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TikTok went dark in the US today. There’s been a ton of news coverage, most of it asking: now where will the kids go to watch their cat videos?
A far deeper picture is being missed.
The TikTok ban was founded in a growing belief that the app is a Chinese intelligence asset. First, it’s a window onto the tastes, preferences, and lifestyles of hundreds of millions across the Global North. But many believe it’s more: a tool for active mind control, which allows the CCP to push content that erodes our ability to act.
So we need to sever the connection: that’s the thinking behind the ban.
You’ve heard about all that already. But did you see this?
The rumours are that Elon wants to lead a consortium that will buy Intel.
I’ve been talking about Intel for a while to the institutional investors who read my work in Global Macro Investor. But I raise this story now because events around Intel and today’s TikTok shutdown should be understood as two fragments of the same emerging, and deeply consequential, reality.
Let’s rewind and start with Intel.
The US is locked in a battle with China to own the coming Exponential Age. The Great Power with the best intelligence will win the 21st-century.
Currently, the US faces a problem. Almost all of its frontier AI chips are made in Taiwan — a country that China may soon invade. So the US is amid a monumental push to take back control of its own chip-making.
Intel is the only credible domestic player to lead that charge. The company is legendary; it was at the tip of the Moore’s Law spear for decades through the PC era. But it lost that lead to the Taiwan’s TSMC in the 2010s, and has been in a trough ever since. Now, the US wants a comeback.
But the bigger picture here? The one that links the Intel rumours and the TikTok shutdown?
The geopolitical map is being redrawn around new technological realities. Specifically, we’re amid a great Technological Decoupling.
It was once believed that the digital age would bring us all together. Mark Zuckerberg told us that the world was becoming more open and connected, and that this was a wonderful thing. Welcome to the global village! But it turns out that — in all kinds of ways — the web’s real cultural power is not to unify, but to divide.
And now, a global faultline is clearly visible. It marks the boundary between two internets: that of the Global North on the one hand, and China on the other.
The US TikTok ban is yet another signal of the emergence of this splinternet. But the point I want to make clear: this is only the start. Via the US push to rekindle Intel and advance its own AI infrastructure at lightspeed — all while doing its best to hinder Chinese AI — we see the emergence not just of two internets, but two rival systems of intelligence.
And this is about more, even, than control of AI chip manufacturing. American AI companies have agreed to block Chinese users from accessing their frontier models and the apps they power. That means no ChatGPT or Claude in China. Instead, Chinese citizens use AIs created by domestic players, who follow strict rules laid down by the CCP. Their LLMs are trained to echo President Xi’s thinking on ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
Once you accept that AI is a deeply consequential technology, you see how important this is. AI will forge our cultures, change the way we think, and even help shape the limits of what it is possible for us to think about. And now, the world is dividing into two great and opposing AI arenas. Two great systems of culture and information processing. Each one wants to advance, while eroding the power of the other.
This truth brings with it a kind of shock; a feeling of lapsing into a new and unexpected timeline. The 1990s and 2000s primed us to expect a march towards global cultural unification. We thought that we’d all soon float within one vast and unified info-verse.
Instead, we’re getting the opposite.
The Exponential Age, it seems, will be one marked by a new kind of cultural and informational division. Two great Intelligence Kingdoms are emerging. Frontier technologies; ancient divisions. New world, same humans.
I’ll keep watching. See you next week,
David.
This was #4 in the series Postcards from the New World, from NWSH.
If we’re going to have a splinternet, I for one welcome the competition. While Silicon Valley has brought many amazing technologies and services to the world, it is incredibly biased by hyperlocal values and philosophical beliefs. Capitalism, reductionism, individualism/isolationism reign supreme in that value world.
Withholding chips and data is a stalling technique. In my studies of policy, it only offers short-term advantages that erode in the long term. Onshoring and domestic building eventually replace them. And look at how BYD today is making better and far cheaper EVs than Tesla.
My hope is we will see intelligence and AIs reflective of plural values each: China, Silicon Valley, Europe, Africa. Single mindsets do not provide the sort of social diversity we need. Otherwise we will ll suffer from overoptimized intelligence monocultures, brittle to the dynamics of our planetary future.
So, we have ourselves a new Cold War. We are building drone armies, clone armies, surveillance systems with unparalleled reach into the lives of ordinary people... and we never got rid of those nuclear warheads, either. I envy those optimistic enough to think a hot war is not inevitable.