Chapter One - 2018

Summary

This chapter begins by discussing how the internet of the future may encompass large chunks of the physical world and onboard most if not all economic and social activities. The concern that Huawei and other Chinese companies would have access to the control panel of the global technological system set in motion the ongoing technology wars between China and the United States and explains the new appeal of ‘decoupling’. What is decoupling? The strategy has been applied to the most sensitive advanced technologies such as chips. The goal of geopolitical competition is to preserve exclusive control over the sources of technological power and to ensure that access to those sources is denied to a rival. The theory of world building captures this reality by stressing the existence of sovereign actors no longer constrained by a system of shared rules, architects of the world order that are nevertheless profoundly global in their outlook. Chips play a major role in the new geopolitics. If straits and islands are the gates to the oceans, microchips are the gates to the virtual. They can be compared to the basic layer of a computer operating system.