California Losing Software Dominance to Communist China

People gather for a press conference about their opposition to a TikTok ban on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 22, 2023. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Something I’ve long dreaded finally is happening: Wokeness and other foolishness by the U.S. and California governments is stifling this state’s innovation machine—leading to Communist China assuming software dominance. The successes of Apple, Google, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley companies dazzle us, preventing us from seeing what’s really happening.

Tech icon Steve Jobs died 11 years ago. Perhaps just as indicative, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel who discovered Moore’s Law in 1965, just died—at age 94. Moore’s Law states computing power doubles, or the price of it is halved, about every three years.

Now this: “Why Chinese Apps Are the Favorites of Young Americans,” headlined the Wall Street Journal March 26. Subhead: “It isn’t just the algorithms, but lessons from a competitive culture.” TikTok, currently being scrutinized in Congress, is only one of these firms.

“Four of the hottest five apps in the U.S. in March were forged in China,” the article reported. “Algorithms are often cited as their secret sauce. An often overlooked facet is how cutthroat competition for users at home has given Chinese firms a leg up over Western rivals.”

We used to have that red-hot competition here. It’s in all the books that have come out about Jobs and the founding of Apple in the mid-1970s at a time of vast ferment in the microcomputer market. Then the dot-com revolution occurred in the 1990s, followed by the social media competition of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

A good idea of how Apple and other firms thought of themselves 40 years ago is the still legendary “1984” ad for the new Macintosh computer broadcast during that year’s Super Bowl. Playing on the year of George Orwell’s dystopian “Nineteen Eighty-Four” novel, it pitched Apple as a scrappy upstart against Big Brother IBM.

Digital Sclerosis

Unfortunately, the vast success of these firms turned them into what they originally fought against: gigantic, sclerotic, centralized companies tightly interwoven with the government. Twitter, although smaller than the other companies, in some ways was more influential because of its use by media influencers. And as we have learned since Elon Musk bought it and unveiled the Twitter Files, it and the other social media platforms engaged in heavy censorship in cahoots with the FBI, NSA, CIA, and other federal agencies.

The U.S. companies now also are obsessed with wokeness, Critical Race Theory (CRT), “gender theory,” and whatever new ideological fad crops up among progressives. The most absurd development was when Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and centibillionaire, funded Equitable Math. Its curriculum actually stated, “White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when ... The focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer.”

This is a man known, before he became a full-time executive, as one of the top computer programmers in the industry. And programming, of course, largely is applied math.

Enter the more nimble Chinese startups taking over the sector—of course, under the watchful eye and penetration by the Chinese Communist Party. You can bet no one in those companies thinks math derives from “white supremacy.”

Five Problems

There are four problems for America now as these and other Chinese companies may have advanced so far it will be difficult for our companies to catch up.

First, these big companies—Facebook, Google, etc.—now are too big to innovate. Even Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has yet to come up with a major new product since Jobs died; the Apple Watch was its last great innovation and was in the pipeline in his last years.

Second is something from my Epoch Times article, “SVB Crash Will Slam California State and Local Budget.” The fallout from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse is reducing capital for startups. That not only will hurt revenues for California state and local governments, as I pointed out. It’s going to be difficult to fund new startups to challenge these Chinese firms. Bloomberg reported March 24, “SVB Collapse Could Mean a $500 Billion Venture Capital ‘Haircut.’”

Third, this problem extends to the military. “Pentagon Woos Silicon Valley to Join Ranks of Arms Makers,” reported the March 26 Wall Street Journal. “To keep up with China, the Defense Department is trying to lure private capital.”

But how can they do it with the private capital system hampered by the bank failures and other problems? Moreover, the chicanery the intelligence community has conducted with Silicon Valley companies, noted above, already politicizes what should be apolitical market systems. Unlike in China, our system is supposed to keep separate the market and the military—with the military then using the market’s brilliant innovations to defend our country.

Fourth, California’s broken educational system prevents the development of adequate homegrown talent to propel Silicon Valley companies. Obviously, companies there draw from the best tech minds from all over America, indeed the world.

But it isn’t just geniuses who run companies. You also need the local folks who have the talent to implement company policy, and do such seemingly mundane things as fix broken computer servers, install building wiring, and even run restaurants where talented people go to mingle and cook up new ideas and projects.

Fifth, even if Congress puts limits on TikTok and the other Chinese companies, that won’t restrict them from taking over social media in the rest of the world. Facebook, Google, etc. will be pushed aside due to their own foolishness and political correctness.

Finally, the only way America can compete with China is to get out of this woke funk—this nonsense of looking at every action through the lenses of race, “gender,” and so on. We need to get back to the good old American virtue of free and open competition, of a level playing field—and let the best win.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.