Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Tech Moves to the Center
In the 1990s, companies loudly declared themselves global rather than American, and nowhere louder than in tech, where Google had no boundaries and Washington couldn't understand them. Today tech is the center of great power competition, and China's attempt to build a technosphere that can dominate the American one makes tech critical to the American state while the state becomes critical to tech's power and independence.
What Legacy Firms Need
A postwar multinational makes cars from parts imported from all over the world in factories all over the world. Free trade is the essence of that business, which needs financial, labor, and manufactured goods markets that are seamless and open, or in Tom Friedman's phrase, a flat earth. Alphabet isn't importing and exporting a lot of goods.
Even immigration looks different. A hotel or construction company depends on hardworking, cheap migrant labor. For a Silicon Valley company, an end to unskilled labor crossing from Mexico means janitorial and gardening costs rise thirty percent, and that barely registers.
What Tech Firms Want
Tech companies care far more about secure supply chains and secure intellectual property, and they increasingly want employees who are patriotic. A worker who thinks selling IP to China is an evil sin will report a coworker who tries it. A legacy multinational wants the opposite: interchangeable units from Sri Lanka or Taipei or anywhere, plugged in wherever needed.
Why did Friedman call the world flat?
Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The World Is Flat argued that fiber-optic cables, shared software standards, and cheap shipping let companies split work across countries as if distance no longer mattered. His examples included call centers in India serving American customers and design work done in one country for production in another. The book spread the flat-earth image through business and politics. It won the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award in 2005.
Why do chips make supply chains a security issue?
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company makes most of the world's most advanced logic chips. The extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to make those chips come from a single supplier, ASML in the Netherlands. A disruption at either point would slow AI development and many other industries at once. That concentration is why governments describe chip supply as a national security matter.
How did American chip export limits begin?
On October 7, 2022, the US Commerce Department announced broad restrictions on sales of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China. The rules targeted the hardware used for supercomputing and for training AI systems. The department expanded them in 2023 to close gaps in the original version. They were the widest set of technology export controls aimed at a single country since the Cold War.
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