2014-09-13

Wholesale Tech China

One of the biggest changes that one can experience from living in China is the total destruction of brand. One learns early in China that even in high technology, the name on the chip is as easily replaced as the label on the jeans or handbag. This is typically viewed as IP theft in the West, but it is also a shift in the value of brand and IP. Anything that can commodified, will be commodified by the Chinese economy. The U.S. tries to defend the legal regime of IP, but China is the natural market where the only safe IP is that which cannot be cut and pasted. Benefits accrue to end users as well, as innovation moves out of the commodified market. Within 10 years there may be stacks of gene-sequencing chips on sale in Shenzhen.......

Scrap Note #14
… Shenzhen fragments (from the world’s tech-comm paradise).

Sucking up to the specter of Sino-Capitalism:
Our hotel is in Huaqiang Bei, the center of the Shenzhen electronic market zone. The area is packed with emporia, which are in turn packed with products — and more specifically commodities. Rather than masking the traits of commercial mass-production under a veneer of ’boutique’ rarity, the Shenzhen spirit is most gloriously manifested in the naked exhibition of hyper-alienated, techno-proliferated, trade-format volumes. Chips (of all kinds) come in sheets, which are then stacked into piles, and tessalated into display places designed to minutely explore minimal differences (product micro-specifications and volume-linked price slices). This is capitalism. It’s easy — in a decline-phase Westernized world — to forget what it looks like.

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