(Preview) Operation Spider's Web and Global Trade, More on io and Devices of the Future, The Allure of Sports on Streaming
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Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? I do not have any statement on Max Verstappen. The good comes with the bad. That's the takeaway and I blame Red Bull. That's

That's all I have to say. You know, all I have to say about Max Verstappen is thank God for Max Verstappen. I can't imagine what Formula One would be without him. But man, oh, man, he's such a wonderful villain for people who didn't see the Spanish Grand Prix. Oh, there's nothing to see. This is a boring race.

The thing about Max is he's so good that everybody else in the field talks about him. Like he's a serial killer the entire time as he's just lurking back there, trying to pass land, clearly inferior car. Like,

And nobody writes him off. And then things did go awry down the stretch. And Max may or may not have intentionally tried to crash into George Russell. No, not only that, the opposite attack is not only was it intentional, it was so skillfully done to not actually cause any issues. It was just a just a reminder that I'm here.

Yes. Well, all part of the fun with Max. Again, he made the entire broadcast about five times more fun than it would have been otherwise. So thank you, Max, for stopping and some admirable restraint from you. You didn't launch into full on defense attorney mode here defending Max's behavior on Sunday. In any event, we do have some racing at the end of this episode. We actually have three

wildly different topics on this episode, but we will begin with some news that broke on Sunday. From the Financial Times, Ben, Ukraine's forces launched a massive drone attack on four airfields deep inside Russia that were home to strategic bombers used in air raids, officials said on Sunday, in possibly their most audacious attack of the war.

According to people familiar with the operation, codenamed Spiderweb, the operation was personally supervised by Zelensky. A total of 117 drones were used in the attack, the president said. The SBU smuggled the drones into Russia, followed later by small wooden mobile cabins, the people said. The drones were concealed under the roof of the structures, which had been loaded onto lorries.

On Sunday, the roofs were remotely opened and the drones launched toward Russian military airfields. According to Alexander Merezko, head of the Ukrainian Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, quote, this is exactly what we need to win the war, which is an asymmetric conflict. Military creativity like that. So, Ben...

Open-ended question here, but as a technologist and someone who's been processing this news for the past 12 hours or so, what comes to mind when you read details of this operation? Well, first off, I do want to give credit to my Exponent co-host, James Allworth. I only did guest posts on Stratechery one time. I was trying to figure out how do I handle when I take days off.

I ultimately decided guest posts weren't the way to do it. What is ironic is he wrote a post, this is in 2014, basically laying out why drones are a

a huge problem for all sorts of things, sort of looking forward, remarkably prescient. I think he always regretted that he wasted it on strategy, but we can put a link in the show notes. So I can't wait to read it. Was it mostly focused on the security threats? Yeah. I think he was focused on like the assassination angle. There was something there where I think there was some sort of concert. What prompted it, there was some sort of concert in Australia and a drone went awry and landed on the train tracks on the Sydney Harbor bridge.

And he's like, what if this didn't go right? He's like, was laying out, you know, just like pointing out what what an issue these are going to be going forward. And I think there's all sorts of interesting angles. The drone thing in Ukraine is is not a new thing. Obviously, it has massive impacts on how you think about military and military spending. It does not really align with the current spend a ton of money on R&D on super expensive weapons platforms like these bombers for. So all that, I think, is pretty straightforward.

I mean, not straightforward in implication, but straightforward in sort of this being an angle. The angle that's most interesting to me is these drones launched from containers. Containers are one of the marvels of civilization, one of the keys to the way things work today. I wrote an article ages ago, I think when Brexit happened, tracing like three major developments that basically inverted globalization.

The way things used to work is when you had like colonies or did forays abroad, you would go to get raw materials. You would bring them back to the mother country, manufacture them to finish goods, and then sell those goods abroad.

What happened – and this was in the 1970s, a very classic what happened in 1971 sort of thing – is this got inverted where you were designing stuff at home, but then it was manufactured abroad, and the manufactured goods were brought back to your home country. And this is something that is – like a lot of these theories about free trade and comparative advantage and all these pieces –

None of them, again, I have many critiques. One of them is they don't grapple with this inversion. Like trade as it exists post-1971 is totally different than trade as it existed previously, particularly in terms of a relatively more advanced economy and how it interacts with a less advanced economy. It's been completely flipped. The three things that drove this was, number one, long-distance telecommunications.

You could like talk to someone in the factory. Obviously back then today you can do zoom, but back then it was, you know, phone calls, but still a big change. Number two was trans Pacific flights. So I think the first airplane that could even go over the Pacific, I think most mainly like West coast of Japan was the seven 27, seven 47 comes out in the seventies that makes it routine and can go, can go much further. But number three and arguably the most important was the shipping container.

This idea that you have a standardized unit and everything in the world outside of like bulk shipping, like agricultural goods and stuff like that, it goes in containers. And what

what this allows, this standardization allows for this totally modular ecosystem where every single aspect of the stack can be specialized, whether it be shippers, whether it be port forwarders, whether it be crane operators, everything is standardized around an identical... Because they're all moving the exact same thing. They're all moving the exact same thing. There's actually two variants. There's the short container and the long container. But

Regardless, the short container is exactly half the length of a long container. And they have all these interlocking mechanisms that lock them on the deck. All the cranes are fit to that. The lorries at ports are fit to that. We actually don't have quite the same view in the U.S. because what happens in the U.S. is they get off the containers, they get unloaded, and they get put into semi-trucks. But most semi-trucks, like here, if you see a quote-unquote semi-truck, it's actually a truck pulling things.

a container where that container is on a trailer that, that, and actually part of the whole COVID shortage was there was shortages of, of trailers for containers inside ports. And, and the whole, it's amazing. It's a standardized thing. It's like a packet on the internet, like the standardized thing that gets passed around and makes us all, all sort of plausible and scalable. Like scalability comes from modularity predictability. You don't know what's in the container, but,

You just know that it's a container. And it simplifies globalized trade everywhere. Globalized trade is only possible because of this. It's the only way you can scale. Just like, again, I think it's a very good analogy to the internet. The internet is packet switching. It's packets. And when you're a router...

distributing packets to where they need to go, you don't know what's in the packet. Now, you can do packet sniffing and you can sort of figure out what's going on and, you know, like the Chinese firewall, things along those lines. But the point is the standardization is an essential component of the global economy, of efficiency, of falling consumer prices, of all these outputs of globalization. Right. And what the key thing to this is

episode is it exploited that.

So what these were was, it's kind of not described properly in this Financial Times article. These were containers. They got containers into Russia. The containers were delivered close to this airfield. And then the containers were modified to have like, you know, some sort of radio transmission, removable roofs. They opened up, the drones come out, they attack the planes nearby. There's some reports they may have been fairly autonomous. I don't know. Like all those are details that,

To this broader point, which is this exploitation of container technology, which undergirds everything. And by extension, if you want to secure yourself against things like that, you're going to fundamentally screw up the entire globalized economy.

All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out. And if you've got feedback, please email us at email at sharptech.fm.