Kliuless #36: The Tech Cold War

Stratechery: China, Leverage, and Values

"The truth is that the U.S. China relationship has been extremely one-sided for a very long time now: China buys the hardware it needs, and keeps all of the software opportunities for itself — and, of course, pursues software opportunities abroad. At the same time, U.S. acquiescence to this state of affairs has denied China the necessary motivation to actually make the investments necessary to replace U.S. hardware completely, leading to this specific moment in time

To that end, and leaving aside broader questions about the Trump administration’s approach to trade with China, when it comes to a 'tech cold war' I think the U.S. has the most leverage it ever will have: the U.S. advantage in advanced components, particularly processors and their fabrication, is massive, and will only grow if the U.S. is able to gain the support of countries like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Yes, China will spend whatever is necessary to catch up, but it will take a lot of time"

"This is the true war when it comes to technology: censorship versus openness, control versus creativity, and centralization versus competition. These are, of course, connected: China’s censorship is about control facilitated by centralization. That, though, should not only give Western tech companies and investors pause about China generally, but should also lead to serious introspection about the appropriate policies towards our own tech industry. Openness, creativity, and competition are just as related as their counterparts, and infringement on any one of them should be taken as a threat to all three"

The Peculiar Blindness of Experts: Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future?

Valve lets players avoid toxic people in Dota 2, charges for the privilege

Mario Kart Tour beta hands-on: Microtransactions land like a nasty blue shell

Nintendo to halt service of two mobile games in Belgium amid loot box debacle

Valve making its own version of popular Dota 2 mod

Backwards compatibility and streaming key to Sony's next-gen strategy

Activision gives Call of Duty: Mobile the battle royale treatment

Samsung reportedly solves Galaxy Fold problems  

Testing first Samsung 5G phones on Verizon's mmWave 5G network

China's NetEase to launch first official Pokemon game in China

Chinese facial recognition company Megvii raised $750mm

Sony Interactive Launches Unit to Adapt Games for Film, TV

Streaming Service Quibi Seeks Up to $1 Billion in New Funding

'Translatotron': Google can now do language-to-language translation of speech all at once instead of transcribing to text, translating the text and then generating new speech from that text

Minecraft has sold 176 million copies worldwide

Tencent acquires Swedish game studio Sharkmob

Google is launching YouTube on the Oculus Quest

Firewatch publisher unveils Playdate gaming handheld

Complexity Gaming opens fancy esports headquarters in Texas

How Spiderman came into being

Inside Google's Civil War  

Interview with Joseph Tsai, co-founder of Alibaba

HBR: What Good Feedback Really Looks Like