Calmness in a storm

So everyone in Singapore were talking about Shou, the CEO of Tiktok who went to face the interrogation by the congress. He is a Singaporean and we were all pretty proud of his performance.

That clearly wasn’t easy; he was being talked over, treated rudely; most of the people interrogating him had speeches of their own where they needed him to fill in the blanks rather than genuinely expecting answers. I thought Adrian Tan’s observation that Shou was often the calmest person in the room of people who were interrogating him was interesting.

While the hearing remains inconclusive, there was little mistake that the US is entering yet another cycle of active state intervention into business. It is strange that issues being put across the table confused data privacy issues, responsibilities of a tech company management, geopolitics and business ownership.

Our institutions today are highly complex and sophisticated. Even the concept of ownership in a business is made so complicated by unbundling of the various rights that are traditionally attributed to owners, then dishing them out to various parties.