American Disruption

Summary

I have a few informal guidelines that govern my writing on Stratechery, including “Don’t post more than one front-page Article a week”, “Don’t talk about my writing process”, and “Don’t start Articles with ‘I’”; it’s an extraordinary week, though, so I’m breaking a few rules. There are three old Stratechery Articles that, after reflection, missed the mark in different ways. The most proximate cause for my rule-breaking was Monday’s Trade, Tariffs, and Tech; I stand by everything I wrote, but it was incomplete, lacking an overall framework and satisfying conclusion. That’s not surprising given the current uncertainty, but that means I should have waited to publish a front-page Article until I had more clarity (I do much more musing in my Updates, which that Article is now categorized as). Now I have to break my rule and write another Article. The second Article to revisit is November’s A Chance to Build. This Article was in fact deeply pessimistic about President Trump’s promised trade regime, particularly in terms of what it meant for tech; the title and conclusion, however, tried to find some positives. Clearly that was a mistake; that Article was predictive of what was happening, but I obscured the prediction. The third Article to revisit is January 2021’s Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History. This Article was right about tech exiting an economically-defined era — the Aggregation era — and entering a new politically-defined era. It was, however, four years too early, and misdiagnosed the reason for the transition. The driver is not foreign countries closing their doors to America; it’s America closing its door to the world. The proximate cause of all of this reflection is of course Trump’s disastrous “liberation day” tariffs. The secondary cause is what I wrote about Monday: the U.S. has a genuine problem on its hands thanks to its inability to make things pertinent to modern warfare and high tech. The root cause, however, is very much in Stratechery’s...