this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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They're unironically doing the open source = communism thing. Close off the source, close off cooperation, disallow Americans to use anything the Chinese are working on because it doesn't have NSA back doors that all true patriot anti-communists would allow with glee on their machines.
This, the restrict act, the tik-tok ban, the walls are really closing in and liberals are dropping any pretenses of the vaunted freedoms they've been crowing about since 1990. Bad times are coming and fast comrades, the violence of empire turning inwards, the repression will be dialed up, the choices will be taken away. And you know what? Many liberals will cheer for it, the Russia propaganda and axis of evil stuff has really broken their brains, they think this is to protect them from Trump or Trumpism as if that was ever a real threat to anything but empire. Meanwhile 100% American pre-Trump reaction will continue building apace.
A Trump presidency could actually be the best thing for the American people, simply because the libs will actually have to face the fucked up bullshit their government is doing, instead of burying their heads in the sand.
This pivot against FOSS in the West will just hurt themselves. The strength of FOSS is its huge potential for reach, while its drawback is that it's harder for FOSS devs to make a living.
In the West, FOSS devs all live on donations. While a few FOSS programs become huge enough to sustain themselves, most fail. Western governments have deliberate policies of not finding much FOSS development, exacerbating this issue.
Socialist countries' (e.g. China's) policies of government investment in development invariably leads to more investment in FOSS, providing FOSS developers more stable incomes. For example, China has multiple government-funded Linux OSes (UOS, Kylin, Deepin), OpenHarmony OS, etc.
This will ultimately snowball into more and more FOSS programs, creating a vibrant socialist-developed software ecosystem the developing world can quickly plug into at low-cost.
They don't have to totally outlaw FOSS. They just do what they did to Iran. They outlaw exports of it to China, force companies hosting it to do their utmost to block Chinese IP addresses, make it illegal and subject to sanction and total blockade if any Chinese company or any of their suppliers use open source code in violation of US sanctions on its use by China as a sanctioned country and jail any US persons who help them do so.
Their goal is a bifurcated world. They've stated decoupling but many thought they meant taking away manufacturing of wires and cables and chemicals while I think increasingly they meant the following. They control the heights right now, they have the patents on the processors everyone uses for gaming PCs, for smart devices, for phones, etc. They have the big social media companies, they have the big OS in Windows and IOS and Android. They have NVIDIA and it's architecture which has advantages for AI among other fields. Architectures that most software is built to run on. They gate that, kick the Chinese out and then tell everyone they've expanded the clean network initiative to be clean technology. No company who does business with the US or uses US tech (it will come with a license specifying this) may use Chinese processors, Chinese operating systems, Chinese applications of certain types, etc. They will then shop this around. Europe, Australia, NZ, Japan, occupied Korea as their vassals will instantly sign up and agree not to engage with China in high technology at all. Other countries will be presented with a choice: choose the US, get all the applications, operating systems, shiny iphone, etc that you're used to OR sign up with China, be banned from using or buying any of those, have sanctions slapped on you just for good measure, color revolution attempts and other reprisals. They'll allow certain stringent and expensive exceptions for companies that have to do business with China, probably force security measures, separate networks, no interaction between western and Chinese outside transferring data in a very cumbersome way with logging and classification duties required with books for inspection to have a real burden, etc. Any country or business found in violation will have its licenses yanked, have its assets seized, and all the usual heavy-handed sanctions regime stuff.
As we've seen with Microsoft and their enshittifying Windows most people choose the path of least resistance.
This doesn't result in an instant win condition for the west but it buys them time and leverage and inflicts pain on China and its allies and it slaps up a wall between peoples, software, networks, etc. At the very least it keeps western people firmly under their control, the control of an increasingly locked down, backdoored, spy-mandated tech sphere so they can keep a lid on those uppity proles and their organizing. And I think part of them thinks it will cause discontent among the Chinese people that they can't have their treats, discontent among the Russian people they can't have western treats because they use an alternative OS.
They were on this path anyways with trying to outlaw encryption exports in the 90s. They just have gotten back on it, it's all 90s stuff all over again, the banning VPNs, the crackdowns, we'll soon find out something or other has a clipper chip in it that no one mentioned.
This is an impediment, a snare, a serious annoyance and problem that will be surmounted but it buys the west time and distance to get ahead which is their whole plan (keeping China 10 years behind them technologically). Of course they have the serious issue of greed and incompetence in western companies versus Chinese state efforts so it won't work but it's going to make computing in the west absolutely miserable within the next 5-10 years.
This sounds like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Which of course the US has done and will continue to do, but wouldn't Big Tech suffer from taking it this far?
Thanks for the insightful comment!
How do you think an export ban will square with Taiwan and America's one China stance? Taiwan is incredibly important to U.S. chip making with TSMC being the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world. If the ban carves out an exception for Taiwan wouldn't that escalate the tensions? The U.S. is now looking to create fabs internally, but those are still many years away from operating and operating at scale.
They'll just not apply it to them either in statue or simply obviously not have their sanctions enforcement people take action, there are two options there. I guess they could also give them exemptions which they'd create a legal means for but that seems more hassle than just not enforcing it (who's going to complain? what president or lawmakers will try to force their hand?) or creating a carve-out.
Fact is US has been ignoring one-China principle for forever. They recognize it in order to have relations but then sell weapons and their top officials are always talking about helping Taiwan "defend democracy" and so on.
No. The US has done far more provocative things and China always warns about red lines then does nothing or at most snubs the US a little. If China is ever going to escalate and hit the US hard with a retaliatory move that's more than a token gesture they'll do so for far more reason than that like the sanctions themselves existing or something. A carve-out for Taiwan won't matter one bit in the overarching calculus of relations with the US as has been shown time and again by China. The only thing that might make China actually react is either the US moving to station a large number of troops there or build a major base or moving nukes there or the DPP types declaring independence or the US openly urging them to do so. Those are the only things that would really change the calculus of the status quo that China and the US has where China tolerates US provocations and separatism and weapons sales.
Honestly, I think this is gonna result in some fantastic unintended consequences. China will be the one building new tech collaboratively with the rest of the world, while US will continue becoming more insular and technologically isolated. There's a reason open source ended up winning in most domains in the end. The effort of maintaining complex proprietary tech stacks is far higher than building this stuff in the open. US firms would be doomed to fall behind technologically if they're forced to shy away from open tech.