Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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Tik Tok’s Call to Arms: Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers, Registered and Unregistered Foreign Agents Unite!
I have been dutifully chronicling people and organizations who, intentionally or unintentionally, advance the aims of the Chinese Communist Party in the West. They are all now being mobilized for the Tik Tok battle.
The pending legislation gives Tik Tok the choice to abandon CCP control or abandon doing business in America. The degree to which Tik Tok and the CCP (and their speaking points are indistinguishable) have invoked a Code Red and gone to the mattresses is a masterful case study for Google on how to muster for existential battle (to cross the streams of some unrelated threads). They are spraying cash across the political ecosystem and there are armies of mercenary lobbyists and politicians gleeful to take it.
Noah Smith captures the situation: “This is a test of whether America is a real nation, or an anarchistic playground for totalitarian empires.”
Lenin once observed of the lobbying industry: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
I find the case for CCP control of Tik Tok and repeated misconduct persuasive. And Tik Tok is banned in West Taiwan along with all other western social media apps, so basic reciprocity is ample justification for this legislation.
I hope someone is collecting a comprehensive list of everyone taking coin from Tik Tok and the CCP. http://www.TikTokTraitors.com looks available.
Contact Your Senators
The fate of the Tik Tok legislation will be decided in the Senate, where a a lobbying onslaught has been unleashed.
For Seattle area readers, Washington Senator Maria Cantwell is at the center of this battle as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. Her former staff represent Tik Tok, which raises questions about what influence they have with their former boss.
Should you be interested in her position on the Tik Tok bill and how she is or is not influenced by former staffers, you can Share Your Thoughts with her office. Or contact other Senators.
One, Two, Three, Four: We Want a Meme War
We are in an ideological war, not unlike the Cold War, with West Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party seeks to upend the global system and eliminate threats to CCP rule, one of which they fear most is the very existence of alternative forms of government. The CCP is not content to stay home and enjoy their communist paradise, but aggressively meddle, coerce, and suborn across the globe.
This war is a battle of ideals, particularly over the Western principles of individual liberty, democratic rule, free markets and free expression. (I will stipulate it is unclear if the West still believes in those principles, but suggest they should).
Memes are the distilled essence of free expression, intrinsically a weapon of free expression, and therefore an ideal medium for waging this ideological war.
There is nothing the CCP fears more than free expression. Yet they are the thinnest-skinned aspiring great power the world has ever seen, so cannot help but be drawn into battles on hostile territory. We, however, are a meme juggernaut. A shitposting superpower.
Watching CCP propaganda arms straight-faced championing Western ideals like free speech and fair competition is the battle we want to have.
Clown Week Preview: Oracle CAPEX
Oracle had a nice upward CAPEX curve going there for two years, exactly what you want to see from a wannabe cloud provider. But that seems to be over. Stay tuned for a deeper look at what is going on with Oracle’s CAPEX spend. As always, it is hard to distinguish between what is cluelessness and what are lies.
It is tough when you take the free cash flow hit by ramping your CAPEX, yet still find yourself falling ever further behind. A tiny solace is that at least they’re not IBM.
EU Insanity: AI Regulatory Suicide
So impressive to see the future so clearly. And even more impressive given a lack of proximity to the nascent technology being regulated.
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EU Insanity: AI Energy Suicide
The US faces many challenges in expanding power generation and distribution and getting back on the road to energy abundance. But at least we’re not Europe. From a good Semianalysis piece on the AI Datacenter Energy Dilemma ($):
Some countries and regions such as the US will be able to respond flexibly with a low electrical grid carbon intensity, low-cost fuel sources with supply stability, while others such as Europe will be effectively handcuffed by geopolitical realities and structural regulatory constraints on power.
In Western Europe, electricity generation has been slowly declining, with a 5% drop cumulatively over the past five years.
Given Europe’s energy situation, the EU average industrial tariff reached $0.18 USD/kWh in 2022, with the UK at $0.235 USD/kWh and datacenter heavyweight Ireland at $0.211 USD/kWh, nearly triple the electricity cost in the US. Like Asia, Europe imports over 90% of its gas in the form of LNG, mainly sourced from the Middle East (and also still from Russia, despite the ongoing war), so their entire industrial base, not just Datacenters, is subject to geopolitical risk, as most readers will vividly remember from the onset of the war in Ukraine. Given the political and geopolitical realities, adding a massive amount of power generation capacity to host the AI Datacenter boom in Europe would be very challenging.
I made fun of Mistral when it was funded, and then made fun of the EU’s reaction to Mistral wanting to actually build a business. But the French for a change not being enthusiastic about the EU’s regulatory agenda makes sense. The French 1.) have Mistral (even if it is just Llama 2) 2.) are strong at math and 3.) lucked out that Putin invaded Ukraine, narrowly averting the shutdown of their nuclear power plants and following the German path to energy suicide.
EU Insanity: The Kafka Singularity
Forget turtles, it is regulators all the way down. What if the EU itself ground to a halt after getting caught in its own regulatory machinery?
Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Elon Musk Part II
With a Tesla factory in West Taiwan, Elon is compromised on this and all other issues relating to West Taiwan. He and his mouthpieces are misrepresenting the Tik Tok legislation as a free speech issue, which is ironic yet totally consistent.
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Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: The Donald, Jeff Yass, Microsoft Bing, DC Lobbyists Part III, Hollywood, DC Lobbyists Part II, NBA, Warner Bros. Discovery, Germany, DC Lobbyists, Elon/Twitter, The Hugo Awards, Harvard University, Wall Street, Apple
