By Philip J Cunningham
WeChat is a ‘killer app.’ It does many things and it does
them well. It’s popular, intuitive and easy to use and has been successfully
monetized. It does what some American-produced apps do, but does them better
and in a more integrated way. The US is not always number one.
Maybe that’s why the US government, which has long nurtured
Silicon Valley as the tech arm of the industrial-military establishment, and
feigned to look the other way as American-born Frankensteins like Facebook and
Google were unleashed on an unsuspecting world, has ordered a hit on WeChat.
WeChat’s parent company TenCent has created a winner. The
threat to ban WeChat from the US, where it is especially popular among people
with links to China, is an attack on the free speech of millions. To ban a
popular platform of expression is an abrupt authoritarian turn that even
staunch US critics could hardly have predicted a few years ago. The shocking
shift in US policy reflects Trump’s defining values: he is mean, he is a bully,
he is unpredictable, and, perhaps of greatest concern during this fraught
election cycle, he is a sore-loser.
Silicon Valley is still a force of nature, so why is the US
acting like a loser instead of a winner? Why the sudden smacking down of
competitors?
Once the undisputed leader in computer hardware, app
development, tech innovation and all things software, the US, under Trump’s
insecure and petulant leadership, has taken to bullying and banning vital competitors.
Trump’s limited intellect, short attention span, tax
tomfoolery and tattered business record all point to a “let’s make a deal”
mentality. As a result, he has bullied and berated innovative companies such as
Huawei, which makes excellent phones, and Tencent, which created WeChat among
many other things, and ByteDance, the creator of Toutiao and the insanely
popular video app, TikTok.
The US president may have mastered Twitter, but he doesn’t
understand the complex, inter-connected tech ecosystem and his mistakes are
coming back to bite. He has surrounded himself with nay-saying China Hawks such
as Peter Navarro, Mike Pompeo and Michael Pillsbury who seek to level the
playing field with China by beating a retreat from the field and then zapping
it.
The preening desire to be number one at any cost and by any
means on the part of the numbskull narcissist in the White House is causing the
US to lose friends and lose influence at a precipitous rate.
There was a time where US business confidence was
sufficiently buoyant to live and let live, to share its technology with the
world, knowing it had new, superior products coming down the pipe. A time when
tech artists and creators, such as Steve Jobs, and not money-grubbing parasites
like Mark Zuckerberg ruled Silicon Valley.
Those days are over, if not objectively, then at least
subjectively, in keeping with the doom and gloom headlines and the increasingly
divisive and dour national mood.
When unbridled greed becomes the national ethos, it’s a race
to the bottom.
Leaving some major foreign policy debacles aside, the US in the
early post-war period exuded confidence and projected a naïve but not entirely
insincere aura of global goodwill. The
complex, charismatic and tragic John F. Kennedy embodied that reach-for-the-sky,
future-embracing ethos.
Even though the US limped out of Vietnam in 1975 with
diminished prestige, and culture wars replaced the space race as a focus of
national yearning, the country retained an internationalist perspective that
led to a boom in US-China trade, tertiary education and cultural exchange.
The “good times” lasted through the Obama administration.
It’s gone now. Kaput. Gone, too, are the days of decency and
graciousness. Michelle Obama famously summed up the winning attitude that
helped her and fellow African Americans achieve much in the face of unfair obstacles
and constant ridicule.
“When they go low, we go high.”
With Trump, all that’s changed. His method of operation and
aspirational motto might as well be: “When they go low, we go even lower.”
It’s no coincidence he was groomed in the negative art of
the deal by Roy Cohn, consigliere to criminals and Cold War McCarthyites.
Trump, showing signs of an undiagnosed obsession, has tried
to dust off everything his predecessor touched and undo everything his
predecessor did. The gilded redecoration of the White House is part of that
obsession, if he had his way it would soon look like a chintzy branch of Trump
Tower and a Trump golf course. That’s why First Lady Melania Trump was late in
moving in, that’s why Jackie Kennedy’s much-beloved Rose Garden had to go.
What’s all that got to do with WeChat? Every time Trump
touches something, he makes it worse. America’s rose garden has been vandalized
from within, it’s cracked and broken, its beauty withered on the vine.
Trump allowed the excoriation of Huawei to continue apace,
while sleazily hinting that a “deal” was possible. He naively thought he could
make some serious cash by banning TikTok and then unbanning it under new
ownership, and only made a mess of things.
Ditto for WeChat.
What Trump cannot take a piece of, he will attempt to
destroy. It’s the way he is. It is what it is.
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