A question we don’t ask often enough
The other day while taking care of some things around the house, I decided to put something on the TV to watch in the background. I’ve always enjoyed “how it’s made” type stuff so that’s what I put on. After a couple hours of chores and half watching how industrial fans and oil tankers were built, I decided to take a break. I decided to spend the time watching how computer processors were made.
I did a quick search and found exactly what I was looking for. From Sand to Silicon. A video produced in the late 90’s/early 00’s style, but in 2012.
At first, it was so stock, so stilted, it almost read like irony. As if Tim and Eric had done a bit about manufacturing integrated circuits. Generic footage of people in clean suits and in conference rooms. Soaring language describing mundane processes.
“Let our experts walk you through the nano-cosmos of, the Atom.”
It was everything I was looking for. Informative, entertaining, and bizarrely anachronistic for something produced in the past 10 years. That stuck with me a bit. It felt off somehow. So I decided to dig into who made it.
The video was produced by GlobalFoundries, a corporate semiconductor manufacturer. That explained, at least, some of the uncanniness of the video. Probably the brainchild of a sales or marketing VP to show to prospective clients or investors.
Looking further, it turns out GlobalFoundries isn’t just some no-name minor manufacturer. They’re a major player in the semiconductor business. They have a yearly revenue of $5.5 billion, 16,000 employees, and manufacturing facilities in Germany, Singapore, Vermont, and New York.
In fact, GlobalFoundries was originally the manufacturing arm of AMD, one half of the PC processor duopoly. They have the exclusive contract to manufacture IBMs server processors, they produce chips for AMDs flagship line of CPUs, and components for Broadcom and Qualcomm. They’re manufacturing key components for companies supplying companies making phones and tablets and PCs. I’d stumbled across the PR of a company integral to the devices that in many ways define the modern world.
It’s pretty likely you own a device that uses their components, and you’ve probably never heard of them. I hadn’t.
That’s all interesting, I’m sure you’re thinking, but what does it matter? There are hundreds and thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of people working on this stuff, and it’s all invisible to us, the end consumers.
I’d say it matters a lot. Our world is driven by companies powered by workers we don’t see. We should see them. Not just because invisible labor is especially exploitable labor, but because the backbone of production has much more influence than most people realize. Increasingly it’s pushed into the background, behind the companies that design and contract, but don’t produce.
If a company vital to the electronics supply chain like GlobalFoundries were to close up shop, the results would be more than noticeable.
If companies like GlobalFoundries are important to the world we live in, so is the question of who controls them. We tend to view corporations as faceless monoliths. They are entities unto themselves. Vast and sprawling, almost forces of nature, but they are owned and operated by people. People with ideologies and agendas. People with goals that could be opposed to yours or mine. People with real power.
Sometimes it’s easy. We know certain corporate villains all too well. Jeff Bezos and Amazon. The Walton family and Wal-Mart. The Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. But, all too rarely, if there isn’t an individual or family involved we forget to ask the most important question.
Who Owns It?
If a company is selling a harmful product or damaging the environment who do you protest? Who do you shame? Whose dinner do you ruin? Who do you pressure and confront?
Who is responsible?
People think the nature of publicly traded companies make this especially difficult or complicated. It’s not. Most individually owned stocks are held by the top 10%. Institutional investors like pension funds own much of the rest.
GlobalFoundries? Well, after being spun off from AMD, it was sold to other private investors. They’re now owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.
Whether it be a government, trust, foundation, fund, or individual the question of who owns what is vital to foreign and domestic political economy. If you want structural change the owners are the people who will have the greatest ability to influence the outcomes.
Asking who owns what will dictate the tactics and strategy of anyone seeking to make the world a better, or worse, place.
This is my way of introducing what will be an ongoing series. An investigation into the people and entities that control much of the world we inhabit. The companies that dictate so much of our lives can easily go unnoticed, but we can start to learn where power lies by asking that simple question.
Who Owns It?
Jean Krill is is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His writing navigates the many disparate visions of a radically better future.