Abe puts his finger on a key issue: the EU is built for a globalised world that simply no longer exists. You see it in the tech strategy of Commission leaders whose brains haven't yet left the Long 90s: their approach makes sense if you believe in innovation and comparative advantage.
You can read it in how they talk about AI. In their minds, competition in the rest of tech is lost for Europe but that's OK because Europe can gain a comparative advantage in a new disruptive space — AI — by spray-and-pray funding for innovation. Small problem: that world doesn't exist anymore.
Tech isn't about innovation, it's about power and networking chokepoints for power. You can innovate all you want, if you don't control or neutralise existing chokepoints your innovation will almost certainly fail to garner any real market success. Silicon Valley is about moats not research.
I like this a lot - I think a lot of both the productivity slowdown and the jump in inequality since the mid 2000s is a direct result of the global innovation system shifting its focus away from solving real-world problems and towards building moats
Yes! I mean, it's not like they don't say it out loud: www.wsj.com/articles/pet... If you look at OKRs at the tech monopolies, which drive all internal incentives, they're very commonly moat-oriented (even if they might not be as explicit as Thiel).
which is why I'm sceptical of the UK government's approach to boosting productivity by trying to encourage US tech firms to increase their activity and sales in the UK through reducing taxes and legislation - if anything this will just allow them to capture even more consumer surplus
I would say that "sceptical" is a very charitable position :)
The idea that we'd could somehow balance out tech markets by becoming good at something new has no path to success. Europe exports data and imports products refined from it, and we build our society on foreign-controlled infrastructure that sets terms for our laws and governance. Sounds familiar?
Our friends in the global majority can see it from miles away: the dynamics that best capture Europe's position today are those of neocolonialism. The end state isn't to become a formal colony but having to choose who to be a client state of.
We still have the capacity to turn this around, a lot of it actually. But for that to happen, we need leadership whose understanding of reality has moved on from watching reruns of The West Wing. It's not clear that we have it.
I wonder if the human instinct to ignore the tyre fire going on in the US instead of internalising that the US government is actually on fire because we’re so busy dealing with all the small effects of the tyre fire in our lives - that self protective normalisation without which we can’t function…
Do EU leaders have that too? “The US as a functional entity can’t really be gone can it, I mean the planes are still flying and we all just went over there and faced down Trump and he didn’t sign over Ukraine to Russia so we can still work with this” or whatever?
I mean, it’s such a weird reality to try to understand!
you've got it right though. it's not that the US is done, but this will be a long period of instability AT BEST, and if you're preparing for the best case then you're not doing your job.
Hope for the best, expect the worst (I saw the 12 chairs at a formative age)
My read (which of course could be wrong) isn't so much that the problem is US-centric as it is misunderstanding the geopolitical shift. If they somehow manage to avoid the worst from Trump and if the US somehow returns to normal, the geopolitics will still have irretrievably changed.
And they're not ready for that. The era has changed. This started before Trump I even, even though that and Brexit were the obvious events. But there's no going back to the international global rules-based order that they are comfortable operating in.
arguably globalism ended in the 90s, it just wasn't immediately obvious
too many large powers (*cough* Russia China maybe India *cough*) who don't *do* rules, even before the US copied their approach