Computer Spies Hacked Reality

A hack.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s big amazing story today, about how Chinese spies secretly put backdoors embedded in “a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice” into the kinds of circuitboards assembled in China and used by lots of big U.S. companies and government agencies, is I think best read not as a story about computer hardware or national security or supply-chain management, but about the epistemology of capitalism. Our lives are, increasingly, lived on and through computers, and a deep lesson of this story is that not even the smartest engineer at Apple Inc.—not even all of the engineers at Apple combined—can fully understand how those computers work at every level. More than that, our business works through global supply chains, and no one involved in a complicated global supply chain can fully comprehend it. All of the knowledge about everything that matters is distributed; if you are a practical sort you can build a house or grow corn yourself, but you cannot take sand and oil and build a modern computer and program it to run Microsoft Word. You can’t even describe all the steps of that process in a reasonably satisfying way.