1. Neither Microsoft nor Apple, but international tech liberation
You might have noticed that it's been the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, and the company held an event which was interrupted by protests from the company's own employees about its involvement in selling tech to Israel. Actually, you might not have noticed that because an awful lot of sites chose not to cover it, or chose to minimise it to a couple of lines.
I've never seen a protest like that at an event, which probably indicates quite how much we are living in interesting times. But while the times are different, so are the companies themselves. Paul Thurrott wrote a good article about how the Microsoft of today is not the same as the Microsoft of the past, but the same is true of Apple. Even a company that has always been fairly obviously odious – Facebook, I'm looking at you – used to be relatively benign in its impact. Now, it's killing kids and not bothering too much about it.
2. The great transatlantic tech split
Perhaps that's always been more obvious in Europe, which has had some long-standing beefs with the big tech companies. But Europe has also always been fairly content with the status quo of the US having effective control over the technology platforms that we all use. The European Union has been happy enough to try and reign in what big tech does, without challenging the American monopolies with actual products.
The radical randomness of Donald Trump's policies seem to have undermined that delicate balance, and now we have a situation where as well as the potential for a trade war, we have a tech war brewing too. Many people here are asking if "Europe’s reliance on American tech not just a competitiveness problem but a critical national security vulnerability?" As Henry Farrell writes, the dependence of Starlink for defence is the most obvious thing, but there are others. When every copy of Windows requires that you have a Microsoft account, the potential for a malicious US to cause tech chaos for the rest of the world is huge. That's not to say that Microsoft itself would cause issues, but it's an American company, and we have seen this year just how vulnerable American democracy really is.
3. The unreliable extortionist
Another thing that the current crisis has illustrated is how far out of their depth technology leaders when it comes to politics. They expected their support for Trump to buy them something, whether that support was the hundreds of millions which Elon Musk poured in to the Orange Dictator's campaign or the million dollar donations they put into this inauguration.
Instead, they have got tariffs which will impact hardware makers like Apple directly and induce a recession. The uncertainty created by Trump's constant flip-flops mean that businesses will be cautious about spending money, hurting advertising-driven companies like Google and Facebook.
There are two kinds of extortionist: the ones that keep to their word, and the ones that don't. Tech leaders are quickly finding out that Trump falls into the latter camp. While I love the schadenfreude involved, I don't think the price was worth paying.
4. The limits of Corporate Monarchy
You can bet that quite a few of the PayPal Mafia, for example, are now waiting for Trump to keel over from the inevitable heart attack and get their boy Vance on the throne. The problem with electing someone who wants to be king is, well, kings are never predictable.
How could they have been so blind and stupid? It's worth remembering that the techbro worldview is shaped by two tenets:
- Money is cheap for those who have money, thanks to close-to-zero interest rates
- Governments are weak, indecisive and inefficient, and ultimately can be bought or outmanoeuvred by corporate power
Except that when you back and elect someone who believes "l'etat, c'est moi", and is prepared simply to ignore the law to do what he wants, neither of those things can or will be true. Zero interest rates are not coming back if Trump succeeds in his grand project of deglobalisation, and it turns out that state power wielded by a king has a lot of impact. The likes of Peter Thiel should have known this, but what they didn't realise is in Trump's world, there is only room for one king: King Donald.
5. A Norman Rockwell America doesn't exist
Of course, the economic theory which underlies Trump's tariffs is less a theory than a fantasy. It's a view of America straight out of a Normal Rockwell painting, a longing for a world which hasn't existed for forty years or more. You can see this when you look at what manufacturing something like an iPhone in the US would actually involve. It's not just that it would cost twice as much: it's that it's just not really possible.
The iPhone, like many tech products, can only really exist in a globalised world with few trade barriers. You can shift where things are assembled around, but no single country has the economic capability to design and construct something so complex, with such diverse parts, all by themselves. As Apple's supply chain web page notes, its products are “Designed by Apple in California. Made by people everywhere.”
6. The grind of developing for Apple
We're all, though, guilty of trying to recreate a semi-mythical past and I think to a certain degree developers are guilty of taking that view when comparing how they interacted with Apple in the past versus the present. Apple was always a bit of a shit to deal with, but it was also exciting. Hitching your wagon to Apple platforms – particularly, of course, the iPhone – meant you had the chance to reach users who were both high spending and appreciated good design. What did it matter if sometimes someone got Sherlocked?
That said, Matthew Bickham's essay about the increasingly hostile way that Apple interacts with developers is well worth a read. Apple may have occasionally shanked some poor programmer to build a feature into the Mac, but the company no longer really needs developers at all. And certainly, it doesn't need the kind of companies who only work on the Mac, taking full advantage of their platforms' capabilities. They would rather have a ChatGPT or TikTok than an OmniFocus or Magic Lasso. Apple is too big to fail, which means it's too big to care.
7. The perils of no longer caring
Perhaps the company will learn the lesson that it can't make everything itself from its struggles with Siri. In some ways, it's the perfect example of what happens when a company no longer has to really care about the user experience of its applications. Siri is bad. But no third party can sweep in and replace it on everyone's iPhones. You can't, say, switch to Google's Gemini. So why care that Siri is bad? There's no real cost to Apple, and no real benefit to getting it right.
8. Radio, live transmission
Some time this summer, BBC Radio 4 will cease transmitting on long wave. For some people – me included – this will be a minor blip, accompanied by a little bit of nostalgia for a childhood which involved late night secretive radio listening under the bed covers.
But for about 600,000 homes around the UK, it also means something slightly different: electricity meters will, which no longer work. The Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) runs over long wave, and effectively tells hundreds of thousands of meters when to change from one tariff to another. It's a simple and incredibly reliable system -- unlike smart meters, which use the internet instead and are liable to things like random charging errors.
How many times do we hear about a simple, resilient system being replaced by something which doesn't work as well, but which offers more commercial opportunities. All the time, my friends. All the time.
9. Students are functionally illiterate
Higher education in the UK is in what you might call "a bit of a state". But the problems for higher education globally go deeper. Lack of reading and writing skills. Using ChatGPT, not just as a tool to help research and interrogate ideas, but just to do the work. Chronic absenteeism from classes, with the expectation that lecturers will spoon-feed them. It's a mess.
10. And a lovely piece of writing to end
Patti Smith, writing in 2017 about the death of her friend Sam Shepard. I wish I could write this well.
Have a splendid week, lovely people.