The Legality of Logistics: On Techno-Orientalism and Geopolitics in Semiconductor Production

This article explores and theorizes the interplay between law and logistics in the history of global semiconductor production, with a focus on the anti-Asian legislative interventions in the United States of America. It examines two pivotal American logistics-related legislative actions: the US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement of 1986 and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. By investigating these episodes, this article offers a historicized commentary on the always-already intertwined and entangled nature of racial, legal cultural, computational, and logistical realms. Against the backdrop of colloquial militaristic language that commonly frames global logistics as geopolitical wars, the paper instead studies accounts of racialization in political and popular discourses that enable such linguistic formulations to be comprehensible in the first place. In doing so, it shows how logistical developments are more generally shaped by legal-cultural rhetoric and discourses and argues that we must understand techno-orientalism to be an important, continuing factor in the logistical histories of computation.