Max Berwald – Final Project

I have been torn between a difficult paper topic and an easier paper topic and I am leaning towards the more difficult paper topic. As I mentioned very briefly in a previous blog post, I’ve been getting very interested in the CHIPS Act, US policy with regards to semiconductors, and the role of semiconductors in the US-Taiwan relationship.

Recently, the US has identified Taiwan’s dominant role in the production of advanced microchips (something like 90% of global supply for certain kinds of advanced chips) as a major national security problem. In Taiwan, this “problem” had previously been described as a “silicone shield,” the idea being that Taiwan’s indispensability in global supply chains because of its contribution in this difficult area would protect it (welding US national security every more tightly to Taiwan’s own national security via digital infrastructure). The CHIPS Act appropriates 52 billion USD for the onshoring of advanced semiconductor manufacture to the US. At the same time, the Biden administration is beginning to experiment with using intellectual property rights to prevent companies all over the world involved in the processes of advanced semiconductor manufacture from doing business with PRC companies. This is driving bifurcation in a highly globalized industry: the PRC cannot abandon advanced computing (long term economic development and national security both depend on it) so it will have to pursue its own independent development of advanced semiconductors. (This is tremendously wasteful from a global perspective.) Everyone goes on and on about how difficult this process will be, but no one denies that it’s pretty much the only course (if the US government is set on preventing Chinese access to these technologies). 

These developments fascinate me for a number of reasons. For my final paper, I want to think about how to integrate this new chapter into the military history of computing. On the one hand, much of the technology behind computing, semiconductor manufacture, and microchip design was done in US military labs. In this sense, the implementation of conspicuous industrial policy related to the long term future of this technology is a continuity. Semiconductors are the perfect example of a technology that it is difficult for the market to afford to innovate and develop on its own. On the other hand, consumerism and market forces have also played a decisive role in the development of this technology between the 1950s and the present. In his recent book on the history of the semiconductor and its current foreign policy dimensions, Chip War, Chris Miller argues that it was the emergence of mass consumer culture in the postwar US that allowed corporations to make enormous advances in miniaturization. (The USSR, he argues, was unable to do this for the same reason, despite a concerted, long term period of state investment.) That is, while a socialized, government-subsidy model was required to make the initial breakthroughs, the gift of these breakthroughs to private corporate actors, and their repackaging of them for a variety of consumer applications, is what allowed these technologies to develop into their present forms. I want to integrate this back and forth motion into both the history of computing as a military technology and into a contemporary understanding of what militarism is. My thinking here is that this trajectory could shed light on the relationship between consumer culture and militarism, and I’m not sure that this has been written about before. If consumerism and consumer electronics were essential to the process of developing technologies that are now so essential to the US military that they have to be re-securitized, made secret, and even onshored at tremendous cost, does that mean that the US species of militarism also has a deeply consumerist quality to it? Reading recommendations are welcome, because I may only think this is interesting because I haven’t read the right articles.

I can’t emphasize enough that, prior to the last three weeks, I really knew nothing about semiconductors, so I’m entering at the ground floor. Recommendations and condemnations both welcome.