In light of the recent trade bans, it might be a good time to
reevaluate the relationship we have to the computing substrates we
use.

There has been growing concern about platform lock-in with social
media and operating system vendors, as well as the fragmentation of
the internet, by way of state or corporate firewalls.

What we are seeing now is unprecedented though, as supply of the
actual transistors performing the computation will be limited to
certain groups, restricting their computational, and therefore
extended cognitive freedom.

While I have hopes that the current target will be able to take the
blow suffieciently well, there are many groups and economies for which
such a development might have catastrophic consequences.

Looking towards other critical infrastructure components, like server
or embedded operating systems, we have solved the problem already, by
embracing multi-stakeholder models of free and open source software
development.

In the last years the https://riscv.org/ community has undertaken
tremendous efforts to achieve similar models for hardware, developing
free toolchains, chip designs and actual physical realizations.

Maybe society can seize the opportunity this unfortunate incident
provides to reinforce cooperation, working together in the struggle
for survival and intelligence, not fragmenting our efforts to waste
even more time and energy.