Tech Won't Save Us - Does Banning TikTok Make Sense? w/ Shoshana Wodinsky & Daniel Greene

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Shoshana Wodinsky to discuss the unconvincing arguments being made for a TikTok ban in the United States, then by Daniel Greene to explore how the turn against Chinese technology signals a shift in US policy on the internet and technology. Shoshana Wodinsky is a freelance reporter, previously at Marketwatch and Gizmodo. She writes the Tubes newsletter. Daniel Greene is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies and the author of The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope. Follow Shoshana on Twitter at @swodinsky and Daniel at @Greene_DM.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network. Also mentioned in this episode:Paris wrote about the effort to ban TikTok and why it shows the US desire to protect its technological dominance.Shoshana broke down the Congressional hearing with TikTok’s CEO in her newsletter and explained how data brokers get data from many social media apps.A priest was outed through his Grindr data, which was part of a campaign by Catholic conservatives to identify priests using gay dating apps.The Strava fitness app gave away the location of secret US military bases when soldiers used the app on their runs.The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have been buying US phone data.Meta paid a firm linked to the Republican Party to smear TikTok.In Foreign Affairs, Dan Wang explained how China has developed its tech industry with insights gained through the manufacturing process.After TikTok, there’s a campaign to get Shein in the crosshairs of lawmakers.Adam Tooze wrote for Foreign Policy about why the US shouldn’t feel it can dictate the path of China’s development.Support the show

If you talk about data like it's one sort of amorphous, solid lump, the way that kind of Congress people have done until now, you end up with privacy legislation that's full of holes and really easy to manipulate in like big tech's favor, which is what we saw in California and why they needed to update their law, the CCPA, like after a year. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and I have a very exciting show for you this week. But before we get into it, just a reminder that Tech Won't Save Us turned three years old this month, which is very exciting, I think. over on patreon.com so that we can keep making this fantastic high quality show with these critical interviews and perspectives on the tech industry for you every single week so that I can do the research that goes into putting these shows together so that I can have these fantastic conversations with the guests that we have on the show so that Eric can put it together and make it sound so great every week and so that Bridget can make our transcripts. And on top of that, if we hit 200 new supporters this month,

we're going to make a special series on Elon Musk, looking into how he became this kind of genius figure that we're all expecting to save the world, how this myth was created, how it has benefited him, and why it's so essential that we break this myth, that we stop seeing him as this genius if we ever want to hope to build a better world. And so if you want to help us hit that goal of 200 new supporters this month, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus, become a supporter, and I'll also send you some

stickers in the mail over the next couple months if you do that. Listener support is essential to being able to make Tech Won't Save Us every single week, to ensuring that the critical perspectives on the tech industry that we talk about in each episode reach as many people as possible. And so if you're able to help us out with that, I would really appreciate it. Now in this week's episode, it's time to talk about the proposed TikTok ban and the larger move against Chinese technology that is being made by the US government. And for the first time this week, I decided to try a slightly different format. So we have two shorter interviews in this episode to address two different angles of this conversation. Because when I thought about addressing it, I said, you know, I don't want two kind of long kind of TikTok episodes. I want to address this issue in a single episode. But I wanted to talk about, first of all, TikTok in particular,

and whether the arguments that, you know, lawmakers and various other folks are making against it really makes sense. You know, is it really sending data back to the CCP to spy on Americans and all this sort of stuff? You know, what is actually happening with this app? How should we understand it? And then I also wanted to understand, you know, what is this kind of turn, not just against TikTok, but against Chinese technology as a whole, mean for kind of US tech policy? Because for a long time, we had this idea that the internet needed to be open, that we needed to allow the internet and digital technologies to spread to every country around the world. And we couldn't kind of have limits on how those things worked. But now we

can see that the US is turning against that approach. And so why did it adopt that type of policy in the first place? And what explains the turn in this moment? You know, I think that we approach these conversations through the lens of speech very often. But what does it actually mean to look at U.S. market power and how these various policy approaches have actually helped the U.S. government and the U.S. tech industry? So to explore those two topics, I have two fantastic guests who have also been on the show in the past. So first up, I'll be talking to Shoshana Wadinski, a freelance reporter who's previously worked at MarketWatch and Gizmodo, and who writes the Tubes newsletter that of course refers to the internet. And so we'll be talking about this specific app, you know, how, you know,

not just TikTok, but many other social media apps liaise with ad trackers and data brokers and, you know, how this muddies this whole conversation and shows that just banning a specific app wouldn't make much of a difference. Then I talked to Daniel Green, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies and the author of The Promise of Access, Technology Inequality and the Political Economy of Hope. And we talk about, you know, the U.S.'s approach to technology and the internet, the policies that were put in place in the 1990s and early 2000s and how that shaped the internet that we have today and how we should understand

how those policies are changing in this moment and why the U.S. is kind of altering its approach, not just to TikTok and social media apps, but to Huawei and semiconductors and these other aspects of U.S. tech policy and the technologies that we rely on and how we should understand all of this. So I hope that you enjoy this format. I hope that you enjoy these two perspectives. I hope that it helps to fill you in more on these issues. And, you know, most importantly, gives you probably a bit of a different perspective than you've tended to be hearing on this discussion in other places. Obviously, the goal of the show is always to give you critical perspectives on

these things. And if we feel that important perspectives are not being out there in the kind of general conversation, I feel like it's kind of our job to intervene in that and to present a different perspective on these issues, especially when they can be so heated like things are now when it comes to anything that has to do with China and technology. So before we get started, just a final note that if you want to support the show this month for its third birthday and to help us hit our goal, you can join supporters like Dylan in Denmark, Johnny in Tokyo, Matt L from Somerville, Zach in San Francisco, Emil in Windhoek, Namibia, Frank from Ann Arbor, Mary Beth in Milwaukee, Simon from Halifax, Kendra from Athens, Georgia,

Kaylin in Saskatoon, Mike in Boston, and Charlie from Copenhagen by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy our first interview with Shoshana Wodinski. Shoshana, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. I'm very happy to have you on the show because obviously all of this stuff has been going on recently with TikTok. You know, this is something that is not entirely new. We saw it during the Trump campaign and you were writing about it during that time when you were working at Gizmodo.

But now, you know, the Biden administration and, you know, the U.S. Congress have kind of brought this back. TikTok is back in the news. The government is talking about potentially banning it. And it's already been kind of banned from government devices in many states across the United States, I believe federally as well. And of course, many other Western countries have done the same and followed suit. Now, on March 23rd, TikTok CEO was in front of the US Congress to answer questions. And I just kind of want to start us off with the big picture. And then we can zoom in on specific aspects of this. But what were your thoughts on the hearing and, you know, the larger U.S. campaign that is being waged against TikTok? How long do you have? I wrote several thousand words about the first hour of the hearing alone.

As it was going on, I was talking to a few other reporters in the space about this. I said that it felt kind of like five different tech hearings all cobbled together in some kind of like nightmarish golem. Because the questions being asked, they kind of related to each other. They were all about apps, they were all about phones, all about tech. But it sounded like sometimes that they were talking about completely different companies. When they were talking about TikTok, they were getting a lot of basic stuff wrong half the time. And look, I say that I'm an optimist about this stuff. When it comes to tech regulation, we're seeing great moves being made against like Google, for example, which is facing several antitrust suits by like dozens of states. But then you watch something like this, the same Congress people that eye movements for either targeted ad purposes or something like that. And I was listening to that and I was like, where did you get this idea? I wasn't even mad. I was just confused by a lot of the hearing. Yeah, I would say when I was reading your newsletter, I was also frequently very

confused because you not only kind of had your thoughts on these different things that the Congress people were saying, but you also took out of the transcript some of these different things and really just kind of wild assertions that in some cases had some kind of grounding, but in other cases just seemed completely out there. Wild assertions that didn't let him get a word in edgewise. Like they would say something more than once. A congressperson would say something completely out of left field and very much not true. And then she would just be like, am I allowed to respond to this? And they would say, no, you have to talk to them. I came away from that hearing feeling bad for the guy. This is his first ever tech hearing, like against like Zuckerberg or Pichai or Dorsey.

I don't think Congress people have been this mad in a long time at one of these hearings. And I think that's kind of owing to them being mad. Like they picked the one thing they wanted to be mad about, even if it barely related to the app. And they were like, this is my chance. I'm going to do it. And you came away from a hearing that was more confusing than comprehensive, which is why I was thinking, I'm like, everyone else, rightfully, is going to be pointing out how batshit this entire hearing was. And they're going to do it a lot more eloquently than I would. And also, I've been writing that take for four years. So I was like, cigarette in hand.

What if I take these people at their word and try to see if there's anything salvageable in here? I kind of noodled around with it a little bit. I literally made a pie chart when I was listening to the hearing. And like, every time I heard like a claim that was actually pretty grounded in reality, and then immediately heard like, something that was barely coherent, I was like, okay, maybe we can make like some sort of like fractions out of this. And in my newsletter, I was like, okay, if you go through every single claim, which I didn't, I went through the first hour. After that first hour, what I came away with was like, maybe like a seventh,

if I'm being generous, maybe like a seventh of their claims were sort of legitimate. And the rest of them were either wrong, just like absolutely ridiculous. They wouldn't be addressed by some sort of ban at all. Or they were not only TikTok's problem, but Meta's and Twitter's and Google's as well. I mean, if the first hour is representative, then like there's kind of your answer. Absolutely. And, you know, I think you can see on one hand, you know, the Congress people tend to use these hearings in that kind of way where they want to kind of get their position in so that their supporters can see it so they can take the clip and put it elsewhere.

But I think you can also see that this is a CEO from an app that operates in China. That's a Chinese company that is not one of the big American companies that, you know, they still kind of do want to do well because it's good for the American economy. In this case, they really don't care. And they don't mind like just really kind of taking out all of their anger about social media more broadly on this guy who's come over to answer their questions. During the hearing, a lot of these senators were championing like their own version of like a privacy or like a tech bill. I heard it became kind of like they were doing these kind of promotional laps around the CEO. And I'm like, you want to look hard on big tech to get support for this bill that you have. And it just so happened that this guy was in the hot seat.

That's why I said I kind of came away feeling bad because it really was kind of a wrong place, wrong time. Obviously, any multi-billion dollar conglomerate does not need our pity. But I was looking at him and I'm just like, oh, I have kind of a bleeding heart about this stuff. It's my fault. So I do want to get into some of those specifics that you were talking about, some of the claims that they were making. And, you know, I pulled out some of these things as I was reading your piece that you wrote, which, of course, I'll link to in the show notes. I was reading one quote by a Republican congressperson, Kathy McMorris-Rogers, and she says, the Chinese Communist Party can use this as a tool to

manipulate America as a whole. And I feel like that kind of plays into this broader kind of assumption or this broader accusation that's being made around TikTok that not only can it collect a ton of data, but it's funneling that data back to the Chinese Communist Party, which is getting all this stuff on the American public, and then using that to kind of shape what the American public sees to kind of, you know, engage in these misinformation, disinformation campaigns that we often hear talked about. And so I wonder how kind of accurate these sorts of arguments are around TikTok's data collection, handing that to the Chinese government and all these things that are associated with it. What do you make of that? I am a little bit rusty because it's been a while since I've had to make a living off of following this stuff. But there's been a lot of really good substantial

research, like Citizen Lab in particular has done a lot of good stuff here, where they kind of break down exactly what the app is collecting and where it's going. TikTok, the US company, which is legally kind of separate, I believe, from Douyin, which is back in mainland China, works off of servers, I believe, in California. And they've also made a deal with Oracle that you reported on a few years ago where, you know, a lot of their data from the United States is stored on their servers, right? Right, exactly. But when you talk about data going from the phone that you're holding in your hand onto a server in San Francisco or in China or wherever, it's not always a straight line. In my writing, because I write about advertising a lot, like advertising tech, typically not on platforms as large as TikTok, but sometimes that changes, there will be these

sorts of intermediaries that can kind of swipe in and like siphon off different pieces of data from the stream that's going from your phone to that server. Sometimes it stops by multiple servers. And so I believe if memory serves, we have no evidence. When I checked this like two years ago, I believe I found American servers being pinged and nothing else. We have nothing on paper that shows data from the apps in an American's hand going to a server back in like Beijing. That said, there's some Chinese national security laws that basically mandate if a government official there asks for data from TikTok, they could say no, they could kind of deny it. But in the past, when tech companies have had foreign workers operating in like Beijing or like Shanghai or anywhere around there. There's stories that have come out about the Chinese government making these employees' life basically hell until the American company kind of like kowtows to their demands.

So when I was covering Trump's ban three years ago, it was a different world back then. Donald Trump was president. We were all stuck in our homes. Everyone was freaking out. And I believe you kind of felt this this time around with your own piece. I was getting a lot of pushback that my coverage was kind of ignoring the red threat that China could bring on all of us. And I was like, you know what? A lot of those critiques were in really bad faith and

just ignored what I had written. But I was like, the same way that I took lawmakers out there were this time, I was like, okay, I will look into this and see how other kind of tech companies have fared. And it turns out they haven't necessarily fared that great. The Chinese government can be a little scary. So instead, my question wasn't, will a TikTok ban do anything of substance? Instead, my question was, let's assume TikTok gets banned. Why not? What else could the Chinese government do? What other sorts of methods do they have at their disposal to get into all of our pockets? And it turns out I found a lot, circumstances depending. Yeah, I think you put it really well there, right?

Because I think that this is a really important angle on this story. And the thing that we need to understand is that the way it's often being presented by people in government is that if we ban TikTok, then that cuts off the ability for China to access all of our data because we're using this app, right? But if we actually look at the connections, as you've outlined in some of the work that you've done, that exist between all of the apps that we use on our phones, whether they are ones that are created by Chinese companies or not, even, you know, social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram that are controlled by American companies that we're all very familiar with using. Because as you were saying, of the advertising that happens there and the data that's collected

for that advertising by intermediaries and data brokers, that because of that, that offers many different ways that that data can get back to China or to anywhere else or to any other actor who might want to buy it or get access to it. You know, there's been reporting that at the FBI, that the Department of Homeland Security is buying data from these data brokers as well. And so that shows us that just shutting down TikTok is not going to be a way to solve this problem if it's something that is even happening in the first place. Right. There was actually, there was a story that came out pretty recently that was really kind of apropos to everything that's going on right now. Do you remember way, way back when, you know, the gay dating app Grindr? Everyone knows it. It's everyone's favorite. I'm not sure

if you remember, but Grindr was actually owned by a Chinese gaming company for many years. And there was some sort of legal situation where they were goaded into selling it to an American group. Smash cut to, I believe it was earlier this year, that the Washington Post put out a story where this priest was outed by some shady group that had somehow gotten his location data using a gay dating app that he had secretly hidden on his phone. So this shady group had full carte blanche access to his location. Grinder denied that it was possible Grinder denied that it was possible. Everyone denied that it was possible. And it was owned by an American company. So what's the big deal? The kind of methodology that this shady group used to get that priest's location and track him from his home to the gay club that he wasn't supposed to be at and then back home. The way that they did that was there's a data flow between that

priest's phone and the servers that the company owns. And when it comes to advertising, you have sometimes 10 or 15 or literally hundreds of other folks in the middle that all operate certain things like some of them will be doing analytics, some of them will be doing user acquisition, some of them will be serving ads or measuring how well those ads perform. And what this shady group did was without Grindr's know-how, they were able to set up shop somewhere between one of those possibly hundreds of middlemen and kind of blend in. And because of the way data works, they were specifically able to siphon off location data from that stream. So, I mean, this stuff was used to like out one guy, but that's not the only group that's doing something like this. It's kind of an open secret in the ad tech world. Apps or websites have an agreement with advertisers and maybe a few middlemen and they shake on it. But occasionally, a bad actor in the US or otherwise is free to kind of swoop in and kind

of snarf stuff up. And in fact, you've mentioned a piece that I'd written three years ago, where some of those cross-border partnerships are actually codified. I've written about the company formerly known as Facebook. They have an active program where they work with Chinese advertisers. I know for a fact that there's ad agencies in Beijing that regularly work with Twitter and Snapchat. And because of the way advertising works, you need data from a person's device in order to run that ad in the first place. Sometimes it's location data, sometimes it's an IP address, but something's being traded off there. And my pet peeve with a lot of this stuff is when people talk about data protection, they never really clarify what kind of data, which sounds like I'm being kind

of an asshole. And like, yeah, I am. But at the same time, you know, that shady group was able to take that priest's location. They didn't know his home address. They had like a geofence, like some sort of like a rough spot on a map where he was. They weren't able to get his name. They managed to figure out who he was because they saw him go to a house and then to a gay club. And then they were like, oh, that's this sky's address. So are you worried about your precise location getting leaked? Sure, of course. A lot of people are. There was that story with Strava a few years ago where military people were having their locations leaked by the app. So okay, you can take care of location and iOS devices thankfully do this. But what about something like your credit card history or your work history or who your fiance is? that kind of Congress people have done until now, you end up with privacy legislation that's full of holes and really easy to manipulate in like big tax favor, which is what we saw

in California and why they needed to update their law, the CCPA, like after a year. I think it's a really good point. And it gives us important insight into how this actually works and why a TikTok ban doesn't address the problems that these legislators claim that they are interested in addressing, right? Because if you look at it, if you're just concerned about Chinese apps, there's many other Chinese apps that people are downloading from the app store, not just TikTok, right? And if you're actually concerned about all these data issues, these are issues with many

other apps and not just TikTok. going to have your home address because that's how it's going to mail you those shoes. So I was like kind of looking at it and I'm like, is it because TikTok is presumably getting that data and manipulating us? Other apps do that too. There's countless stories of like foreign regimes taking like advantage of Twitter mobs, for example. That's besides the fact that Twitter already is giving data to folks abroad that are also beholden to these same laws that the Chinese government has in place. So by banning TikTok, you're just going to make a lot of teenagers mad more than anything. And obviously, despots and bad actors, they're not going to go away just because TikTok isn't there. They're just going to follow you to where the

people are. That's how they work. Absolutely. And, you know, to pull another quote from the article that you wrote, this congressperson that I mentioned before, Kathy McMorris-Rogers, she said in this hearing, TikTok has repeatedly chosen the path for more control, more surveillance, and more manipulation, as if every social media app hasn't done the exact same thing. But you mentioned the algorithm there and the idea that TikTok is making us believe certain things and whatnot. What do we know about TikTok's algorithm and what they're actually doing and how this works? Because this is something that the American social media companies seem particularly concerned about because the TikTok algorithm does seem to be more effective than what they've been doing for a number of

years now. To back up really quickly, over the years, because I started covering TikTok, TikTok's privacy is used specifically way before it was kind of this blockbuster app. So for a long time, I got used to following developers based in China or based in Malaysia that were working for the company. There just wasn't anybody in the States back then. And I also noticed they tend to be more open about sharing exactly what's going on inside the company there than they are with folks in the US. And I believe one of the lawmakers during the hearing asked, like, why are you so nervous? Why are you trying to bury like your company's Chinese ties? And I'm just like, gosh, I wonder why.

Because then this shit happens. So while I was writing up this 3000 word newsletter, I wanted to get the kind of Beijing perspective on like what was going on over here. And I noticed a lot of folks linking to a specific kind of set of blog posts and like developer documents. And I should note, a lot of the stuff was written in code, and a lot of the stuff was written in Mandarin code specifically, with a lot of jargon that doesn't translate across borders. But I did my best to decipher it. And what I found was either enough ByteDance folks had kind of spilled the beans, ByteDance being TikTok's parent company, or enough people living abroad had successfully reverse engineered the app that they had essentially broken down what makes a lot of this stuff so addictive. And like, I have like about like 500 tabs of this stuff, literally. So I'll put most of it in the newsletter. But the kind of long and short is American platforms like your YouTubes, your Instagrams, that sort of thing. They tend to throw the most popular person that you might be interested in.

Like I mentioned earlier, I watch a lot of sewing videos. So because I'm trying to learn how to sew. So on Instagram, for example, when I get recommended new people to follow, it's like the dressmakers that have like thousands and thousands of followers. And it's like, because the sort of thought process there is, if 5,000 people already like this dressmaker and you like dressmakers, chances are you're going to like her too. Like, it makes sense. TikTok, at least according to what these people were saying, it basically takes that formula and throws it out the window. TikTok does not really give a shit about popularity. And instead it will surface kind of random clusters of stuff that's

related to what you're into. And it will just throw it your way. And if you like it, you like it. If you don't, you don't. But if you do, and if enough people like a certain video clip within a certain time frame, it gets recommended to a small circle of people at first. If it reaches that threshold, it gets recommended to a larger circle and then a larger circle and then a larger circle. But the way that these people were saying it's set up is that everyone kind of has a fair shot, which is why on Instagram, I was being told to follow dressmakers that have these really pretty aesthetic flowy wedding dresses. But on TikTok, I got recommended a person with like 10 followers who makes furry suits because TikTok was just like,

I don't know, like, I guess you're into this now. And I totally was. TikTok will never say this stuff out loud. So I'm basically, a lot of this is kind of hearsay. I don't know. It makes sense to me. Yeah. This is all the proprietary algorithm. So they're certainly not going to share it with us. Like you hear me say that and it all sounds pretty benign because I'm talking about wedding dresses and fursuits. This hearing just made me more confused than really angry. I mean, I was angry, but I was also really confused. So I was wondering, I'm like, what sort of media do they think a foreign adversary is going to push in front of us? Which like, again, that sounds like a really sort of like, why do you care about like this

really kind of specific thing? Like you're ignoring the big picture. I, which like, yeah, maybe I am. But if we don't know what we're kind of scared of and how that manipulation would happen, then you end up with accusations that are either wrong or could apply to literally anybody else. And also, I'll just say this, before getting into all this stuff, I got a neuroscience degree and I focused on learned behavior specifically. And a lot of sort of the manipulation that's being alleged, not only of TikTok,

this is a platform thing in general. A lot of it's alleging kind of nefarious intent on their part. But really, people are just dumb. You see a pretty picture and you click on it. My sort of takeaway from a lot of this stuff,

if you want not to be manipulated, you have to put in the legwork to try not to be. I don't think a lot of people know how to do that. So instead of asking, they're just pointing the finger somewhere else. I think that in having you describe that, though, that also kind of points us in the direction of if we were really concerned about these problems of data collection, of the way that the algorithm is used, and of some of the other things that these lawmakers were pointing out when they actually made sense and were just completely ridiculous, that if we really wanted to address these problems, it's not a TikTok ban that you need to do in order to address it, right? It's federal data privacy regulations, regulations on algorithms and other things like that. But these lawmakers do not seem to be

proposing those sorts of solutions. So what does that tell you about the actual kind of objective of this campaign, if it's identifying all these problems, but then not really offering a real solution to them? No, it's like like during the hearing, a lot of the folks brought up that like, this is an example of why we need like a federal data privacy law. And I was like, I would be chuffed to bits if this nonsense ended up being the reason that we finally get that law. Because right now in the US, different states have different rules for like what you can do. And as a result, in my interviews with sort of these middlemen and like shady characters, instead of abiding by one law in Virginia and one law in Connecticut, they just ignore both of them. lawmakers on the grounds in these states are so busy holding hearings that go on for five hours, they don't get caught. Really, the only place that has any sort of substantial ground here is California with now the CPRA. But again, they managed to get got so good that they passed the

wrong version of a law the first time around. I think they're all good points. And I would say that, you know, I'm obviously quite pessimistic on everything that's being proposed here. And I think that really at the core of this is not really a desire to address these fundamental problems with social media and all of these apps that we're using constantly, but to kind of take on one of the competitors to, you know, the major social media companies that exist in the United States, instead of addressing the core of all their business models as well. I mean, I've covered the company formerly known as Facebook quite a lot in my time.

And I noticed this was like around 2020 during the Trump administration, Mark Zuckerberg would very often position his app successfully as sort of the savior for small businesses, because it is true that many small businesses by default are dependent on Facebook's platform to reach their audiences. That's true. So like every time a sort of very reasonable critique was like aimed at the company, they would just immediately kind of pivot to, if you regulate us, think of all the small businesses that would be harmed, which like, yeah, is true, but you can't have it both ways. on the day of the hearing that TikTok flew in all of these influencers who also have their livelihoods depend on that app. And I'm like, oh, we're just using literal human shields now. And like, it has worked for Facebook in the past because nobody wants to be the guy that topples your local ice cream store just to get back at some company in Silicon Valley. So in this case, if I'm thinking about most of the American public,

I feel like going with the small business angle might be a better sound to congressmen's ears than influencers when really on the ground, they are the same thing. Luckily for TikTok, it's been leaning really hard into e-commerce lately without much success. But if you kind of read the tea leaves, you can see the company priming itself to be like, no, small businesses depend on us too. Which, you know, again, I have no sympathy for multi-billion dollar companies,

but I'm just like, I'm watching it. And I'm like, we didn't learn the first time. And I don't know if we're going to learn now. A perfect point. And I would just say that Amazon does the same thing, right? I was talking to Maura Weigel a few weeks ago and they basically say, you know, we're protecting all these small businesses, making it possible for them to exist. And there's something, you know, very kind of pernicious and self-serving that's happening there as well. So I guess Shoshana to kind of close off our conversation, you know, we've been talking about several different aspects of this. Is there anything

else that you think people should know about this hearing in particular, or about, you know, this kind of wider discourse around TikTok that we haven't gotten to in this conversation? Well, I mean, if they want to stomach my more than 3000 word newsletter, and I'm going to keep writing all this stuff. So you can definitely follow that quick little plug there. But more than anything, I mean, when you read sorts of news stories about this, or news stories about any app, really, and you hear sorts of claims that like, seem to be legitimate and seem to have backing and sound true. Just always ask, what exactly is this person afraid of? And what am I afraid of? And does this claim kind of address that? Because you'll typically find that it doesn't. I think that's always great advice for people to keep in mind when they're reading these stories and considering the narratives that we're getting around these tech companies. Shoshana, always great to have you on the show. I really appreciate you taking the time and I

can't wait to have you back on again. Thanks so much. Oh, thanks. So that was Shoshana Wodinski. And hopefully that gives you some insight, some perspective on the proposed TikTok ban, some of the arguments that are being made against TikTok in particular, and why some of these data arguments really don't make a ton of sense. I think it makes a lot of sense to look at the social media model that many of these companies, not just TikTok, have chased after for the past couple of decades and whether that makes any sense to continue. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to target TikTok in particular for things that many other companies are doing.

Now, we turn to my conversation with Daniel Green, where we talk about US tech policy in the 1990s, how that has evolved through the 2000s, and why we see a notable shift in this moment. So enjoy this conversation. Dan, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much, Per. It's happy to be here. Very excited to chat with you again. It's always great to have you on the show and to get your

insights on the tech industry. And of course, in this moment where we're seeing the US government's policy on technology and the internet seeming to shift in response know, in response to, I would say, a number of factors, but in particular, the competition from China, I think it's a good moment for us to kind of revisit a bit of history to inform a conversation around what's happening now. And so I want to start with a bit of that kind of historical piece just to inform what we're going to talk about. And I think, you know, it's important to understand where this framework for the US government's approach to tech and Internet policy really came from. So what was the orientation in the late 1980s through the 1990s as the U.S. government was formulating its policy on Internet and technology?

Yeah, I mean, as with everything else in American economic history, it's a history of blowback about, you know, overreaching in one particular area, and then that coming back to bite you in the butt a couple of decades later. So the commercialization of the internet really cannot be divorced from the moment of globalization that follows the economic crash of 1970s. So the kind the nationally oriented Keynesian economies of the 1970s start to fall apart for pick your poison, for gold standard, oil crisis, drop in productivity, whatever. And we see then a move to much more nimble supply chains stretching all over the world, especially start to encircle countries which maybe had tried to create their own welfare states, but then were ruthlessly gutted by the Volcker shock, by debt imposed by the IMF, etc, etc.

So at the same moment, we also see that the Democrats have been really out of power for a long time in the US with the semi-exception of Jimmy Carter. So during the 80s, during this time in the wilderness, the American Democratic Party is trying to figure out how to get back in. And they do so in part by proposing the internet and the class of people with an interest in the internet as the solution to the problems created by de-industrialization at home. The late 70s and 80s are also a period of heavy de-industrialization, although that's a process going back as far as the really immediately after World War II. So what Clinton and Gore and other folks in this Democratic Leadership Council do is both bring in a new class of voters and activists. So very different from the tense but multiracial working class coalition that undergirded the New Deal. We have a lot more

professionals, people who work in office parks, people who are very committed to formal equality, but not necessarily equality of outcome. So, you know, against housing discrimination, ready to protest against that, not so much a fan of public housing being built in their neighborhood. And these folks often end up in office parks producing high technology products, Montgomery County, Maryland, Route 128 in Boston, Silicon Valley. And these are what are called the Atari Democrats, name that they end up giving themselves. And that comes along also with a new group of investors at the top of the party, including some people like the heads of HP and Apple at the time, who were lifelong Republicans. And they were a little concerned about the kind of HP and Apple at the time, who were lifelong Republicans.

And they were a little concerned about the kind of isolationism that Reagan promised and the threatened defunding of places like the Department of Education, because these were industries that were extremely capital intensive, that had really broad ties to the global economy. But we're also producing cultural products, things like software or media, things that depended on English remaining language of global commerce. So this new group of financiers, of tech executives, of capital intensive manufacturing, distinguished from especially the oil people that really supported Reagan, started to reframe the party at the same moment that NSFnet was being transitioned towards privatization as the internet. So by the time Clinton wins the election in 92,

they are proposing that the internet is going to be the thing that is going to take care of the industrialized US and secure American hegemony abroad. They've just defeated the Soviets. They're still a little scared of competition from Japan and West Germany. But we have the most robust internet infrastructure here in the US at the time. Extending that globally and building up abroad is a way to connect everybody to high-paying, knowledge-work jobs that do not respect geography, unlike those old fuddy-duddy manufacturing jobs. So that promise to solve the problem of deindustrialization comes out at the exact same time as the people who would most benefit from internet liberalization have taken control of the party. And this is how they end up distinguishing themselves from Republicans. And this is why the 1990s are really the kind of the height of American liberalism.

It's the thing that everyone keeps trying to return to, because that was the moment when, you know, everything was going really right for them. And what we'll see is that a lot of the decisions they made on things like liberalizing telecommunications infrastructure as a condition of entry into the World Trade Organization, that then comes back to bite us in the butt as Huawei ends up taking all of the infrastructure projects for telecommunications across the world. It's such a fascinating history and you describe it so well there. I would be remiss if I didn't say, if people do want to know more about what's going on in that period, of course, we talked about it more last time you were on the show. And of course, they can go back and listen to that interview too.

But now, based on what you were talking there, obviously, we see that there's this move toward the internet and privatizing the internet, liberalizing the internet, having the internet kind of go global. And some of the narratives that we usually have around this period is that you know because the internet is being liberalized becoming more accessible you know the open internet is expanding everywhere there's this kind of great expansion in freedom of speech and freedom of expression that is enabled by that and i think that it can be easy to see that period solely or primarily through that lens and not kind of focus on the economic side of what was actually going on here. internet to be privatized, to be commercialized, and to be extended around the world so that many other countries were using this network that was kind of originating in the United States? Yeah. So the internet is a network of networks that not any one person can claim ownership to.

So what we're really seeing with American economic and foreign policy at this moment is a way of identifying a particular setup of relatively frictionless communication between states undergirded by Western, but especially American infrastructure and Western, but especially American software firms and networking firms, so Microsoft, Cisco, that being the engine of liberalization. And there are plenty of people, you know, in the US and out, who have, you know, perhaps libertarian visions of an open internet, but one that is perhaps agnostic on or even opposed to American interests, you know, the kind of more anarcho-punk approaches to cyberspace. But the Americans were quite clear

on both economic interests of the US and liberalization of the internet being the same thing. And if it's okay, I'd like to read just a really brief thing that Al Gore wrote in 1991. So there's this special issue of Scientific American with all the heavy hitters of tech libertarianism, Negroponte, those sorts of people. And Gore was the champion of a liberalized internet in the Senate. He then took it on as vice president. I do not joke when I say that I really do think that Al Gore created the internet, because his vision of what was going to happen is the world that we live in now. And he saw himself very much as the 1990s equivalent of his father, who was very, very integral to the creation of the American highway

system, which was itself a kind of cold war project to make US cities less reliant on single nodes and to increase the flow of goods between cities. So with that in mind, Gore in Scientific American in 91 writes, you know, quote, the unique way in which the U.S. deals with information has been the real key to our success. Capitalism and representative democracy rely on the freedom of the individual. So these systems operate in a manner similar to the principle behind massively parallel computers. These computers process data not only in one central unit, but rather in tiny, less powerful units. Capitalism works on the same principle. People who are free to buy and sell products or services according to their individual

calculations of the costs and benefits of each choice process a relatively limited amount of information, but do it quickly. When millions of individuals process information simultaneously, the aggregate result is incredibly accurate and efficient decisions. Communism, by contrast, attempted to bring all the information to a large and powerful central processor, which collapsed when it was overwhelmed by ever more complex information. So Gore is very deliberately saying here that the liberalization of the internet and the extension of that openness

to the rest of the world is identical with American capitalist interests. They are the same thing and they will reward everybody else, but it's still his rules and his country's tech, at least in the beginning, that is undergirbing that project.

They are the same thing for them. In terms of how it ends up happening, you know, there is some argument that American contractors in the American state should shift some money from defense spending, no longer needed as much for the Cold War, into internet infrastructure build out. That's more of a campaign tax than anything else. The actual money distributed, you know, never tops a couple of billion dollars. It's really nothing compared to the Pentagon. It doesn't even really compare to the crime bill in 94. But it was important rhetorically, and it was important to build the identity of this new

political coalition to the point that when Gore is back on the campaign trail in 96, he's talking about his opposition in the Dole campaign and saying, these people that want to defund our internet build out, they're unilaterally disarming us against international competition. So it is very clear here that they see international economic liberalization and American interests and the glowing internet as the same thing. They're all identical. The problem that we come into a couple of years later, a couple of decades later, is that those things are no longer identical, in part because that hegemonic coalition that Gore and Clinton were constructing around the internet begins to fracture. Yeah, I think really well put. And I think it's so important to understand like

Gore's orientation toward the internet and how that really kind of sets up the internet that we have today, right? So put a fine point on it. I mean, he sounds like Hayek in that. Like, I mean, this is the argument that was made 70, 80 years prior about why communism couldn't work is because it was an inefficient economic process. And then you have the leader of the American liberalism saying the exact same thing for his pitch as a New Keynesian. You know, this is why we need to invest in this thing, because it's American capitalism. It's a relatively coherent narrative from the free market libertarianism of even the 30s up to the internet liberalization that we start to see in the 90s.

A great point and a key one. I have one question that maybe starts to bridge this period with what we're looking at now. This is to say that that, you know, as you were talking about this kind of idea of the open internet is coming along at a moment where, you know, there's a lot of neoliberal policies that are emerging, there's the effort toward globalization, and the US is kind of creating a global system that is oriented around kind of ensuring that Western capital can easily access more markets, you know, so capitalism continues to expand and all these sorts of things. And I feel like when we look at kind of the orientation toward the internet, or if you look at the internet from a US perspective, it can maybe not seem so bad that, you know, US companies are going abroad and that everything is open and whatnot. But I think that when you

look at it from a foreign perspective, you can very much see how as the internet goes global, it ensures and it allows've begun to see more and more of that with Europe getting more frustrated that so many major US companies dominate its tech sector, obviously with China and its ability to build competitors to that. Other countries as well have been speaking out more about how these US companies kind of dominate the technology industry in their countries and make it difficult for their domestic competitors to compete if they're not allowed to take measures that kind of restrict the ability for U.S. tech companies to dominate. And so I wonder what you make of that kind of, I guess, relative ignorance of that aspect of U.S. tech policy or the ability of these U.S. tech companies to really dominate internationally in

that way and how that has really begun to shift in recent years? Yeah. I mean, at least in the 90s and early 2000s, I think it's frankly, it's the success of American imperialism. So, you know, the Soviet Union is defeated and the US is the representative of global capitalism at that point. And, you know, I pretty much agree with Sam Gindin's analysis here that capitalism is global, but it is protected, set up, restored, spread through American imperialism. And especially in the 90s, that's the only game in town. Chinese military is too weak, and the workforce is too far down the value chain. Ditto for Latin America and Africa. Europe, at least at that point, is mostly happy to identify its kind of

neoliberal ambitions with that of the US. So engagement with the WTO or the General Agreement on Trade proceeds largely on American terms. That begins to fracture over time. I mean, I think the earliest kind of protests that you can see against that are largely identified with like, you know, the same kind of like content protectionism that we saw earlier in the century. So like, the French effort to create Minitel is, you know, super interesting and is largely building off like the, you know, French content industry that is protected and promoted and subsidized as an effort to protect French culture. And it's not that different from Canadian content or Quebecois content being produced as a kind of protectionism. Minitel

is probably the best kind of national example of something that was built to oppose the American internet. And it did work very differently, but it lost, it flamed out. So I think especially in the 90s, and this is in part why American liberals are so nostalgic for that period, it is really, it is the strength of American imperialism and the ability to enforce those trade agreements to global scale that allows Americans to think, oh yeah, my interests are totally identified with the rest of the world's interests. That's the definition of hegemony, right? When you impose your particular class interests onto everyone else is supposedly a universal interest.

No, I think it's a really important point to make and an important thing to understand about how this policy ultimately works and why there's so much kind of excitement about the global expansion of the internet, even though there are other things that are associated with it as well. And so obviously there's a lot that kind of happens in that intervening period, right? And we've talked about pieces of it. We certainly can't get to everything, but obviously in the past number of years, we have seen a significant or like the beginnings of a more significant shift in the U.S. approach to its policy on the internet, internet infrastructure, other kind of aspects of the tech industry that we haven't really seen as much, I would say, in those past recent decades, right? Where we have seen actions under the Trump administration around companies like Huawei, and now these things continuing into the Biden administration with the CHIPS Act and the potential action against TikTok and other things like that. So what

explains why the United States is making these radical shifts away from this more kind of open approach to technology and the internet in this moment? Yeah, I think it's probably most helpful to talk here about things that are not specific to the US. So I would probably frame it as like two kind of general trends, you know, and one is like, what the tech sector, and I think we can say that quite narrowly in the 2000s and 2010s, even the 90s, identified with software development, you know, what software development did to national economic developments in a bunch of different places, including China, and then how the rest of the international political economy has changed since the height of free

trade liberalization in the 1990s. So I think it's just a reality that by, you know, the kind of like mini recession that we get during China's, you China's withdrawal in the 2015-2016 era, which comes back to hit, especially American Rust Belt states pretty hard, may have helped get Trump elected. We have a growing dissatisfaction with the tech sector, what we've often called tech lash. This, I think, accelerates after Trump's election in the US, especially because of a concern of disinformation. But this is a broadly shared sentiment across the entire world. Part of it is political. Folks are everywhere, are extremely worried about social media and the power that a few American companies have to determine what counts as speech in large swaths

of the world. In some places, especially Facebook is identified not just with the content provider, but with the entire internet through the way they package themselves with mobile services. And so a lot of people are worried about the power of these side liberalism, is that while software development made a lot of people very, very rich, there was even less trickle down there than in other places where you expected some trickle down in part because of the production process. Like you don't really need to employ that many people. And they're all of a relatively similar background. And the externalities are not that serious in the way that you would think of like large manufacturing or even a big school or something like that. They're not building up larger ecosystems of anything besides software development.

People talk about the kind of Japanification of industrial economies in the post-recession period as being a lost decade. We really did not have much wage growth or much job growth post-recession, especially in Europe. So I think there is this growing resentment across the world that placing all our eggs in the American software development basket just did not work. It just did not give us the job growth. It did not give us the wage returns. It did not give us the things that we needed besides people being priced out of major downtown cores. So that's one thing. Everybody is feeling that all at the same time. And so the US is getting more suspicious

about software developments, about these large platforms at the same time as everybody else's. You can see that in China with the recent kind of crackdown on tech executives, which is part of the larger crackdown on things like these tutoring companies and stuff like that.

But there is a sense that these people have gotten too big for their britches and have kind of distorted the local state that's interpreted in China as like they're challenging the party power. But same thing elsewhere. The other thing that's happening is that like the liberalization seems like a great idea for those people that are already on top of the value chain and are saying like, okay, we privatize all of your country's resources and maximize its openness to the free market. That's going to be great for us because we have a bunch of new low wage exporters to process our iPhones or whatever. And that was really like the American dream for trade liberalization is to see like China as the world's factory. That was great.

They really liked that. The problem is that China in particular, and I would say absolutely South Korea, Japan and West Germany this earlier, Vietnam to an extent, these places did what everyone said they should do, which is move up the value chain throughout that period of globalization. And they often did it in ways that were not the kind of American path to doing things, especially in Vietnam and China, you have a fairly strong central state that is orienting this kind of economic development. But these places start to move into value-added manufacturing, they start to move into infrastructure development, they start to move into services,

they start to move into web development. So I think, frankly, a lot of the American reaction to TikTok in particular is, wait a second, I thought we were the software guys. I thought we were the platform guys. I thought we were the surveillance capitalism guys. And now you have some Chinese guy coming in and telling me what to do with that? No way, Jose. That's my business. So I think what they had hoped for in the 90s was like a global market for American goods and a global suppliers of low wage labor to put those goods together. But what actually happened is that especially Chinese companies end up competing with a kind of leaner and meaner capitalism than Americans did. I remember in 2015, 2016, when you had Chinese venture capitalists in a room, they would usually say, and not incorrectly, if you want to start a company that can run into regulatory problems, something like computer vision or something, which is always a touchy surveillance topic, you should come to China. You should do it in China. You will have less resistance from the state here than you will in

the US. We don't have all those burdensome regulations because I can pay off my local party guy. And that may have been true for a while. I don't think it's true anymore. But there was the openness of capitalism that was pursued in the 90s ended up all through the stack, from the chips to the infrastructure to the web development, ended up producing a new set of lean, mean companies that really challenge American hegemony. And Americans are not used to that. Yeah, when we see these developments, like it's very clear how the Chinese have become very competitive with the United States, and that this is driving in particular much of the response against, you know, Chinese companies, because they're the biggest competitors that u.s firms are facing and i wonder you know you talked there about how the united

states kind of saw itself as making this software and kind of designing these things and then china in particular was going to be the factory where all this was created and then that was kind of you know how this kind of arrangement was going to work. But it seems that especially when we look at like Huawei and to a lesser degree, the CHIPS Act and some of these other concerns about kind of, I guess, the critical minerals and, you know, electric cars more broadly, because this is also kind of coming in with the regulations that the Biden administration is putting on electric car development and things like that. It looks like what we're seeing is kind of in part the consequence of that decision, right? We're not going to make very much in the United States. We're going to allow it to be made in China. And then as a result, China is learning

from that manufacturing process, moving up the supply chain, gaining additional skills, and coming back to be able to compete with US firms who have lost a lot of that kind of, I guess, institutional knowledge on the production side, even as they've been doing something else. Yeah, I think in general, what you're seeing with the Biden administration, this kind of supply side liberalism is a recognition of the divergence between the interests of global capital, if we can say there is such a thing, and the American state. And in the 90s, it was very easy to say those two things were the same, and perhaps even through the

2000s. The process whereby pretty much every American chip maker, besides Intel, no longer makes their own chips. And this is relatively recent developments. There was a guy, Jerry Sanders, who's head of AMD, said sometime in the 90s like real men have fabs uh real men have fabrication plants where they make their own chips um amd now does not make its own chips but this was seen as like a post-war style vertical integration where you would design the thing and build the thing these days america has a ton of chip designers they're at the top of the value chain there but bar intel and some folks like lower down on the value chain who make like, you know, single use stuff for like your car windows or whatever.

We mostly don't fabricate a ton of chips. And the market is still very concentrated. Like it's pretty much just South Korea, the US and China and Taiwan. And China is really, frankly, a distant fourth, that fabricate ships. But today, the most important shipmaking company in the world is TSMC. It's Taiwanese Semiconductors. And they do not design their own ships. They are a foundry who takes other people's designs and then manufactures them at scale. Probably the most important company in the world in terms of its strategic value to

everything that we make. Some people say that 50% of devices with a semiconductor in them have something from TSMC. They produce Apple's chips, for example. And they're in Taiwan. They're right across the street. If stuff pops off, that's the linchpin of the global economy right there. And that's the moment when folks in the national security apparatus start to get a little nervous and say, well, you know, it's probably not true that China can just take TSMC and start producing its chips just like they did before. For all the reasons you said, there's a lot of skill involved. There's a lot of learned things, especially in chip fabrication.

The design and fab work hand in hand. There's a lot of trial and error as you learn to use the tools and you adjust them to this particular place. And that feeds back into the design. But it still makes people really nervous that that kind of thing is right there, right across the coast from China in a country that China does not believe exists. And so I think a lot of the kind of supply side liberalism on chips, and then especially with infrastructure and Huawei, which is not really a place that Americans compete with, like most of Huawei's

competition is Scandinavian, it's like Ericsson and Nokia, you're recognizing that the military is scared that they don't have control over these crucial components that are essential to everything in the world, but especially to American military superiority. You know, this is American military superiority and free trade was very visibly linked with the kind of smart bombs that we saw in the 90s, live on CNN. And there's a decent argument that that is what is giving Ukraine such an advantage over Russia right now, or at least what is allowing Ukraine to prolong a protracted war that you would think that a much larger military would be able to win very quickly. So we have seen that the interests of the American state and global capital are at least in tension in this way.

And the CHIPS Act is designed to correct that. It's not a ton of money. I think it's something like $40 billion as incentives for fabs and then more for R&D. $40 billion is like one fabrication plant that takes three years to get online and is not going to be a top of the line kind of thing that you would put in an iPhone. Those are like more mature markets for chips that would go inside cars or toys or something like that. But it's trying to reshore or at least insure companies like TSMC. It's trying to invest in R&D so that American manufacturing can be more closely aligned with our chip designs. It's certainly not like the kind of like moonshot thing that would say like, Intel is our national champion. We're going to pour so much money into

Intel that they're basically nationalized. It's not that, but it is a recognition that there's a problem and they're trying to put the cat back in the bag. Whether that's going to be successful, I don't know. The sanctions against Huawei, a little further up the stack in infrastructure, were very, very harsh for a couple of years and it really destroyed Huawei's revenue, but they're profitable again. They're down 30 or 40% from where they were in 2018 or so before the sanctions started hitting. But they're profitable again.

And they seem to be able to pour enough money into R&D that they can develop their own chips and stuff that was prohibited from sanctions with US suppliers. So it may be that this just forces Chinese companies to create their own ecosystem, which would maybe backfire a little. But you are realizing now that this economic liberalization of the 1990s with these tech markets has come back to bite us in the butt. And that's what the Biden administration is trying to solve. And that's what the Trump administration was trying to solve. I think there's much more continuity here than we think. Yeah, it's interesting to see that kind of almost bipartisan aspect to it,

right? Where, you know, Trump was really pushing a lot of these things, I think, but then Biden has very much adopted them. And I think going back to the 90s, when we were talking about, you know, it wasn't just Clinton and Gore and the Democrats who were interested in pushing the internet in this way, but Newt Gingrich and the Republicans were kind of right on board with this broader vision that was kind of going along with that. You know, we were talking about more of the kind of tech manufacturing side of it. We were talking about the Chips Act and Huawei. But then there has also been this focus on TikTok and like some other kind of more technology services that are coming out of China as well that are competing with major service companies like Facebook and Instagram in this case, if we're thinking about services, but also you look at Shein and other kind of e-commerce companies that are competing with Amazon, for example. There's recent rumblings that now that TikTok has been in the spotlight, Shein might be getting in the spotlight kind of

next. It might be the next kind of focus. So what do you make of about this aspect of it, where obviously there are a lot of arguments that are being made around why TikTok needs to be getting this attention that as I talked to Shoshana Winninski about, like, doesn't seem to really be accurate, right? A lot of the problems that are being identified with TikTok are the case for much of social media, but the regulatory action is only against TikTok specifically or proposed regulatory action. So how do you see the approach on the service side of things instead of as distinct from, I guess, the kind of Huawei and chip stuff? Honestly, I do think like the approach to TikTok is relatively consistent. And so far as like, it's bad when China does it, that's consistent. I don't doubt that there is,

you know, despite whatever financialing that makes it an entirely private company with data stored in the US, as your excellent Jackman article pointed out, that I'm sure that there is still some Chinese Communist Party interest in ByteDance writ large. I mean, they would be stupid not to, just as the US would be stupid not to maintain interests in Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. I mean, we've seen plenty of like, even like county level American law enforcement getting cooperation from Facebook. So I'm sure

the most powerful military in the history of the world is doing the same. And the Stone Revolutions told us exactly that it's all through the stack, you know, everything that they're scared of Huawei doing is exactly what we've been able to get AT&T to do. It's just China does it. So it's bad. So I think that's relatively consistent there. The other thing I would say, and I think your point, the comparison of Xi'an is a really good one. I'm reminded of some lessons I've gotten from scholars of intellectual property and race, like Anjali Vats or Lester Mann, that intellectual property, and you really saw this in the 90s with the WTO agreements, is inherently racialized. And there is a global hierarchy set by these trade agreements that specifies who is a creator, who is a consumer, and who is allowed

to do what kind of creation. Even within Chinese finance circles or even outside investors who invest in China, everyone was kind of shocked at the success of ByteDance and TikTok, just because like that kind of like cultural phenomenon was not something that people expected to come out of China. They had invested into as more as a producer of low value commodities, not this kind of mass cultural phenomenon. You know, and to be fair, like it is the only kind of global one that has emerged out of that ecosystem, maybe Alipay to an extent, you know, TV, like The Wandering Earth, like that kind of thing. I think there is this sense from Western viewers that TikTok is exceptional because it's doing things that the Chinese economy shouldn't.

It has broken the global hierarchy of creatorship, which is generally a color line. And I think you can read the accusations against TikTok alongside accusations of copy theft in China as the place where copyright goes to die, the place that we have to watch out for unless they take our movies and pirate our stuff from our brilliant Hollywood people. And it feels like pretty much the same thing. You're able to put a military gloss onto it because of surveillance advertising. But ultimately, I think it's rebelling against people who have gotten too far up the value chain. And I guess the final question to reflect on all of this is, obviously, the US is changing

its approach here, right? Because it is facing greater competition from China. It's also facing, as you were saying, the greater scrutiny of the tech industry in general. Do you think that its measures, that its policy approaches are actually going to work in defending kind of American tech hegemony from the competition it's facing from China? Or does it feel like the cat is kind of out of the bag here and we're in for quite a different kind of tech ecosystem or whatever you want to call it moving forward? Yeah. I mean, there's not a button that grandpa Joe can push just that says stop neoliberalism on it. I don't think there's any one moment that's going to tell us that we've escaped, you know, whatever

earlier era is this trend towards a more fragmented national internet, I think, has been going for a while. And we continue into that direction where for reasons of protectionism, for reason of surveillance, both of which can have perfectly legit national interests involved, even if I wouldn't like them. That'll continue. For chips specifically, and the EU just passed their own even smaller bill. That's when you realize they're a monetary union and not a fiscal one. The actual dollar amounts,

I don't think are significant enough to really move the needle. I mean, like TSMC is putting something like 20 billion a year into R&D alone. And that's just that one company. Their largest fabrication plants are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. You're really not changing the price of those items coming into the US. I don't think it's enough to change the needle all by itself.

I think there is an ecosystem effect whereby Huawei starts insuring, starts doing all of its stuff in China, the US through chips, through the IRA, through increased protectionism, through strategic decisions at Intel, who may actually be fabricating less moving forward. All of those things, I think, start working together with Europe. Europe is frankly a little worried about the IRA and the Chips Act. They don't produce much chips-wise there besides chips for German autos. As all those things taken together

can start to move the needle, where I think you really start to see immediate effects are stuff targeting personnel. So this is most visible in like holding the chairman of Huawei in jail for multiple years in Canada at the US's request for purportedly providing parts to Iran. But that is visible in a bunch of smaller actions where the sanctions against the Chinese semiconductor plants or fabs, the sanctions

against Huawei are making it more and more difficult, for example, for people of dual citizenship to work in one country or the other. They have to choose and stick with that choice. It's making it harder for, say, a Dutch company, ASML, who makes these lasers that are really important to cutting-edge microchips. They're the only company in the world that can do it. It makes it much harder for them to work with Chinese companies. So I think these kinds of sanctions that are mostly done through the

US Department of Commerce by placing these companies on the entity list, like that stuff is as much of a threat, if not more than any American industrial program. So it's likely that this kind of old-fashioned protectionism, I think, is just as effective as building up our own domestic supply. You know, we are really at a moment here where it does seem like there's an attempt to shift something in the global order around this. And so I think it's so important not just to understand that history of where this all came from, but also the reasons why these things are shifting in this moment. And so I'm really happy that I was able to get your insight on this, Dan. Thanks again for taking the time to chat.

Always a pleasure, Paris. And I agree, this is really, really important. We don't know what's going to happen next. We really don't. And I think anyone that tells you that they know what's going to happen next to you should not be trusted. Shoshana Wadinski is a freelance reporter and writes the Tubes newsletter. Daniel Green is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and the author of The Promise of Access.

You can follow Shoshana on Twitter at at S. Wadinski. And you can follow Dan at at Green underscore DM. You can follow me at at Paris Marks. And you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making it every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.