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Thursday, Mar 30, 2023 - 00:52 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Tick Tock Goes The Clock

There hasn't been much reaction to the new (minor) Missile Crisis yet with Team Blue playing their remaining cards close to their chest, other than the cessation of strategic nuclear data-sharing by the U.S. side, and more general announcements of Cold War II. They... they seem to be taking a sharpie to the card yet again, but ok lor, they happy can liao.


Turn 13, Action Round 4 (Team Blue)

Team Blue plays Captured AI Scientist for its Event.


No lah, Singapore not in China, ok?
(Original sources: twilightstrategy.com, cnbc.com, freelogopng.com)


The Twilight Struggle: New Moon edition of this card has had its name slightly-altered from the original to protect modern sensitivities, much like how works by Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie etc. have been edited - oft retrospectively for digital versions - to satisfy the word-censors... or, dare we say, the vocabulary Nazis. Whoops.

Well, since that's out of the bag already, the original Captured Nazi Scientist card refers to the post World War II Operation Paperclip, in which the victorious Team Blue Americans inducted over a thousand (frequently-Nazi) scientific talents from the defeated Germans, towards boosting their own technological efforts. In the case of Wernher von Braun, this contributed greatly to NASA's successful moon landing, and thus Team Blue's triumph in the Space Race - a race which has recently been suggested to have been restarted.

Leaving the cosmos and extraterrestrial void aside for the moment, however, it is reasonable to assert that the true Space Race of our generation is actually more about artificial intelligence* (AI), than any other natural/physical science - with the ongoing Chip War being waged to deny Team Red/China access to the semiconductors critical to (cutting-edge) AI development. So-called generative AI** taking the world by storm via ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion etc. in recent months has only fueled the craze (some of it even warranted), which is where we return to the geopolitical application.


Explaining the TikTok algo***


For those not residing on Earth for the past few years, TikTok (Douyin in China) is a Chinese video-sharing app that has well surpassed YouTube globally, even in Team Blue core players such as America and Great Britain. Here, it might be noted that there is arguably essentially no network/infrastructure-level innovation that TikTok offered, over YouTube and other long-established competitors such as Twitch, Vimeo, Instagram etc.; the logistics behind serving up video-on-demand has been largely solved. What separated TikTok from the crowd, then, was its AI-based algorithm. Unlike, say, YouTube that was content to just serve up music and clips on request, TikTok tailors its infinite rush of short videos according to user behaviour, leading to addictive binge-watching that some have termed "digital crack"; the holy grail of the attention economy.

Interestingly, short-form videos had already been offered by services such as Vine (remember it?), which however never quite got its monetization right for content creators (which we may be seeing in other contexts, for Cold War II), unlike TikTok. Whatever the ultimate reasons for its overwhelming success, however, TikTok had committed an unforgivable cardinal sin: it was a Team Red product, that was set to Dominate a soft power domain that had previously been the exclusive enclave of (Anglo) Team Blue tech giants. The Cold War equivalent would be (a translation of) Pravda threatening to outsell The New York Times in the U.S., which has to be obviously unacceptable.

This had The Donald famously make to ban TikTok in 2020, a stand that has more or less been duplicated by the Biden administration this month - because while the person in the Oval Office might change, underlying strategic fundamentals do not. The House anti-China committee has thus wasted no time in hauling TikTok's CEO (a fellow Singaporean and Hwa Chongian) up for a five-hour grilling last week, which frankly had the vibes of a witch hunt at times (which the previous POTUS might sympathize with). The main concern was apparently China possibly using TikTok to spy on Americans, to which it might be noted that there had been basically zero concerns about U.S.-based giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft etc. doing the same to the outside world (or, to be fair, their own citizens).

But look. We all know where this is going, lah. This is The Greatest Game after all, there's no need to be shy about such moves. In any case, it's not like China has too much room to object either, given their own Great Firewall (of Steel?) blocking access to external websites and apps willy-nilly.


To come in multiple colourways?
(Source: bbc.com)


The Event sees Team Blue advance their Space Race marker to the Earth Satellite box - the same as Team Red currently - for 1 VP as the second player to reach it, cutting Team Red's VP lead to just one. Note that since this is an Event, it does not preclude them from sending another card to the Space Race track later in the turn if need be, in the spirit of looting foreign technology (i.e. Nazi rocketry previously, CCP AI recommender systems presently, from the proposal for TikTok to undergo a forced sale to U.S. parties). I do have to take back the statement in February that the U.S. isn't sending their own moon missions, however - Artemis III is scheduled for late 2025, and should make for some good live-streaming.


[*Which just so happens to be my professional field, with developments as very broadly expected when first setting off on this path, a decade or two ago.]

[**I should really do a piece - and more original research - on this, soon.]

[***Okay, maybe he's not exactly an AI scientist, but close enough?]



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