Not so long ago, it was the stuff of nightmares: you pick up the landline and there’s no dialing     1    . Nothing. The phone is useless, dead in your hand. For most of the 20th century, this was a horror film cliche, a symbol of isolation and doom foretold.

But today the death of the landline is close to being a reality — and one entirely of our own     2    . BT has announced plans to hike charges for landline calls, in a bid to maintain commercial feasibility for landline services. The move suggests that BT which has long promoted landlines over mobile calls may have given up on turning back the clock. In the US, the proportion of households that have mobile phone connection but no landline has risen to a quarter. The most recent research in the UK put the     3     figure at 15%.

The death of the landline has gone almost unnoticed. After all, the din of phone chatter is all around us. What difference does it make whether the cables lie underground or not? A lot, actually. The death of the landline is a cultural shift that affects our personal and public lives. It has freed us from our     4    — in the office, where email has disconnected us from what the people who sit three feet away do all day, and even more     5    , at home. In any household in the days before mobiles took over, the landline served as switchboard for everyone’s     6     outside the home. The phone rang, you answered it, you asked who was calling, and then you passed the phone over. Everyone knew who called you, and how long you spoke for. Within families, couples, flatmates, it was a kind of invisible knowledge map about the state of everyone’s     7     and social lives, and one we took for granted. Now, we are all freelance operatives.

And     8     though we are to our mobiles, most of the time we aren’t talking but typing. Office culture has become increasingly silent. All you     9     these days is the clatter of typing, the lull (沉寂) while they wait for a response, and then the rapt (全神贯注的) concentration when the emailed reply appears. With the arrogant “ignore” button, we all become a little more untouchable in our individual worlds, and less     10    .

Chip flow interrupted

A stable global supply chain of chips had been maintained before disruptive moves by the US.

Two of the US’ top chipmakers—NVIDIA and AMD-were ordered to stop exports of two high-end chips to China on Aug 31. The ban     1     sophisticated (精密的) chips for graphics processing units (GPUs); which have been widely used in applications including AI and creative production.

This came after US President Joe Biden signed an order to pass the $52.7 billion (about 369.5 billion yuan) semiconductor chip manufacturing subsidy (补贴) and research law on Aug 25.

It aims to     2     efforts to “make the United States more competitive with China’s science and technology efforts”, Reuters noted.

Biden also signed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 into law on Aug 9. According to the act, chip makers that shift their factories to the US can receive subsidies and tax benefits with     3     conditions that restrict US companies from increasing investments in China for 10 years.

“The US and its allies,” Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and a financier for the Bill Clinton, Obama and Biden presidential campaigns, said in March, “should utilize targeted export controls on high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment... to protect     4     technical advantages and slow the advancement of China’s semiconductor industry”.

In     5     to the US latest act, Woo Jin-hoon, a guest professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, wrote for China Daily, this is “a move that can be profitable for the US in the short term, but harmful in the long run”.

The design, manufacturing and even raw materials of a complete and complex product like semiconductors (especially chips) are usually     6     across many different countries and regions, forming a huge trade network.

No matter how hard countries or regions try to support their own manufacturing bases and     7     their production, a certain degree of interdependence among countries and regions is unavoidable, China Daily commented.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Sept 1 at a press     8     that the US move is typical “sci-tech hegemony (霸权)”.

“With its technological advantages, the US has abused the concept of national security and its state power to     9     down on the development of     10     economies and developing countries,” said Wang. “The move violates market economy principles, harms international economic and trade orders and disrupts the stability of global industrial and supply chains.”