14 Leaders The EconomistOctober 5th 2019
2 nese e-commerce giant, has already shown off a machine-learn-
ing risc-vchip. Xiaomi, a maker of smartphones and other con-
sumer gadgets, is planning to use risc-vchips in its fitness
bands. Were Android not open source, Huawei would be in an
even deeper hole than it already is.
Other countries are interested, too. India’s government has
been investing in risc-vdevelopment in the past year; it is also
keen to develop a technology ecosystem that minimises foreign
dependence (see Asia section). In an effort to reassure the com-
panies using its technology, the risc-vFoundation is moving
from America to neutral Switzerland.
Many in the West, meanwhile, see China’s growing techno-
logical prowess as a malign development. One worry is that Chi-
nese products may be Trojan horses, allowing a repressive dicta-torship to steal secrets—or, worse, to sabotage societies that are
increasingly dependent on networked computers.
Here too, open-source technologies can begin to change the
mood. Most Chinese products remain closed-source “black box-
es” containing software and hardware whose inner workings are
unknown. Particularly for software, and to some extent with
hardware, an open-source model would give buyers the ability to
compare what they have with what they were promised. To the
extent that they can verify, they will not have to trust.
The tech war is a battle for influence between an incumbent
superpower and an aspirant one. A complete rupture would be
extraordinarily costly and force most countries to take sides.
Open-source computing can help calm tempers. That would be
good for everybody. 7S
ince the first three words of the preamble to the United
States’ constitution thundered into the world’s political lexi-
con, “the people” has been one of the favourite invocations of
those in, or in pursuit of, power. It has also been one of the most
abused. No state has been as undemocratic or unpopular as the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The People’s Movement
for the Liberation of Angola has paid more attention to liberating
the country’s assets into its leaders’ foreign bank accounts than
to freeing Angolans from the oppression of poverty. In the media
the formula signals a determination to ignore popular taste: the
People’s Daily makes no more effort to appeal to its Chinese read-
ers than Pravda did to tell the truth to its Soviet ones. So when
Downing Street frames the election Britons are expecting as “Par-
liament versus the people”, the people should beware.
References to “the people” are standard fare in political
speech. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president,
likes to bang on about the mandat du peuple, and
the responsibility it confers. This is fine; the
danger arises when “the people” are weap-
onised against a supposed enemy.
It is not just politicians who do this. Princess
Diana said she wanted to be the “queen of peo-
ple’s hearts”—in implied contrast to the awk-
ward husband who commanded the affections
of nobody but his mistress. But with the rise of populism, the tac-
tic is spreading among politicians. Sometimes the enemy is a
foreign one. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s late demagogue, called
on the people to resist “the empire”—George W. Bush was unpop-
ular worldwide, and thus a convenient target. Today Mexico’s
president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (amlo), unwilling to
antagonise his northern neighbour, prefers the vaguer “mafia of
power”. Sometimes it is a religious minority, such as Muslims,
who are clearly excluded from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s
celebration of its success in India “in inciting amongst the peo-
ple a desire for a unique cultural Indic renaissance”. Any of these
foes may be used to whip up support for a struggling politician.
But the target is usually the institutions that stand in the poli-
tician’s way, especially the legislature, the courts and the media.
Such checks and balances are essential to the proper workings ofa democracy but, inevitably, inconvenient for presidents and
prime ministers who are not particular about the means they use
to achieve their ends. President Donald Trump has referred to
the media as “enemies of the people”; Poland’s ruling pisparty
justifies its attacks on the legal system and the opposition by ref-
erence to its connection to the narod; Boris Johnson, Britain’s
prime minister, has set himself up as defending the will of “the
people” against those in Parliament and the courts who are stop-
ping Britain from leaving the European Union without a deal.
Once a politician has defined those who elected him as “the
people”, then he embodies their will and it is but a short step to
defining his own enemies as the nation’s. After Polish mps called
for an euinvestigation of their government, the prime minister,
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, called them traitors. Mr Johnson calls a law
designed to avoid a chaotic departure from the eu“the Surrender
Act”, and accuses its supporters of “collabora-
tion”. Mr Trump tweets that “what is taking
place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, in-
tended to take away the Power of the People,
their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second
Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall,
and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The
United States of America!”
If “the people” are thwarted by the courts or
parliament, they may be driven to unconstitutional action.
That’s what some Britons thought the Conservative Party chair-
man meant when he said that, if they were denied Brexit, they
would “look at other ways of initiating change”. And it is what
some Americans concluded when Mr Trump retweeted a pastor’s
warning that impeachment would “cause a Civil War like frac-
ture in this Nation”. If “the people” take matters into their own
hands, what is a president to do? At a recent press conference,
amlodeclared, “I believe that not only you’re good journalists
but you’re also prudent...And if you cross the line, well, you
know what happens, right? But it’s not me, it’s the people.” He did
not specify what the people might do, but Mexico’s journalists
understand the risks: 12 have been murdered this year.
Voters should keep an ear cocked for this dangerous phrase. It
marks the user out not as a democrat but as a scoundrel. 7Down with the people
Politicians who invoke “the people” are usually up to no goodPolitical rhetoric