Tech's globalist dream is dying

The tech world order that came together in the '90s at the Cold War's end is falling apart as a new rift between Russia and the West opens and a great retrenchment begins. The breakup of the USSR in the early '90s opened an era in which internet use rapidly spread around the globe and US tech companies viewed the entire planet as both factory floor and market. Working from that assumption helped a handful of companies grow to previously inconceivable size, wealth and power. But the triple whammy of a "decoupling" between the US and China, a global pandemic, and Russia's Ukraine invasion is rapidly shifting the landscape — and raising questions about how long those firms can maintain their colossal scale. A new COVID outbreak that's spread from Hong Kong to nearby Shenzhen, China, has led Foxconn — the gigantic Taiwan-based tech supplier — to temporarily close production complexes there that manufacture, among other things, Apple's iPhone. At the same time, Ukraine's plight has pushed many US-based tech giants toward taking sides in a major international conflict, turning the power of their platforms toward blocking Russian state propaganda. Now all that, plus the pandemic, has left the US in a "bring production home from overseas" mood. The result is the start of a vast withdrawal from a single global tech market.