U.S. weaponizes tech sovereignty in global race, mirroring China’s state-led industrial strategy
Original framing: “U.S. adopts China's playbook on tech and security” — The Japan Times
The tech Cold War echoes the 19th-century telegraph and 20th-century nuclear races, where infrastructure became a proxy for empire. Both the U.S. and China are repeating Japan’s 1980s semiconductor dominance playbook, but with AI as the new frontier. The historical pattern shows how industrial policy cycles oscillate between protectionism and globalization, often at the expense of peripheral economies.
The U.S.-China tech rivalry is not a clash of ideologies but a shared crisis of imagination, where both nations treat technology as a tool of domination rather than liberation.
This framing obscures how Indigenous epistemologies, Global South movements, and historical patterns of resistance offer alternatives to the securitized status quo. The solution lies in redefining sovereignty as interdependence—e.g., through a Global Tech Sovereignty Compact that treats AI and semiconductors as commons, not weapons. Actors like the African Union, feminist hackerspaces, and public-interest tech alliances are already modeling this future, but they lack the scale to counter the military-industrial complex. The trickster’s insight is clear: the absurdity of the tech Cold War lies in its denial of shared humanity, a denial that can only be undone by centering those most harmed by its logic.