Posts tagged "university:":

A Cohesive Note-taking and Academic Workflow in Emacs

Mathematics in Emacs

For taking notes I started out with a simple notes.org file, separating subject and topics organically with headers. I would recommend other to do the same. Initially, simply writing things down is the goal, and any optimisations will likely result in a net loss. I was inspired by Gilles Castel’s next-to famous series of blog posts on his note taking in LaTeX and vim, particularly his emphasis on “no delay [being] acceptable”. Of course, there are significant deviations in mine and Castel’s approaches and, to be perfectly honest, I think his notes are of a far superior quality. The primary difference is in medium; while the mathematics are written in latex, I prefer to write prose in the much lighter syntax of org mode or markdown, no \emph for me. Instead, I use org-latex-preview and org-fragtog to display latex inline and use the org documents themselves as notes instead of exporting them to PDF. Here is an example of a quick step-by-step way to solve first order differential equations using the integrating factor:

While Karthink has shown that you absolutely do not need to rely on writing snippets as Castel does, I still take that approach. Karthink relies heavily on auctex, an amazing suite for writing latex in Emacs, but most auctex functionality can not be used directly in org-mode. cdlatex, by the same author as org-mode, is however very useful through the org-cdlatex-mode minor mode. It allows for auto-completion of commonly written things like ${}^{\text{super}}$ / ${}_{\text{sub}}\text{-scripts}$ and Greek letters. It also creates a “just press tab whenever you want to continue writing” workflow that will move point in or out of delimiters and complete symbols. This combined with a liberal set of custom expanding templates using yasnippet creates a fast and coherent system since yasnippet also uses TAB as a key by default, meaning that you can spam it throughout writing, only thinking about the math conceptually as you’re listening to the lecturer.

But Emacs is not limited to writing mathematics merely in a documentary fashion, but also in a practical one. While theoretical mathematics operate on the syntax of math itself (algebraically), physics is often times interested in the actual values of the operations. For this I often quickly wrote mathematics in polish notation directly, also known as Emacs lisp. I find algebra difficult in polish notation, and so I usually do it in latex first, only performing the last numerical calculation in lisp.

This is what I would call the “killer app” of org-mode compared to other note taking applications like obsidian or pure TeX files. Being able to instantly tap into a programming language is really powerful, but it also feels very powerful, even when doing trivial things. Quickly being able to jot down numerical calculations (and having them written down for future reference) is quite useful. While I am sure one can write notes in Jupyter notebooks and other computational documents I have yet to hear of someone do this²

Are you someone who does this? Feel free to email me about this and tell me about your workflow, I am always interested in hearing how other people perform these tasks.

. Emacs’ configurability means that one can easily adapt it to one’s own needs rather than either writing your own incomplete tooling or learning someone else’s workflow.

Humanities and the social sciences

After high school I have taken a break from the hard sciences and studied a few different subjects at Stockholm University and the Swedish Defence University. What strikes me as fundamentally different is that while mathematics builds on itself very clearly, where you directly use earlier knowledge to explore new topics, the social realm is a lot more “flat”. One can jump directly into Foucault’s postmodernism or Hegel’s Phenomenology and, while of course missing valuable context, still enjoy a degree of understanding. Comparatively it is quite difficult to get any sort of a grasp for quantum chromodynamics without firm knowledge of the structure of the atom. I also felt that studying depended much more on obtaining a breadth of ideas and perspectives rather than sitting down and mastering whatever new topic the lecture had covered. This then called for a radically different approach.

I ditched my former monolithic “one large file” approach and instead, somewhat reluctantly I admit, began using Org roam. I was critical toward the preaching I observed being done by users of various Zettelkästen systems and felt like the idea of a “second brain” encompassing all your knowledge were useless. Having used the system for almost a year now I still feel the same way. It is quite useful to be able to link ideas, since broad concepts and actors often show up in multiple areas³

Like Marxism! Is there any field where there hasn’t been an attempt at the application of Marxism? There’s even Marxist mathematics.

.

I also took inspiration from Gregory Stein to create an org-mode bibliography that combines notes of books and articles with their respective bibtex entries. Here I am back to the monolithic file approach, with each book or article read merely separated into different broad categories⁴

Each entry does however have an org-id so that it can link and be linked to by other org-roam nodes.

. I have quite a backlog of saved .pdf files that I would like to convert to this new bibliography, but I do not have the time to do it all manually. To start I instead just asked an LLM to convert my hand-written citations for coursework into bibtex entries and sorted them into the file. I will let it grow organically from there.

title: The Meiji Restoration and Modernisation of Japan
subtitle: IR1.1 Seminar 1 Preparatory Assignment
author: Joar von Arndt
options: toc:nil
latex_header: \usepackage[a4paper, top=2in, bottom=2in, left=1.7in, right=1.7in]{geometry}
latex_header: \usepackage[activate={true,nocompatibility},final,tracking=true,kerning=true,spacing=true,factor=1100,stretch=10,shrink=10]{microtype}
latex_header: \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
latex_header: \usepackage{lmodern}

The Role of Geography in Dynastic China

Throughout Chinese history, there have been two great divides. First, that of the east-west, and later the north-south. These two dynamics have been instrumental in how Chinese society looks today and of how the history of imperial and premodern China played out. While China has had contacts with the outside world since time immemorial, it has been isolated from the outside world due to its geographic boundaries. To the north, large steppes and desert that makes settled agriculture largely impossible, as well as major mountain ranges. The west has large deserts and the major obstacle of the Tibetan plateau in the south-west, and further to the south tropical forests and a dense network of mountains. Finally, to the east lies the world’s largest ocean, the pacific, with only the islands of Japan and Formosa, as well as the Korean peninsula before a reaching expanse. These borders have shaped the Chinese frontier, but a multitude of geographic features have also impacted the Chinese interior.

The concept of the Chinese state originated in middle Huang He, where it merges with the wei river. The city of Chang’an served as the capital for numerous early Chinese dynasties such as the Zhou, Qin, Han and Sui dynasties due to its location in the easily defensible and fertile wei river valley. The north’s intermittent rainfall allowed for early irrigation systems that required more advanced social organisations¹

What-you-see-is-what-you-get

In contrast to the north, the south is mountainous and wet; the primary food crop is rice and the population is concentrated along narrow river valleys⁴

Each entry does however have an org-id so that it can link and be linked to by other org-roam nodes.

The difficultly of travelling north-south compared to travelling along the Huang He or Yangtze and their tributaries in the east-west axis means that there was developed a distinct cultural boundary between the two. As early as the Romance, Sun Quan quipped “So the southerners can’t ride, eh?”⁶

Guanzhong, “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. 1074.

The interplay between geography and the historical trajectory of dynastic China highlights the significant role that physical landscapes play in shaping societal development. The unique agricultural practices, cultural identities, and political frameworks arising from geographic divisions have impacted the form and path of ancient China. An understanding of these geographical impacts is essential for a comprehensive appreciation of China’s multifaceted history and ongoing narrative, as they illuminate the lasting legacy of the land in influencing the lives and identities of its populace. This geographic perspective is a key way to look into how historical legacies inform challenges and aspirations throughout the vast scope of premodern China.

The Philosophical Impacts of Nuclear Weapons

To answer the question of whether or not the invention nuclear bomb has been the most important event of human history is not an easy task. There are certainly numerous arguments in favour of such a statement; nuclear weapons have given us the thermodynamically most efficient form of releasing energy yet devised; they have given us the ability to quickly and easily destroy the major feats of our ancestors and possibly even those of our descendents; they have given us power beyond humanity’s comprehension. And yet the nature of a question of this broad a nature requires us to think more deeply about technological evolution and of our place within it. What constitutes an invention, and what makes certain inventions more important than others? Have the impacts of nuclear weapons, on both our materialist world and the cultural spiritus mundi, been large enough to warrant such a description? The Manhattan Project, despite its tremendous success from seemingly out of nowhere, was not a gift of Prometheus. The project itself was an industrial effort of incredible proportions, and built upon the recent cumulative advances in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and special relativity. It is therefore difficult to see the invention of nuclear weapons as a being a particularly important event from the left-handed qua limit perspective, while for those looking in from a right-handed perspective may see the Trinity test as a defining point in human history, especially given the role in the popular consciousness nuclear weapons were given during the cold war.

Nuclear weapons are fundamentally a tool for destruction. The term often used, the bomb, signifies its place as the ultimate explosive, whose Ding an sich is destructive potential in the extreme. They are the ultimate tool of our modern industrial society when organised for murder. It allows for the quick, easy, efficient, and large-scale genocide of the human race. It is hardly necessary to produce a bigger explosive, only delivery systems can be improved. The power to destroy has been concentrated as much as it ever could. The fate of all mankind is now concentrated in one decision, made by one man¹

What-you-see-is-what-you-get

The subject that drives this development is that of technique, strictly different from that of technology. Jacques Ellul dedicates an entire chapter of his work La Technique ou l’Enjeu du siècle to trying to accurately define technique, and so summarising it here is difficult. But Ellul later uses a quote he sees as symptomatic of technique related to nuclear weapons.

We may quote here Jacques Soustelle’s well-known remark of May, 1960, in reference to the atomic bomb. It expresses the deep feeling of us all: “Since it was possible, it was necessary.” Really a master phrase for all technical evolution.⁴

Each entry does however have an org-id so that it can link and be linked to by other org-roam nodes.

Nuclear weapons were a logical next step after the discovery of nuclear fission and of its possibility for chain reactions. The scientific and engineering challenges that had to be overcome for the peaceful use nuclear fission were very similar to those involved in the creation of an explosive device⁵

Luo Guanzhong, “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. Translated by C.H. Brewitt-Taylor. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library. 2013. https://archive.org/details/romance-of-the-three-kingdoms-ebook

But technique does not rest, it is ever expanding. The problems that followed the invention of the atomic bomb were not yet of a truly existential nature. While nuclear weapons were incredibly effective, they could still be reasonably defended against through the maintenance of air-superiority, and the requirements of large amounts of fissile material meant that they remained a scare tool. Ideas of nuclear weapons as simply more efficient bombs were not unheard of within the U.S. military establishment⁶

Guanzhong, “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. 1074.

The invention of arms control is a technical invention to do nothing. The rational answer to the inquiry of nuclear weapons is to never detonate them, as in doing so the threat behind them becomes useless. But the industrial nations that have developed nuclear weapons — as well as the systems to maintain employment and constant readiness — can not readily give them up, only reduce their number. The answer to the self-inflicted problem of the uncontrolled nuclear arms race is then another solution, that of arms control. But this causes more problems; how to ensure compliance, the labour and organisation for monitoring stockpiles et cetera. A reason for the failure of the “five recognized nuclear weapon states” in fulfilling their obligations under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and also the reason that the non-nuclear states do not feel betrayed over the nuclear armed states’ failure at disarmament may be that they themselves would feel pressured to keep their nuclear weapons had they possessed them. Why South Africa did give up its weapons was because it did so through technique. South Africa did not leave its nuclear weapons program in disrepair, but decided to decisively rid itself of its limited number of weapons in exchange for improvement of international relations and prestige. The technical use of nuclear weapons were in this case their destruction not in explosive form, but in dismantlement.

Carol Cohn has described her experience with what she has christened as technostrategic thinking by defence intellectuals regarding nuclear strategy. She sees it as “based on a kind of thinking, a way of looking at problems — formal, mathematical modeling, systems analysis, game theory, linear programming — that are part of technology itself”¹⁰

Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12, no. 4 (1987): 687–718. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174209.

Is there then no hope of stopping this technical development? It the only choice a nihilistic submission to its whims? This is not a particularly strange conclusion; technique is an inherently alienating force that removes meaning from not just our actions, but even our very lives themselves. What is the point in living on if your only accomplishment would be the continued advancement of an unsaid structure of society to which there is no alternative? Nietzsche was right in asking “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” in reference to our murder of God. Humanity needed to take God’s place because God did not give meaning to our lives any more. Instead the goal, the temple of human society, would be this tower of Babel. We would become masters of the physical world; “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them”¹¹

Genesis 11:6

[…] disappears by committing suicide, he ceases to be, and consequently he ceases to be a human being, an agent of historical evolution.¹²

Alexandre Kojève, “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit”. London: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Kojève is not alone in this line of reasoning. Camus also agrees with this idea of the nihilist only having suicide as a true course of action¹³

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays”. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1942.

The foundations of deterrence theory shares some similarities to the Kojève’s interpretation¹²

Alexandre Kojève, “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit”. London: Cornell University Press, 1969.

This dynamic underscores the paradoxical stability created by mutual recognition of the destructive potential inherent in nuclear deterrence. The system persists not because it ensures peace, but because it creates a deliberately uneasy equilibrium¹⁶

Thomas Schelling, “The Future of Arms Control”. Operations Research 9, no. 5 (1961): 722–731. http://www.jstor.org/stable/166817.

So if the development of nuclear weapons can be adequately explained by the march of technique and the actions of nations states be modelled as the struggle between masters, what then are the future developments of nuclear technology, and what impact has it made or will it make on human society or man in microcosm? In the event of catastrophic and cataclysmic nuclear war, a total war, that risks the extermination of the human species, the progress and continuity of history ends absolutely. Technical and industrial society will have destroyed itself and any future developments we might be interested in. We are then only interested in the existential dread that unemployment of nuclear weapons brings to people, or the effects of a limited nuclear war. A limited nuclear war is either the same as a total nuclear war, for the victims, or not too dissimilar as nuclear testing or a conventional war for those who survive. A limited war is mostly different in the restrain of the absolutist monarch, to use the language of Scarry¹

What-you-see-is-what-you-get

The state that backs down becomes the slave. And since the slave is no longer obsessed with this struggle for recognition in the nuclear arms race his now submissive population is terrified by their incapacity to fight against the adversary; The are struck by the fear of death that made them back down to begin with. It is this fear that Jaspers describes as an enlightened fear¹⁷

Karl Jaspers, “The Future of Mankind”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. https://archive.org/details/futureofmankind0000unse.

This dynamic reflects broader existential questions about freedom and control. What the master-slave dialectic teaches us the nuclear age transforms into a global condition. Nations, like individuals, are caught in a perpetual state of self-definition, reliant on both the acknowledgement of their peers and the restraint of their adversaries. The enlightened fear becomes a paradoxical source of empowerment, as it fosters a new kind of freedom: the freedom to act responsibly within the constraints of mutual vulnerability. This is the core idea behind arms control, that stability within this shared vulnerability will cause both fear, the fear to act, and enough security that both sides can focus on other matters within this fear. This balance between fear and security is what makes arms control a crucial mechanism in the nuclear age. By fostering stability through mutual agreements, arms control seeks to institutionalize the enlightened fear, transforming it into a structured and predictable element of international relations¹⁶

Thomas Schelling, “The Future of Arms Control”. Operations Research 9, no. 5 (1961): 722–731. http://www.jstor.org/stable/166817.

The interplay between fear, control, and power in the nuclear age brings into question not only humanity’s technological and political evolution but also its moral and philosophical trajectory. The existential implications of nuclear weapons extend beyond the realm of international relations and into the core of human identity, autonomy, and survival. Nuclear deterrence, while maintaining an uneasy peace, amplifies humanity’s existential tension. The omnipresence of annihilation redefines freedom — not as liberation from constraint but as the capacity to exercise restraint in the face of overwhelming power. This reframing challenges the Enlightenment and technical ideal of progress, which envisioned technological advancement as a pathway to emancipation. Instead, nuclear weapons exemplify technique in that they shackle humanity to the perpetual threat of its own destruction. This tension resonates with Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence¹⁹

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Gay Science”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882.

Achieving such a reïmagining requires more than disarmament. It demands a cultural and philosophical shift — a collective recognition that humanity’s worth is not tied to its capacity for domination or destruction but to its ability to foster creativity, love, and goodness in the world. This transformation parallels the existentialist call for authenticity; In that we should strive to live as we are innately. But this can only be driven by Jaspers’ enlightened fear, mirroring Mencius’ need for education to act morally. Heidegger sees this as a crucial point of technique, that “Unless humanity makes an effort to reörient itself, it will not be able to find revealing and truth”²²

Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik”. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. 1954. https://monoskop.org/images/2/27/Heidegger_Martin_1953_2000_Die_Frage_nach_der_Technik.pdf

The nuclear age compels humanity to confront the duality of its existence — its unparalleled capacity for both destruction and creation. The challenge is not merely technological or political but profoundly existential: to reïmagine progress and security in a way that transcends the pursuit of power and embraces a vision of collective flourishing. This transformation demands a conscious reckoning with the ethical responsibilities of wielding such destructive potential and a commitment to embedding restraint and cooperation at the core of global civilization. Ultimately, the legacy of nuclear weapons will be defined not by their use or disuse but by the choices humanity makes in their presence. These choices reflect the broader question of what it means to be human in an age where the tools of annihilation coëxist with the potential for boundless creativity. Whether we succumb to the nihilism caused by our inventions or rise to the challenge of building a new world remains an open question, but the stakes could not be higher. The future of humanity hinges on its ability to live authentically and wholly under the shadow of this technical evolution.

A Historical Perspective on Strategic Resources

Throughout the history of human civilization, the characteristics of strategic resources and the methods of dealing with them have changed considerably. But as our economy becomes more and more complex, and the number of materials increases together with this complexity, the application of any single material represents a smaller and smaller portion of economic activity. For this reason, the impact of any single resource on the world’s supply chains is unlikely to have as significant of an impact as they might have had in the past. It is interesting however to observe how nations have dealt with the issue of strategic resources in the past and to learn how those techniques may be used in the future to protect critical industries. Historically energy has been the principal strategic resource, but in recent time the prodution of computing machines and information processing has become increasingly important.

For almost all of human history, the labour of mankind was almost entirely devoted to the production of food. Major disasters such as the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations three thousand two hundred years ago did not have insufficient bronze supply as sole cause, even if it may have contributed to the crisis¹

What-you-see-is-what-you-get

With the advance of industrial manufacturing, more effective agriculture, and rapid urbanization, and most of all the use of sources of energy not reliant on human or animal labour led to the rise in complex supply chains and the use of rarer and more advanced materials. Following the demise of the Dutch Republic, the Spanish American Wars of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland emerged as the preëminent leader in the world. It did so partly on the back of Watt’s steam engine from the late eighteenth century, it in turn fueled by long since exploited high-quality British coal. Other European great powers such as France, Prussia, and later Germany were all fueled by the large consumption of coal⁴

Each entry does however have an org-id so that it can link and be linked to by other org-roam nodes.

Coal in truth stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country — the universal aid — the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times. ⁷

Chi, “Key Economic Areas in Chinese History, as Revealed in the Development of Public Works for Water-Control”. 1.

Coal thus became the world’s first true strategic resource, vital to not just the income of those who traded it, but critical to the stability of the entire nation’s economic health. Any nation, regardless of their location in the world or state of development, needed to acquire a steady and reliable supply of coal to avoid being “thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times”. But the eventual replacement of the steam engine by the internal combustion engine meant that the Europeans could no longer rely on domestic sources of energy but had to import foreign oil.

The start of the oil industry has its origins in Titusville, Pennsylvania, where the very first oil well was drilled six years before Jevons described coal as the universal aid. Oil was at first not a critical resource because it was almost entirely a product for illumination, competing with coal-based “town gas” and blubber from whales hunted at sea⁸

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, “The War Trap”. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. https://archive.org/details/wartrap0000buen/mode/2up.

While Shell was a British company, it was dominated by the 60/40 merger with Royal Dutch in 1907 and was therefore chiefly in the control of foreign interests in the view of the British government, especially as Anglo-German relations grew more amicable at the turn of the century⁹

The definition of the use of nuclear weapons is one that is not straightforward. Most nuclear weapon use has been either rhetorical (threats), or demonstrative (nuclear weapons testing). Both of these fall under the umbrella of “nuclear signalling”. The detonation of nuclear weapons on the population or military facilities of an enemy, like those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is one that I will in this text refer to as the employment of nuclear weapons. In this case $Employment⊊Use$.

The rise of mechanized warfare and aviation that got its start during the first world war but really took off in the interwar period and during the second world war meant that oil became a truly critical commodity. The rise of the internal combustion engine and the mass production of the car at the turn of the century, meant that the oil industry had grown considerably. It had also saved it from the rise in electrical lighting during the same period that caused a severe decrease in kerosene revenues⁸

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, “The War Trap”. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. https://archive.org/details/wartrap0000buen/mode/2up.

The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without plenty of ammunition, and neither guns not ammunition are of much use in mobile warfare unless there are vehicles with sufficient petrol to haul them around.¹⁰

Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.” Signs 12, no. 4 (1987): 687–718. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174209.

Likewise, Japan’s expansion in the Pacific was driven by its need to secure raw materials, especially oil, as its own domestic supplies were virtually nonexistent. After the United States sanctioned Japan following its invasion of China, denying it the ability to buy oil, Japanese strategic planning became centred on the security of its oil supplies. Even after the conquest of the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia) the Japanese remained afraid of American capabilities to intercept shipments of petroleum on their way back to the Japanese home islands. This was a core reason for the attacks at Pearl Harbour that brought the Unites States into the war. Even during the war, oil supplies were a constant struggle for the Japanese military. Despite attempts to make aviation fuel out of pine cones on massive scales, the Japanese air force was forced to carry out its famous kamikaze attacks principally due to shortage of fuel⁸

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, “The War Trap”. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. https://archive.org/details/wartrap0000buen/mode/2up.

Both during and following the war, large supplies of oil had been found in Arabia and in other places around the world. But despite the fact that oil had been proven to be perhaps the most important resource for mobile warfare, neither of the two superpowers saw oil supply as particularly worrying. This is because they both possessed some of the world’s largest supply and the nations where these new supplies were being discovered were either neutral or somewhat aligned with the two superpowers (Venezuela and the Soviet Union, the United States and Saudi Arabia¹¹

Genesis 11:6

But despite this lack of strategic interest oil’s significance only seemed to grow. Petroleum not only powered the world’s cars, airplanes, industry, and electrical generation, but was also being used in an ever increasing number of products on larger and larger scales in every sector from construction, to plastic packaging, to pharmaceuticals. This increase in demand coincided with a increase in the share of U.S. oil that was imported from foreign countries. This was exploited by the major Arab oil-exporting nations, who were aggravated by staunch western and U.S. support to the State of Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War⁸

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, “The War Trap”. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. https://archive.org/details/wartrap0000buen/mode/2up.

The primary instrument created by the oil-importing industrial nations to tackle the immediate hold over the oil markets that OPEC had was the creation of the International Energy Agency and a system of oil reserves held by its member states that can be emptied as a reaction to jumps in the price of oil. Largest of these is the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which holds up to 714 million barrels of crude oil¹³

Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays”. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1942.

It was during this period that oil started to take a back seat to the increasingly sofisticated computer industry. During the late 20th century the commodification of information, and the machines that processed it, became increasingly valuable. The invention of the transistor in 1947, the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) in 1955, and later the integrated circuit (IC) in 1959 allowed the mass production of computing machines on an unprecedented scale. Moore’s law and Dennard scaling meant that computers not only became cheaper, they also became faster and used less power as the size of transistors decreased exponentially ¹⁴

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. “The Phenomenology of Spirit”. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Critical to this nascent industry was the location of these companies to both acquire expertise and reduce labour costs. The early semiconductor was centred on “Silicon” Valley after Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and its descendent Fairchild Semiconductor had pioneered the silicon transistor and integrated circuit, respectively. Since these early chips were more reliable due to their solid-state nature, their first large customer was the American military for use in the Minuteman-II ICBM. As the semiconductor industry grew, IBM emerged as the juggernaut. But the American dominance of the semiconductor industry was not to last. American efforts to offshore the “packaging” of chips meant that knowledge was continuously transferred overseas, particularly to the Four Asian Tigers of the Republic of Korea, Republic of China (ROC), Hong Kong, and Singapore; but also to the Philippines and especially Japan. The Japanese market was large and possessed a large number of companies manufacturing ICs and semiconductor components. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) wanted to maintain Japanese competitiveness to American penetration into their market by keeping up with the developments in “Very Large Scale Integration” (VLSI) technology that was needed for the ever increasing number of components used in any given IC¹⁴

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. “The Phenomenology of Spirit”. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

The LDP thus had a sophisticated plan to maintain the Japanese IC industry. To accelerate VLSI development the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) incentivized the otherwise intensely competing companies through free government loans that represented a much larger R&D expenditure than what any single Japanese company could afford, though much smaller than what the major American companies were investing in VLSI R&D¹⁵

A reference to Thomas S. Power’s famous quote in response to a RAND counterforce strategy avoiding Soviet civilian targets:

Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!

The approach taken by the Japanese VLSI project shares some similarities with the recommendations made by Malmberg et al.¹⁸

Günther Anders, “The Obsolescence of Man, Volume II: On the Destruction of Life in the Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution”. Munich: C.H. Beck. 1980. https://files.libcom.org/files/ObsolescenceofManVol%20IIGunther%20Anders.pdf

This dominance in a critical industry is useful in achieving foreign-policy goals. ROC control of this middle ground in the IC supply chain meant that the they could use this choke point to plausibly deter a forceful reunification by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Since dominance in IC manufacturing does not hinge on the control of a strategic geographic location, but rather delicate high-tech fabs and an equally brittle system of supply chains, an armed conflict could easily result in the destruction of these facilities and bring about large economic damages to both nations involved as well as the larger global economy. ICs are also much harder to store than oil as they are continuously updated and improved, with much of the knowledge not even written down but passed around through tradition and experience. Avoiding the upset of this thin balance is in the interest of every major economy on the planet today, and exerts enormous pressure on the actors involved. The PRC’s recent attempts at cornering the market for rare metals, particularly rare-earth metals, shares this strategic thinking. Rather than being able to completely stop production of advanced technology in hostile countries, a practical impossibility owing to the small volumes of these materials, the PRC uses increased economic inefficiency as a weapon to deter countries from intervening it what it deems critical foreign policy objectives (Such as the status of Formosa). The failure of economic warfare on impacting the overall quality of war materiel²¹

The U.S. Department of Energy, “Executive Summary: Plowshare Program”. Accessed 2024-11-30. https://www.osti.gov/opennet/reports/plowshar.pdf

As technology advances, so too will the division of resources and techniques employed. The days when foraging, hunting, and fishing was all that humanity did to sustain itself at the dawn of humanity has long since passed, and with it the hope of complete self-reliance. The ever increasing list of goods seen as critical to the economy, like that published by the European Commission²²

Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik”. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. 1954. https://monoskop.org/images/2/27/Heidegger_Martin_1953_2000_Die_Frage_nach_der_Technik.pdf