe Biden, February 11, 2021, https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SIA-Letter-to-Pres-Biden-re-CHIPS-Act-Funding.pdf. 179Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS): “Summary of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018,” treasury.gov, n.d., https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/206/Summary-of-FIRRMA.pdf. 179TSMC began construction: Stephen Nellis, “TSMC Says Has Begun Construction at Its Arizona Chip Factory Site,” Reuters, June 1, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-construction-has-started-arizona-chip-factory-2021-06-01/; Alan Patterson, “TSMC to Build 5nm Fab in Arizona,” EE Times, May 15, 2020, https://www.eetimes.com/tsmc-to-build-5nm-fab-in-arizona/. 179Samsung rolled out its plans: Anton Shilov, “Samsung Foundry: New $17 Billion Fab in the USA by Late 2023,” AnandTech, February 10, 2021, https://www.anandtech.com/show/16483/samsung-in-the-usa-a-17-billion-usd-fab-by-late-2023. 179Intel broke ground: Stephen Nellis, “Intel Breaks Ground on $20 bln Arizona Plants as U.S.

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One single firm overwhelmingly dominates the contract foundry market: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). TSMC is the third-largest semiconductor company globally behind Intel and Samsung and alone accounts for over half of the global pure-play foundry market. Combined with other smaller foundries, Taiwanese companies make up 65 percent of the foundry market. (The United States, by contrast, has 10 percent of the foundry market.) Raw sales figures understate Taiwan’s significance, however. Not all semiconductors are created equal, and TSMC is not only the largest contract foundry but also a technology leader. The overarching trend in semiconductors, since the 1960s, has been toward smaller transistors, which have allowed for increased density (more transistors per square inch) on chips.

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Ross, “5 Commandments: The Rules Engineers Live By Weren’t Always Set in Stone,” IEEE Spectrum, December 1, 2003, https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/5-commandments. 28fab costs have increased: Khan and Mann, AI Chips. 28leading-edge foundry can cost $10 billion to $20 billion: Arjun Kharpal, “Apple Supplier TSMC to Build a $12 Billion Chip Factory in the U.S.,” CNBC, May 15, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/tsmc-to-build-us-chip-factory.html; Mark Lapedus and Ann Steffora Mutschler, “Regaining the Edge in U.S. Chip Manufacturing,” Semiconductor Engineering, October 26, 2020, https://semiengineering.com/can-the-u-s-regain-its-edge-in-chip-manufacturing/; “Chipmaking Is Being Redesigned. Effects Will Be Far-Reaching,” The Economist, January 21, 2021, https://www.economist.com/business/2021/01/23/chipmaking-is-being-redesigned-effects-will-be-far-reaching; AleksandarK, “TSMC Completes Its Latest 3 nm Factory, Mass Production in 2022,” TechPowerUp, November 27, 2020, https://www.techpowerup.com/275255/tsmc-completes-its-latest-3-nm-factory-mass-production-in-2022; “Samsung Considers Austin for $17 Billion Chip Plant, Seeks Tax Breaks of at Least $806 Million,” Reuters, February 4, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/samsung-considers-austin-for-17-billion-chip-plant.html. 28$40–44 billion in capital expenditures: Yang Jie, “TSMC to Invest Up to $44 Billion in 2022 to Beef Up Chip Production,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tsmc-to-invest-up-to-44-billion-in-2022-to-beef-up-chip-production-11642076019. 28each evolution of chip production: Lapedus and Steffora Mutschler, “Regaining the Edge in U.S.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The facility, known as the TSMC, is the source of more than half the world’s outsourced semiconductor manufacturing. Silicon Valley may design the chips, but Taiwan produces them. If we’re being entirely accurate, the inscription on your iPhone should actually read, “Designed by Apple in California. Chips Manufactured in Taiwan. Assembled in China.” And it’s not just every iPhone that relies on TSMC chips. So do laptops, video games, and F-35 fighter jets. In light of its centrality to the most important electronic equipment in the world, the TSMC is now the world’s tenth most valuable company.66 The TSMC had managed to straddle both sides of the Sino-U.S. tech divide, with American companies accounting for about 60 percent of its business and Chinese firms making up another 20 percent.

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-China Economic and Security Review Commission,” Center for a New American Security, January 25, 2018, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Kliman_USCC%20Testimony_20180119.pdf. 65 “Index W,” Theodore Roosevelt Association, https://theodoreroosevelt.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=991271&module_id=339551&actr=4. 66 Eamon Barrett, “Intel’s decline makes rival chipmaker TSMC the world’s 10th most valuable company,” Fortune, July 28, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/07/28/intel-7nm-delay-tsmc-stock-shares-worlds-tenth-most-valuable-company/. 67 Sherisse Pham, “Taiwan chip maker TSMC’s $12 billion Arizona factory could give the US an edge in manufacturing,” CNN, May 15, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/15/tech/tsmc-arizona-chip-factory-intl-hnk/index.html. 68 Eamon Barrett, “Semiconductors are a weapon in the U.S.-China trade war. Can this chipmaker serve both sides?

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Can this chipmaker serve both sides?,” Fortune, August 10, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/08/10/us-china-trade-war-semiconductors-chips-tsmc-chipmakers/. 69 “Chipmaker TSMC eyeing expansion of planned Arizona plant -sources,” Reuters, May 4, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/technology/chipmaker-tsmc-eyeing-expansion-planned-arizona-plant-sources-2021-05-04/. 70 Steven Lee Myers and Javier C. Hernandez, “With a Wary Eye on China, Taiwan Moves to Revamp Its Military,” New York Times, August 30, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/30/world/asia/taiwan-china-military.html. 71 Ibid. 72 David Wertime, “Former intel officers: U.S. must update its thinking on Taiwan,” Politico, October 8, 2020, https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-china-watcher/2020/10/08/former-intel-officers-were-thinking-about-taiwan-wrong-taipei-beijing-washington-conflict-490547. 73 Brad Lendon, “The US is standing firm with Taiwan, and it’s making that point very clear,” CNN, September 2, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/02/asia/china-taiwan-us-analysis-intl-hnk/index.html. 74 Paula Hancocks and Ben Westcott, “Taiwan risks being caught up in the power struggle between the United States and China,” CNN, August 15, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/14/asia/taiwan-tsai-trump-azer-china-intl-hnk/index.html. 75 “50 U.S. senators call for talks on trade agreement with Taiwan,” Reuters, October 1, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taiwan-china-idUSKBN26M7HL. 76 David R.

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

My friend, Hank Zona, used to nod his head in someone’s direction and whisper, “That guy has more chins than a Chinese phone book.” I never knew what that meant, but now I do—14 pages’ worth. The address was simply Science-based Industrial Park. The taxi driver never heard of TSMC. This was 1991. By 2001, he probably worked for TSMC. I was met in the lobby by Dr. Morris Chang. “OK, let’s go then. You’ll need a bunny suit.” I had been on enough tours to know the routine. I put the white booties over my shoes and slid on pants, a jacket and a sur- 132 Running Money gical cap to tuck all my hair into.

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I could have gone back to other venture capitalists and raised the $100 million I needed to build a fab, but they would have owned the company, not me and my team. So we looked around to see if anyone had a fab they weren’t using completely and maybe wanted to rent us some space.” “Did you find one around here?” “No, we found TSMC instead.” “Who?” “The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. All they do is run a fab and sell finished wafers to us at a fixed price. We can put anything we want on those wafers, same price. So we crank out more designs, and these guys will manufacture them all.” “This is a big change.” “It’s really no different than the publishing business.

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Investors “get” profits—it is their common language. My problem was in believing that someone would just make chips for Xilinx or any of the other fab-less chip companies that quickly followed. My annual December trip to the Far East was coming up, so I scheduled a side trip to Taipei. It was a bit more than a day trip to Kansas City. TSMC was located in Hsinchu City, a bumpy hour-plus cab ride from Taipei. I had never been to Taiwan before, but I had a whopping 18 hours to figure out how this fab-less stuff worked—no time to see the sights. Hsinchu City looked a lot like Parsippany, New Jersey: a bunch of industrial parks, a couple of malls and one medium-size hotel.

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

But in 2017, you would be asked about Intel’s strategy for dealing with the slowing of Moore’s Law. And in 2019, you would be asked about Intel’s strategy for dealing with the rise of special-purpose processors, as developed by Google and Microsoft. And in 2021, you would be asked about the company’s seeming loss of process leadership to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The idea that Intel has a single unchanging “strategy” that spans these challenges reduces the concept to a slogan or motto, like “Be the best.” Strategy is problem solving, and it is best expressed relative to a particular challenge. Strategy should be an ongoing process. This concept of strategy allows a company to have a strategy process that is not a constant restatement of some vague overall purpose and intent.

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Recently, AMD’s share of the market increased because its new Ryzen chips outperformed Intel’s current offerings.6 • Manufacturing. Intel was having major problems moving from its 14nm node to the 10nm node. Intel’s delays not only were embarrassing to the company, but put other tech companies plans at risk.7 Contract chip foundry TSMC did not seem to have experienced these problems at this node, allowing Intel’s chief chip rival, AMD, to jump ahead in its processor performance. • Missing Mobile. Intel’s strategy in mobile had been to develop the Atom, a small x86 processor optimized for mobile devices. The offering did not win many mobile phone placements.

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Study-Group Analysis The study group agreed that the set of issues facing Intel were gnarly. They differed in their opinions about importance. Ashok, one of the participants, said, “They have to solve the manufacturing issues. If they don’t, they will lose the cloud and all their revenue. If Intel cannot make the next 7nm node, it might as well just become another customer for TSMC.” Differing sharply, Abigail felt that culture was issue number one. She offered that “the whole race to smaller and smaller is coming to an end. The cloud is turning into a cost game, and Intel is not ready for that. It has coasted on the Wintel standard for years and is not prepared for cost competition.”

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

It’s remarkable how this legacy is only slowly disappearing. In AI, the lion’s share of the most advanced GPUs essential to the latest models are designed by one company, the American firm NVIDIA. Most of its chips are manufactured by one company, TSMC, in Taiwan, the most advanced in just a single building, the world’s most sophisticated and expensive factory. TSMC’s machinery to make these chips comes from a single supplier, the Dutch firm ASML, by far Europe’s most valuable and important tech company. ASML’s machines, which use a technique known as extreme ultraviolet lithography and produce chips at levels of astonishing atomic precision, are among the most complex manufactured goods in history.

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See authoritarianism; surveillance traffic optimization, 98 transcriptors, 88 transformers, 64, 90–91 transistor, 32–33, 67 Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1968), 43, 263 Tsar Bomba, 42 Tsinghua University, 121 TSMC, 251 Turing, Alan, 35, 75 23andMe, 81 2001: A Space Odyssey, 110 U Uighur ethnic cleansing, 195 Ukraine, 44, 103–4, 161–62 Unabomber, 213 United States export controls, 249–50 international cooperation and, 265–66 surveillance, 195 universal basic income (UBI), 262 University of Oxford, 101 Urban II (pope), 39 urbanization, technology waves and, 27–28 U.S.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

Somewhere, in nearly every corner of this sprawling city, someone is building a part that will end up in an iPhone, or maybe snapping the whole thing together. Of the two hundred addresses that Apple lists for its top suppliers on its annual report, nearly half are located in just two cities: here and Shenzhen. The forty suppliers here in Shanghai, like TSMC, the chip manufacturer that produces the iPhone’s ARM-based brain, are scattered far and wide across the city. When I arrive at TSMC’s headquarters, the security checkpoint is posted far from the complex, so I can’t see much of anything besides the well-groomed lawn and the mammoth gray-and-red plant walls. The guards, of course, won’t let me in for a closer look.

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My fixer and translator, Wang Yang—we’ve chosen to use a pseudonym to protect her identity—was a tremendous help in getting factory workers to talk. She’s a big reason we spoke to a couple dozen sources over the course of a handful of visits. We visited Foxconn’s Longhua and Guanlan and Pegatron’s Shanghai factory, as well as supplier factories such as TSMC, the chip fabricator. Of the Foxconn employees, Xu, Zhao, and their friend were the most candid, but many factory workers were willing to speak to us outside the gates, at lunchtime noodle shops, and at the local market. From these interviews, combined with research from the above sources, I feel confident I was able to capture a solid snapshot of the state of play at China’s electronics factories.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

High-technology Exports of East Asia Six: China, Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand Taiwan, whose numbers figure 34 above does not include because the cowardly international agencies do not recognize it, has become a remarkable technological success story. The Taiwan Semiconductor Machinery Corporation (TSMC) is the world’s largest producer of foundry chips. The Electronics Research and Service Organization (itself started by the Taiwanese government in the early 1970s to get a jump on the IT industry) started the TSMC as a joint venture with Phillips of Holland in 1987.12 Today TSMC has sales of $2.3 billion.13 Taiwan also produces such complex items as notebook and desktop PCs, video cards, and sound cards. Acer Computers of Taiwan is the world’s third-largest manufacturer of PCs, with sales of eight billion dollars.14 Taiwan’s amazing economy has produced ten billionaires.15 The Dark Continent Born Again But what hope could there be for a region impoverished by warlords, civil conflict, unending war, corruption, and brutal tyrants, after futile attempts by the West to influence events?

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Turnbull, A History of Singapore 1819–1975, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 89. 11.http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf05300/pdf/tables.pdf. 12.Alice Amsden, The Rise of the “Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 221. 13.http://www.tsmc.com/english/a_about/a_about_index.htm. 14.Amsden, Rise of the “Rest,” p. 193, 199; http://www.brandingasia.com/cases/ case1.htm. 15.http://www.forbes.com/lists/results.jhtml?passListId=10&passYear=2004&pass ListType=Person&resultsStart=1&resultsHowMany=25&resultsSortProperties= %2Bnumberfield1%2C%2Bstringfield1&resultsSortCategoryName=rank& category1=Country+of+Residence&searchParameter1=7Str%7C%7CPatCS% 7C%7CTaiwan&category2=category&searchParameter2=unset. 16.Jonathan Spence, To Change China: Western Advisers in China, New York: Penguin Books, 1969. 17.Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China, 1931–1949, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 37. 18.John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 1998, p. 284. 19.Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2d ed., New York: Norton, 1999. 20.Jespersen, American Images, p. 120; Fairbank and Goldman, China, p. 291. 21.Rist, The History of Development, p. 65. 22.For year ending in September 2004, http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/ statistics/product/naics/naicsctry/imports/i316214.html. 23.Amsden, Rise of the “Rest,” p. 217. 24.http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/eap/eap.nsf/Countries/China/42F2084B942D74 C68p. 5256C7600687DBF?

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

From the United States, participants in the PortalPlayer network included Texas Instruments and Linear Technologies, a small company specializing in power-management integrated circuits. From Japan, PortalPlayer recruited Sharp to provide flash memory, Sony for battery technology, and Toshiba for hard-disk-drive technology. In Taiwan, PortalPlayer developed close relationships with both United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to access silicon-foundry capabilities. In effect, PortalPlayer had deployed a pull platform to drive rapid iterations of innovative MP3 designs by accessing and connecting with world-class capabilities from specialized companies around the globe. When Apple came up with an idea for a new MP3 product line coupled with an online music store, it approached PortalPlayer to mobilize its global design network; as a result, Apple was able to enter the market with its iPod just nine months after the initial product approval.

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See Geographic spikes Standards adopted through shaping strategies adoption of McLean’s containerized shipping driven through shaping strategies Novell’s network operating system as de facto of protocols designed to facilitate interactions Visa Start-up companies Stocks (equities) Stocks of knowledge compared to flows of new knowledge as diminishing in value as means, ends, toward knowledge flows Storage law for data Stress in push systems Stress in the workplace Strong ties Success Super-nodes Surfaces, exposing Surfermag.com Surfingthemag.com Surfline.com Sur vival access as essential toig and serendipity Tacit knowledge about how to do new things conveyed through conferences cultivated through listening, empathy described versus explicit Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) Talent development institutions reoriented around needed by institutions as new trajectory of institutions and open-innovation efforts supported by focused initiatives TCP/IP standard Teahupoo, Tahiti Teams and guilds as collaborative creation efforts interacting, as creation space success elements as peer-to-peer networks performance-driven of surfers World of Warcraft (WoW) social networks Teasers for online social network attention Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital (Perez) Technology CPU innovation breaks down push distinguished from platforms as tool for reaching talent outside institutions Tertius Gaudens Tertius Iungens Tesla Motors Texas Instruments Thinking for a Living (Davenport) Thomas, Doug T-Mobile Too big to fail concept Toshiba Tow-in surfing Toyota Toys and games industries Training programs Trajectory defined as meaningful destination as element of journey toward pull igigig for finding, motivating, individual passion, creativity as shaping view of talent development for institutions Travel services as search engines Travelocity The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (Merton and Barber) “The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Sarendip” fable Twitter in corporate contexts Iranian protests videos secured script used by protestors in Iran TWsurf.com Uncertainty.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Supply chains of companies like Apple, Samsung, and Intel are difficult to unravel and layered on top of one another, “a complex structure of supply chains within supply chains, a zooming fractal of tens of thousands of suppliers, millions of kilometers of shipped materials and hundreds of thousands of workers included within the process even before the product is assembled on the line.”327 A typical smartphone could have tens of thousands of individual components, sourced from hundreds of different companies, that snake their way through a sprawling network of miners, smelters, traders, shippers, and manufacturers in dozens of different jurisdictions. For example, the Apple A12 chip, designed in Cupertino, California, may be sourced from chip fabrication facilities in Taiwan, operated by a company like TSMC. From there, the chip may be packaged and tested by a company called Amkor, in the Philippines, and from there shipped to the Foxconn assembly plants in China before then being shipped around the world after assembly to wherever the consumers are located. Tracking the individual components of such a supply chain to ensure compliance with labour and environmental safeguards is extremely challenging for even the most well-intentioned company.

…

., 241 Tracking GhostNet (Citizen Lab), 204 Traffic & Conversion Summit, 101 TripleLift, 60 Trudeau, Justin, 192 Trump, Donald, 3, 182, 287 as false information source, 4, 110, 120, 268, 269 social media use, 110–111, 269, 303 Trump, Donald, Jr., 88 Trump, Melania, 110 tsmc Co., 227 Tubaigy, Salah Muhammed, 137 Turkmenistan, 150–151, 192 23andMe, 71–72 Twitter, 2, 28, 48, 107, 111 activism on, 138, 139, 142, 156–157 data retrieval from, 183, 189–190 false information on, 84, 110, 126, 131, 140–142 UC Browser (app), 68–69 Ukraine, 82–83 United Airlines, 59 United Arab Emirates (uae), 149–152, 171 United Fruit Co., 116 United Kingdom, 3, 82, 118 Government Communications Headquarters, 43–44 United Nations, 279, 325, 326 United States.

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

By applying or removing small voltages of electrical current and electromagnetic pressure, we can flip that switch on and off as we choose, and so let the current flow or not as we choose. Right now, in the semiconductor fabricators of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the machines that it has bought (from ASML Holding in the Netherlands and Applied Materials in Silicon Valley) and installed and programmed are carving thirteen billion such semiconductor solid-state switches with attached current and control paths onto a piece of a wafer that will become a crystal silicon “chip” about two-fifths of an inch wide and two-fifths of an inch tall. TSMC’s marketing materials imply that the smallest of the carved features is only twenty-five silicon atoms wide.

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

State-owned companies were successful in the steel industry in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, steadily raising the quality of output in an industry that seems given to bureaucratic-style public sector control. In Taiwan’s state-dominated industrial policy, public firms such as United MicroElectronics and TSMC were also successful in getting to and remaining at the forefront of many types of semiconductor production. However, Taiwan and the rest of north-east Asia had plenty of examples of state firm failure – or at least underperformance compared with private companies. In Taiwan and Korea, for instance, state-owned shipbuilders failed to keep pace with private ones.

…

See Tibor Scitovsky, ‘Economic Development in Taiwan and South Korea’, in L. Lau, ed., Models of Development: A Comparative Study of Economic Growth in South Korea and Taiwan (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Affairs, 1986), p.160. 64. The best known are United MicroElectronics, which is state-controlled but with five private partners, and TSMC, the government joint venture with Holland’s Philips which in 1986 invested in a first ASICs foundry in Taiwan. See Wade, Governing the Market, p. 103. 65. See Kuo et al., The Taiwan Success Story, p. 109. The authors calculated that exports accounted for 22.5 per cent of increased manufacturing production in 1956–61 and 68 per cent in 1971–6. 66.

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

Unlike people, sensors work tirelessly, never needing sleep and never demanding a raise. They notice changes where humans miss them, thus ensuring labels are correctly affixed to bottles moving through a factory assembly line. They are used in nuclear power plants for early detection of leaks. Some semiconductor foundries, such as TSMC in Taiwan, are attempting to build what’s known as “lights-out factories,” where sensors will eliminate the need for any employees at all. Unconfirmed reports indicate they are coming close. By the early 1990s, sensors had become so inexpensive and so collectively powerful when used in networks that engineers were starting to believe the number of ways and places they could be useful was almost limitless.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

As you read in the previous chapter, Apple got its boards stuffed at unregulated low piece rates by contracted immigrant employees, and Apple was far from alone. An estimated one-third of the region’s Indochinese immigrant population was employed assembling printed wire boards in the 1990s, a whopping 40,000 people.25 The increasing sophistication of Taiwanese contract manufacturers—led by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which was founded by former Texas Instruments employee and Stanford electrical engineering PhD Morris Chang in 1987—also allowed firms to outsource progressively more work. In China, Deng Xiaoping’s pro-market policies allowed the Taiwanese contractors to “onshore” production to the mainland in turn, where firms enjoyed the privileges that came with the People’s Republic’s first capitalist production enclaves.

…

vii In 1986, the Treasury Department imposed a record $4.75 million fine on Bank of America for failing to report cash transactions across its California branches as required by anti-laundering regulations. Nathaniel C. Nash, “Bank of America Is Told to Pay U.S. $4.75 Million Fine,” New York Times, January 22, 1986. viii Coincidentally, Knight overlapped at Stanford with TSMC founder Morris Chang. Though their firms came to represent different moments in the globalization sequence, we can recognize them as two principals in the same ballet. ix Zimbardo does not seem to consider that passersby correctly assumed that the graduate students had permission from the owner to destroy the car for some inscrutable scientific purpose related to the university and that they were not engaged in any criminal or even (directly) antisocial conduct.

…

The comparison treats the factory as a total environment, like a state. Normally the workplace is only one part of a person’s life, making the numbers difficult to compare. Brian Merchant, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (Little, Brown, 2017), 272. iii A Taiwanese onshoring contractor with Western shareholders, like TSMC, doesn’t have the same problems, though in this case it was their chips being blocked. Bob Davis and Katy Stech Ferek, “U.S. Moves to Cut Off Chip Supplies to Huawei,” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2020. iv This transition has been most visible in electronics, but it’s not exclusive. In a 2021 essay, James Meek examines wind tower factories in Glasgow, Scotland, and Phu My, Vietnam, both owned by the same South Korean company.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

By acting as a lead customer (often paying on a cost-plus basis), they effectively funded America’s businesses to invest in the intangibles needed to produce and sell chips, an investment that proved valuable when the businesses expanded into commercial markets. The Taiwanese government’s support for its nascent semiconductor industry in the 1970s and 1980s (particular through its technology agency ITRI) worked similarly: ITRI did not just invest in R&D, it incubated companies like UMC and TSMC, investing in the intangibles they needed to run semiconductor foundries effectively and link them to the global semiconductor supply chain. The success rate of industrial policy in supporting infant industries is an open question; but to the extent that it works, it is an example of government investment in non-R&D public intangibles.

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation by Sebastien Page

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Cal Newport, capital asset pricing model, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, global macro, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, iterative process, loss aversion, low interest rates, market friction, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, oil shock, passive investing, prediction markets, publication bias, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs, TSMC, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

When the commodities supercycle was in full swing, in mid 2008, energy and materials accounted for more than a third of MSCI EM market capitalisation and tech companies just a tenth. Last month, the commodities group was barely an eighth of EM market cap, and tech companies more than a quarter. This should be no surprise. EM tech companies include the Chinese internet trio of Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu and longer-established names such as Hon Hai and TSMC of Taiwan and Samsung Electronics of South Korea.6 Emerging markets stocks have become more “high tech” and less commodity-dependent. Consumer sectors have also become more prominent. Like the S&P 500, all else being equal, the asset class should be more resilient to traditional economic downturns than in the past.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Table 1.1: Market Capitalisation of the World’s Top Tech Companies Company Market Cap (billion) Employees Apple 673.91 50,250 Microsoft 406.36 128,000 Google 364.27 53,861 Alibaba 285.14 22,072 Facebook 206 8,348 Oracle 182.22 122,000 Intel Corp 165.6 107,600 IBM 162.38 431,212 Cisco 135.86 74,040 Qualcomm 116.99 31,000 TSMC 112.19 40,483 SAP 83.29 263,000 2894.21 1,331,866.00 Source: NASDAQ stock quotes Tech companies are very efficient producers of profit compared with other large listed companies. Walmart, for example, has a market cap that is below Alibaba’s but employs more than 1.4 million Americans alone.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

., 8, 32, 75, 98 Super Mario Odyssey, 30, 32 Sushiswap, 223 sustainability, 125, 182, 209–10, 222–23 Sweeney, Tim, 12, 19, 44, 96 on advertising in the Metaverse, 264 on Apple, 22–23, 184 on blockchains and the Metaverse, 234–35 “critical mass of working pieces,” 244–48 on powerful companies controlling the Metaverse, 285, 289 on the scope of the Metaverse, 14, 119–20 “Sweeney’s Law,” 100–101, 181–82 on the timeline of the Metaverse, 239, 245 see also Epic Games; Fortnite; Unreal game engine tablets, xi failed Apple Newton tablet, 145 “iPad Natives,” 13, 249 iPads, xi, 294 lidar scanning, 159–60 techno-capitalists, xiii, 22 TeleGeography, 85, 130 Tencent, 19, 24, 166 “hyper-digital reality,” xii, 7n, 239, 307n lawsuit over game item trading, 128 use of facial recognition, xiii WeChat, 205–6, 209, 214, 303–4 Tesla, 101, 166, 271 3D, 29–30, 33–36, 58 avatars, 40, 124, 144 common standards for, 135–40, 248 immersive, 30, 37 isometric (2.5D), 9, 30 objects, 36, 40–41, 248, 299 televisions, xiv, 5 “3D internet,” 34 TikTok, 28, 34, 116, 298 Time magazine, 66, 73 Tinder, 19, 215, 255, 259, 261, 308 Tivoli Cloud, 193 T-Mobile, 212 Tonic Games Group, 137 Top Policy Group, x Totem AR headset, 144 TouchWiz OS, 213 trolls and trolling, 129, 229, 291 “Trouble with Bubbles, The,” 5 TSMC, 166 Twitch, 50, 135, 179, 278, 298 Twitter, 92, 129, 138, 229, 287, 300 2001: A Space Odyssey, xi, 305 ultra-wideband (UWB) chips, 160 “uncanny valley,” 82–83 Uncensored Library, 11 Uniform Resource Locator (URL), 38–39 Uniswap, 223, 233 United Nations, 243 United States v. Microsoft Corporation, 16, 165 Unity game engine, xii, 20–21, 62, 66–67 appeal of, 106–9, 131–32, 175–76 competitors to, 278 developer licensing with, 106–7 Facebook and, 276–77 financial dimensions of, 113, 115–19, 122n, 214 Google Cardboard and, 142 interoperability and, 107, 122n, 136 use in animation and film, 118–19, 257–59 use in engineering and design, 31, 118, 136 see also Riccitiello, John Universal Scene Description (USD), 136, 160 Unreal game engine, 12, 62, 66–67 appeal of, 105–10, 131–32, 175–76 competitors to, 278 developer licensing with, 106–7, 181, 284–85, 297 financial dimensions of, 113, 116–17 interoperability and, 107, 122n, 136 Live Link Face app, 159 use in animation and film, 118–19, 257–58 use in engineering and design, 118, 136, 266 see also Epic Games; Fortnite Unreal Tournament 1, 101 Upland, 115 US Air Force Research Laboratory, 65 US Army, 144, 267–78 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 251–52 US Department of Defense, x, 296 user acquisition, 191 user-generated content, 24 user interfaces brain-to-computer interfaces (BCIs), xi, 154–55, 204–5 haptic feedback/interfaces, 151–52, 252, 261, 291–92 input delay, 80–84 skeuomorphism in, 47, 307 US Federal Reserve, 168–70, 302 US Securities and Exchange Commission, xii Valve, 177–79, 181–82, 225, 247.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

[It] delivers at least 30 percent and sometimes more than 50 percent of the entire U.S. consumption of products ranging from soaps and detergents to compact discs and pet food; The world’s supply of iron ore is controlled by three firms (Vale, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton); A few immense firms like Mexico’s Cemex control the world’s supply of cement; Whirlpool’s takeover of Maytag in 2006 gave it control of 50 to 80 percent of U.S. sales of washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and a very strong position in refrigerators; Nike imports up to 86 percent of certain shoe types in the United States—for basketball, for instance—and more than half of many others; As of March 2009, Google had captured 64 percent of all online sear/fony ches in the United States; TSMC and UMC have together captured 60 percent of the world’s demand for semiconductor foundry service—in which a company serves as a sort of printing press for chips that are designed and sold by other firms—and have concentrated that business mainly in one industrial city in Taiwan; Corning has captured a whopping 60 percent share of the business of supplying [LCD glass].13 These are just market concentration statistics.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

In April 2020 the ban of the purchase of Huawei equipment came into full effect. Then in May, the U.S. Commerce Department dramatically raised the stakes by requiring a license for anyone using American equipment to produce chips for sale to Huawei. The leading chip foundries in Asia, South Korean Samsung and Taiwanese TSMC, would have to choose between access to state-of-the-art U.S. manufacturing equipment and their giant markets in China.80 To go one step further, in September the Commerce Department widened the sanctions from Huawei to SMIC, China’s leading manufacturer of microchips. At the same time, it exerted pressure on European governments and businesses to cease delivery of essential chip-making equipment to SMIC.81 There was an “unacceptable risk,” the United States declared, that equipment would find its way into the hands of the Chinese military.