This is an excellent article by Lauren Jackson in today’s New York Times interviewing Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”
Zuboff says: “Apple is the wealthiest and most powerful corporation, certainly in modern history, perhaps in the history of capitalism. And Apple now exerts unilateral, essentially unaccountable control over critical communications infrastructures, by its complete control of the operating system for its smartphones and other devices.”
She continues: “I think it’s important for people to understand that Apple is not a government. Apple is a company. It’s a corporation.”
Now I’m shifting gears to ask: what if China’s Communist Party has inserted a party committee into Apple’s enormous operations in China with or without the company’s knowledge? The CCP is clearly seeking to use American and all foreign corporations as tools for it to surveil the world and to shape opinion in its favor. As I will argue in A Grand Strategy: Countering China, Taming Technology and Restoring the Media, Apple is for all intents and purposes a Chinese company. It’s entire production infrastructure is run by Foxconn in China. Apple does not make its iPhones anywhere else. The Chinese government has recently used the iPhones of its Uighur population to spy on them. As the New York Times also reported recently, Apple’s data centers in China are run by Chinese government technicians.
There is a great reckoning ahead. Who are Apple and the other big tech platforms? Do they remain American corporations? Or have they become pawns in the global competition between the United States and China?
