The rising backlash in the United States over H-1B visas is not merely a dispute over jobs or immigration. It is a belated recognition that America’s digital dominance increasingly rests on a fragile and outsourced labour model – one that prioritises managerial control and cost efficiency over institutional continuity and domestic capability. Silicon Valley, long mythologised as a crucible of innovation, now functions less as a builder of sovereign technological power than as a rent-extracting platform empire, dependent on imported talent to sustain an increasingly hollowed-out system.
This dependency has hardened into an addiction disguised as policy, routinely rationalised as a strategic imperative to preserve America’s IT primacy. Yet to grasp the structural nature of this reliance, one must first examine the digital environments from which this talent is drawn. That, in turn, requires a clear understanding of what a genuine ‘IT superpower’ actually is.
The Twin Silicon Towers
An IT superpower is defined by its ability to command the entire digital value chain, from physical substrates to abstract systems, under conditions of stress. It is a civilisation capable of designing, manufacturing, deploying, securing, and iterating digital infrastructure at global scale. It is a civilisation that builds, owns, and weaponises the stack.
In the 21st Century, this translates to not just economic advantage but a whole new imperialism altogether. And much like the imperial precedents of yore, the current contest has two competing architects: the United States and China, centred in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen respectively. Everyone else is a tenant, a tributary, or a battlefield.
At the centre of this matrix lies the physical dominion of hardware that rules our age. Semiconductors, hyperscale data fortresses, and global information arteries act as both products and geopolitical scalpels. The US wields this scalpel with chilling grace, controlling the very ideas of chips (design tools, architectures) and the high-tech machines needed to print them, even if the dirty work of fabrication happens overseas. In imperial terms, it is the master tasking his servants to work the forge, while keeping the sacred blueprints locked in its vault.
China, in the meantime, responded not with despair, but with unyielding defiance. Denied the finest tools, it built its own in staggering volumes, even if the first production runs were outdated, uglier, and heavier. It swapped the pursuit of elegance for the doctrine of relentless, sanction-proof redundancy. While the West obsesses over nanometre pageants, China has been quietly conquering the boring, essential, wartime foundations of the digital world. It forged the mature nodes, the power grids, and a comprehensive manufacturing juggernaut that keeps the lights on when the algorithms fail. Its ascent is not a matter of if, but of when. The countdown clock is ticking more robustly in Beijing rather than in Washington.
Above the physical dominion sits software. It is the ethereal layer of digital diktats that make hardware bow to human will. America’s dominance in this area cannot be overstated. Its tech titans shape reality itself and script the prevailing narrative. Windows, iOS, AWS, and TensorFlow are not mere tools, but de facto constitutions for the digital age. Governments, armies, universities and banks are born into this American-made universe, breathing its logic, and paying its rent. China, systematically excluded, resolved to forge a parallel universe. The result is The Great Digital Schism – two suns, two gravitational pulls, and two competing futures.
IT superpowers are animated by human capital. The US system operates like a seductive siren that lures the world’s brightest minds into its California orbit, crowning a handful as billionaire demigods who, in turn, extend its dominion. It cloaks itself in the cult of individual genius, even as the deep state’s hidden hand quietly anoints the winners and dooms the rest. China’s model, by contrast, has been likened to an ant colony. It is a relentless, disciplined tide of homegrown engineers marching in lockstep with state mandates, strategic imperatives and sparks of raw genius.
When a crisis strikes, the American deep state quietly orchestrates resolution through its private vassals by dispensing contracts, imposing controls, and neutralising threats behind closed doors. China’s deep state simply issues commands. It can redirect entire rivers of capital and talent overnight toward a single, unrelenting objective. One system is a dazzling yet fractious republic of tech barons, perpetually negotiating among themselves. The other is a digital Sparta that is lean, mean, and disciplined.
True power is exported. The US exports a worldview via rule books of standards, norms, and platform dependencies that is the very software of globalisation. China intends to replace them with its own alternatives in the long-run. Both offer techno-authoritarian templates disguised as liberating platforms. The battle is over whose code will rule the future.
Thus, by the conventional metrics of stack control and civilisational autonomy, there are only two IT superpowers. One is the incumbent deity of the abstract layer while the other is the militant ascetic mastering the physical fundamentals. In this epic, most nations are relegated to background characters.
China’s model is fiercely autarkic. Its monumental progress has been erected almost entirely by domestic labour, domestic talent, and ideas forged in the furnace of geopolitical necessity. Its workforce is mobilised by patriotism and long-term state mandate. In this ecosystem, the engineer who builds and the MBA who strategises market conquest are prized equally and together form pincers of the same state-mobilised project. Vital institutional and systems memories are retained in the Chinese ecosystem, providing it with a robust long-term outlook and objectives.
America’s model, by contrast, for all its dazzling innovation, functions as a global extractor of profitable ideas. Within this system, the engineer is increasingly subordinated to the MBA, whose primary function is not technological stewardship but the optimisation of quarterly KPIs and shareholder returns. The result is a workforce shaped less by institutional loyalty than by transactional incentives. This system naturally spawns a class of digital mercenaries whose ultimate fealty is tied to social mobility, a reality made explicit by the relentless scramble for visas like the H-1B. In such an environment, institutional and systems memory is routinely sacrificed in an amnesiac rat race for short-term advantage.
The H-1B stampede in the United States is not simply about containing China; it reflects the cumulative consequences of a system that has steadily hollowed out its own domestic talent pipeline in favour of a cheaper and pliant foreign workforce. Despite possessing some of the world’s top IT faculties, the American tech ecosystem now depends on an external reservoir of Indian talent to sustain itself.
And here is where the rattling spanner appears in the Western tech machinery.
The Curious Case of India
India, the nation most feverishly described as an IT superpower, needs a cold reality check. The title is not just a developmental mountain to climb; it is a canyon of self-delusion. The proof is in your pocket.
Pick up your smartphone. Ignore for a moment the American OS or its Chinese alternative. Scan the essential apps that command your attention and orchestrate your day. You will find your digital life conducted from a colonial outpost, governed by the distant rulers of the Twin Silicon Towers.
Perform the audit: your browsers, chat platforms, search engines, antivirus, and maps are either American, Chinese or even Russian. Your cloud storage, video streams, and social feeds are overwhelmingly American. Your games hail from America, China, South Korea, and Japan.
Now, look for India. It is absent. It is not present in the foundational code, not in the dominant platforms, and not in the global tools that shape perception and behaviour. By the metrics of consumer-facing platform dominance – the very metrics that crown the US and China – India’s contribution to the global digital cortex is negligible. It is the world’s premier consumer, a subcontractor of sheer volume, and a prolific user and yet, it has never been a prime source.
This is no accident. It is the inevitable result of building a ‘superpower’ on a business model of intellectual serfdom. India didn’t create the IT revolution. Instead, it became its cheapest body shop. Its celebrated industry is a glorified, high-stakes call centre for code. It does a reasonably satisfactory job of following someone else’s blueprint, debugging someone else’s mess, or scaling someone else’s vision.
Writing a million lines of Java to a foreign specification is not power; it is digital coolie labour. In the age of AI, this work is already being displaced by the very algorithms Indian contractors are paid to implement. The result will be a severe contraction of India’s software workforce – one for which the country appears institutionally and fatally unprepared. In a world where capability gaps are widening faster than Moore’s Law, India has yet to reach even the warm-up lap of the global AI race.
While US ‘Tech Bros’ wax lyrical about ‘Indian IT and AI talent’, the nation itself has produced no universally adopted frontier language models. The global conversation is dominated by American (ChatGPT, Claude) and Chinese (DeepSeek, Qwen) systems. Despite nascent domestic efforts, no Indian model has yet crossed the threshold from local prototype to global contender.
The superpower fantasy collapses completely at the hardware layer. Indian semiconductor capacity is virtually non-existent. This nation of 1.5 billion people, with the fourth largest GDP in the world, possesses no advanced fabs, no sovereignty in design, and no control over the tools that design both hardware and software. It is unable to supply reasonably clean water to many of its own citizens, much less generate Ultrapure Water (UPW) for chip production.
Its AI ‘ecosystem’ is a Potemkin village built on rented American GPUs and fine-tuning American models for applications designed abroad. Even in cybersecurity – the realm of digital daggers – India has produced no toolkit that commands global adoption or defines defensive paradigms. For a nation with a supposed ‘army of engineers’ this commercial and influential silence is deafening.
Yet, this very silence begs the question: If India commands none of the levers of digital supremacy, why do its code and coders grease the Western IT machinery?
A Disturbing Colonial Reincarnation
‘But the Indian CEOs in Silicon Valley!’ comes the desperate, corrective cry. Yes, there is indeed a cadre of highly celebrated Indian C-suite managers who helm US Big Tech. Yet when was the last time you had read a genuinely thought-provoking essay or opinion piece written by any of them? Or an incisive contrarian view at TEDx talks?
Is there a deeper, barely-discussed dynamic at play here?
The Indian managerial phenomenon has a direct historical precedent, centering on a mindset forged by British colonial rule. Consider how a handful of British civil servants governed the entire subcontinent. At the turn of the 20th Century, fewer Britons administered all of undivided India than ethnic Germans ran the city of Prague for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
To blame India’s current socioeconomic malaise on British colonial rule is an abject fallacy and a pathetic civilisational excuse. Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and Manchuria endured far harsher Japanese occupation which ended only two years before India’s independence. Yet none of them languish in the same state of chronic underperformance, rampant corruption, and runaway poverty.
Furthermore, at the time of independence in 1947, India – despite the ravages of colonial extraction – remained a significant exporter of textiles, academic textbooks, and basic manufactured goods, far outpacing the war-shattered economies of the former Japanese colonies whose industrial exports had collapsed amid devastation and reconstruction. India had also produced two renowned Nobel laureates while under British rule: Rabindranath Tagore (Literature, 1913) and C.V. Raman (Physics, 1930).
It is time India finally recognises the elephant in its civilisational room.
From Traditional to Techno-Feudalism
The rise of Indian-origin CEOs to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley is celebrated as a pure meritocratic triumph. A closer examination reveals a more profound and unsettling historical reincarnation. Their ascent represents not the disruption of an old order, but the seamless transplantation of a centuries-old governance template into the digital realm. It is the bureaucratic, data-driven, rigidly hierarchical state – perfected by the British Raj – finding its ultimate expression in the algorithmically managed platforms of the 21st Century.
The British Raj was less a traditional empire than history’s first proto-data state. Its power stemmed from a ‘steel frame’ of administration designed to control a vast population with minimal personnel. This system relied on three pillars: the relentless census (mapping human and material resources); the imposition of impersonal code over local custom; and a steep, caste-inflected bureaucratic hierarchy. A tiny vetted elite of Indian Civil Service officers commanded a massive native class of clerks and soldiers. The British did not really create a new hierarchy; they simply grafted their imperial project onto a pre-existing socioreligious scaffold.
As one British administrator noted, the system successfully cultivated men of ‘integrity, ability, and loyalty’ capable of sustaining the imperial bureaucracy. A generation or two later, a similar talent pool, acculturated to hierarchical systems designed to benefit a narrow elite, found niche positions within the new imperium of US Silicon Valley.
Platform giants such as Google, Meta, and Amazon are not merely companies but sovereign digital territories. They govern global user populations, and the old British India colonial model has proven eerily adaptable. A platform’s Terms of Service function as law; data extraction operates as taxation; and algorithmic content moderation serves as its police force.
Within this framework, the imported CEO assumes the role of a digital Viceroy, presiding over increasingly stratified labour hierarchies. A new precariat has emerged alongside a disenfranchised clerical underclass, while hiring and promotion networks have grown ever more insular. Tribalism, parochialism, and caste-inflected social ties are frequently cited by US tech workers in discrimination complaints and legal filings, particularly in relation to H-1B hiring patterns.
The cumulative effect is a slow erosion of meritocratic incentives and institutional loyalty. From a geopolitical perspective, this dysfunction is an unambiguous gift to China, which benefits as alienated expatriate talent returns home to build the next generation of domestic champions – Huawei rather than Google, SMIC rather than Intel.
But are there any other consequential second- and third-order outcomes which echo the colonial past? One cannot walk through the streets straddling Silicon Valley – through San Francisco’s Skid Row with its hordes of the homeless, its garbage and human waste – without witnessing the physical manifestation of this new techno-feudalism. The geography itself confesses the truth. The urban appendages of the world’s most advanced companies increasingly resemble the outer regions of India.
The stark disparity between immense wealth and profound urban decay which mirrors India’s past and present is not merely a coincidence of inequality but a direct, second-order echo of colonial spatial organisation and transplantation. The plush mansions of Silicon Valley CEOs and their peripheral slums function as a modern cantonment system. They are secured, privileged enclaves for the administrative elite, surrounded by a neglected periphery that bears the human cost.
Thus, the proliferation of Indian CEOs is not an anomaly but an archetype. Indian IT talent are not revolutionary disruptors; they are the perfect subalterns for the algorithmic age, leveraging the very talent that once served a geopolitical empire. This explains the industry’s stark wealth gaps. Techno-feudalism, like its colonial predecessor, is designed to concentrate capital and data at the apex while outsourcing labour to a perpetually precarious base.
The final, bitter irony is that the tools of colonial control have been repackaged as platforms of global connection and liberation. The engineer who climbed the meritocratic ladder from an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) to a Silicon Valley boardroom has not dismantled the feudal pyramid. They have globalised and algorithmised it, transforming the world’s users into the data-subjects of a new, borderless digital Raj. The caste system has been anonymised in code, but its essential logic – of extraction, hierarchy, and controlled mobility – remains the dominant operating system of the 21st century.
Advantage China?
While Silicon Valley perfects a new, globalised digital feudalism, China has been building a sovereign, integrated techno-state. It has rejected the colonial-derived model of outsourcing its foundational genius. Its system, however authoritarian, is oriented towards a different end: sovereign stack control, from fabs to foundational models. It is building the next generation of Huaweis, BYDs, and SMICs not with digital viceroys managing a global hinterland, but with a mobilised, domestic industrial base.
The final, bitter irony is that the nation most adept at imperial-era hierarchical administration is now optimally suited to staff a digital order that accelerates its own geopolitical decline.
India may have supplied the managerial class for the current digital age, but China is constructing the future age itself. The contrast reveals a deeper strategic divide: Silicon Valley has become captive to oligarchic goals, while Shenzhen continues to operate in service of a civilisational mission.
Dr Mathew Maavak is a retired international consultant specialising in strategic foresight, governance, nanotechnology, Big Data, and artificial intelligence. His commentaries on complex global risks have appeared in numerous media outlets worldwide. He is also the author of the dystopian techno-thriller ‘The Electric Reckoning.’
