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Virginia Heffernan
How to Love Technology Again
I God in a chip factory
Playing
The endless combat to repair
The long run is analog.
Who watches over the Watchers?
Gas disturbance weapons
I come to Taiwan thinking morbidly about the fate of democracy. My luggage has been lost. This is my pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain of Protection. The Holy Mountain is meant to protect the entire island of Taiwan, and even, through the most pious, to protect democracy itself, the extensive experiment in governance that has exerted an ethical and genuine influence on the budding world for the maximum of history. a century. The Mountain is a commercial park in Hsinchu, a coastal city southwest of Taipei. His shrine has an unpretentious name: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
In terms of revenue, TSMC is the world’s largest semiconductor company. In 2020, it quietly joined the 10 most valuable companies in the world. It is now larger than Meta and Exxon. La company also has the largest logic chip production capacity in the world. And it produces, according to one analysis, 92% of the world’s most advanced chips: the internal nuclear weapons, aircraft, submarines and hypersonic missiles on which the strong external balance of forces is based.
Perhaps more precisely, TSMC makes one-third of all silicon chips in the world, adding those in the iPhone and Mac. Every six months, only one of TSMC’s thirteen foundries, the fearsome Fab 18 in Tainan, sculpts and engraves a quintillion of transistors for Apple. In the form of those miniature masterpieces, which rely on microchips, the semiconductor industry produces more items in a year than have been produced in any other factory in any other industry in the history of the world.
Of course, now that I am in the exercise of bulleting Hsinchu, I realize that the exact danger covered by the Holy Mountain deserves not to be pronounced. The risk of crossing the 110-mile-wide strait west of the smelters puts Taiwan at risk every moment of every day. Not to mention either country via call, or are they one?Taiwanese newspapers euphemize Beijing’s bellicosity toward the island by calling it “cross-strait tensions. “The language spoken on both sides of the strait, an inland waterway?Foreign waters?- It is known only as “Mandarin”. The longer it stays without calling the risk, the more it looks like an asteroid, irrational and crazy. And, like an asteroid, it can hit at any time and destroy everything and everything.
Semiconductor production plants, called factories, are among the wonderful wonders of civilization. In-house manufactured silicon microchips are the sine qua non condition of the built world, so they are indispensable for human life and are treated as fundamental goods, commodities. Goods in the medieval sense: amenities, amenities, amenities. In the late 80s, some investors even experimented with trading in the futures markets.
But unlike copper and alfalfa, chips are not raw curtains. Perhaps they are cash, the currency of the global realm, denominated in sets of processing power. In pieces of silicon not unusual, employing etching techniques remarkably similar to those used to mint paper money, an almost insignificant curtain on building blocks of the price itself. This is what happens at TSMC.
Matt Burgess
Ramin Skibba
David Nield
Joel Khalili
Like silver, silicon chips are densely draped and the engine of almost all fashionable abstraction, from legislation to concepts to cognition itself. And the power relations and global economy of semiconductor chips can be as mind-boggling as the markets for cryptocurrencies and their derivatives. Or like some theologies, those featuring nano-angels dancing in nano-pins.
As befits a pilgrim, I am exhausted. The flight from Kennedy Airport to Taipei almost charged me: just under 18 mind-blowing hours in the back of a crowded 777. I had vented my sleepless malaise browsing iOS games while persevering with Putin, Xi, the MAGA Republicans, and the rest of the nihilistic flexors with malicious conceptions about democracy. At the same time, I warned for the millionth time that warmongers opposed to lace, such as the right and doing when they feel depressed, point to a new clash of civilizations or, more likely, aim to subjugate Chinese competition so that they can make more money.
As the passengers only found out when they landed in Taipei, the plane took off without a bag of single economic elegance. We had two words in the baggage claim: “war in Ukraine”. My Samsonite horse, which contained Chris Miller and Albert O’s Chip War. s Passions and interests. Hirschman – the ebook I was given with the etymology of “goods” in mind – was back in New York. We had been forced to light up. Flights from U. S. airports are now required to be able to take flights. U. S. sanctions bypass Russian airspace near Alaska, from where they are banned, in retaliation for the U. S. ban on Russian flights in U. S. airspace. That of course was a reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.
This invasion, and the courageous defense established by Ukrainian citizens, was largely followed in Taiwan. Ukraine is a kind of traumatized sister state to Taiwan, another promising democracy extorted by an authoritarian neighbor eager to annex it. This belief informs the semiconductor industry. Last year, microchip titan Robert Tsao, who founded United Microelectronics Corporation, Taiwan’s first semiconductor company and TSMC’s longtime rival, pledged about $100 million for national defense, an investment that includes educating 3 million Taiwanese civilians to confront Chinese invaders. Ukrainian patriots.
TSMC, which plays very well, becomes Tsao as a kind of contrast. Tsao is a braggart. It is also capricious. Having invested heavily in China for years (his prominent Chinese porcelain collection once included a 1,000-year-old brush-washing dish, which he sold for $33 million), he resigned as president of the WBU in 2006 amid accusations that he had illegally invested in Chinese semiconductor technology. But Tsao has changed course since then. Now he is rebelling against the Chinese Communist Party as a crime syndicate. In 2022, he issued a call to arms while wearing a rococo tactical team. He refused to contact me for this play unless I promise to spend time on television. . Maybe just not.
In 1675, a French merchant named Jacques Savary published The Perfect Merchant, an industry manual that has become a consultant for trade around the world. Albert O. Hirschman quotes Savary on how capitalism, which would have been considered only greed so sixteenth-century, has become the healthiest ambition of the human being in the seventeenth century.
Matt Burgess
Ramin Skibba
David Nield
Joel Khalili
Savary firmly believed that foreign industry would be the antidote to war. Humans cannot be polyglots across borders without cultivating an understanding of foreign laws, customs, and cultures. Savary also believed that the resources of the Earth and the brotherhood created through industry were given through God. “It is not God’s will that all human beings should be in one place,” Savary wrote. of friendship between them. “
TSMC’s good fortune rests on its unique understanding of this scattering of providential gifts. Fortunately, the company is known as “pure gaming,” which means that all it does is produce custom chips for commercial customers. These come with factory-free semiconductor companies like Marvell, AMD, MediaTek, and Broadcom, and factory-free client electronics companies like Apple and Nvidia. In turn, TSMC relies on donations from other countries. Companies like Sumco in Japan process polysilicon sand, which is mined for global semiconductor corporations in places like Brazil, France and Appalachia in the United States, to grow silicon ingots. hot monocrystalline. With diamond lacing saws, Sumco’s machines cut gleaming slices that, polished so elegantly that they seem to have nothing within reach, are the flattest objects in the world. From those wafers, which measure up to a foot in diameter, TSMC’s automated machines, many built through Dutch photolithography company ASML, etch billions of transistors into chip-sized pieces; larger slices make loads of fries. Each transistor is about 1,000 times smaller than meets the eye.
So I came here to see TSMC futuristic and poignant: a tribute to Savary’s vastly outdated romance in which liberal democracy, foreign trade, and advances in science and art are one, healthy and unstoppable. More specifically, however, the company, with its near-monopoly on top-production chips, serves as the umbo of the region’s so-called Silicone Shield, which is the most forceful artifact of twentieth-century realpolitik. For an imperial force to capture TSMC, the logic would be to kill the world’s ultimate goose that lays the golden eggs.
As a faithful valet that exists only to make your aristocrat look good, TSMC provides the brains for various products but never claims credit. Manufacturers operate on stage and under a cloak of invisibility, quietly intervening between eye-catching product designers and even more flashy brands and distributors. . TSMC turns out to appreciate the mystery, but anyone in the company understands that if TSMC’s chips disappeared from this world, each and every new iPad, iPhone and Mac would be locked immediately. TSMC’s simultaneous invisibility and indispensability to the human race is anything Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang likes to joke about. “Basically, there’s air and TSMC,” he told Stanford in 2014.
“They call Taiwan the porcupine, right? It’s like trying to attack. You can blow up the whole island, but it probably wouldn’t do you any good,” Keith Krach, a former deputy secretary at the U. S. State Department, told me. TSMC President and former CEO Mark Liu put it more concretely: “No one can TSMC by force. If you use army force or an invasion, you will render TSMC inoperative. In other words, if a totalitarian regime occupied by TSMC force, its kaiser would never have its democratic partners on the phone. Material suppliers, chip designers, software engineers, 5G networks, augmented truth services, synthetic intelligence operators, and affected product brands would block their calls. The factories themselves would be blocked.
Matt Burgess
Ramin Skibba
David Nield
Joel Khalili
With democracy reliably “threatened” in America through everything from election interference to gerrymandering to violent insurrections, shining Reaganite cities in the hills (or sacred mountains) are few and far between. No WIRED reporter has violated the global flea sanctuary and visited a TSMC Factory. That’s why I need to pass. I need to know what happens atomically in factories and how I could return to divinity, or at least to the embodied human brain, which, in the founding instinct of humanism, amounts to the same thing.
Mark Liu, president of TSMC, doesn’t like to call the company a sacred mountain of protection. “We are a collaboration of the era of globalization,” he says. “This label hurts our finger. “
Like silver, silicon chips are densely and the engine of almost all fashionable abstraction, from legislation to concepts to cognition itself.
“They call Taiwan the porcupine, right?” says Keith Krach. “It’s like trying to attack. You can blow up the whole island, but it wouldn’t do you any good. “
Burn-Jeng Lin, former director of TSMC and inventor of immersive lithography, still refers to the company as “we. “