DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK: Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware. Just bear with us on China for a little bit longer. Fortune cookie riddle: What do you get when you combine hackers with the center of global electronics manufacturing and a lax attitude toward intellectual property laws? The burgeoning hardware economy of the city of Shenzhen, dubbed by Wired — which has apparently taken to making good documentaries now — as the Silicon Valley of Hardware. The film explores a marginally overlooked focal point in tech innovation outside the US and for the most part, outside the hands of the Silicon Valley oligarchy. It argues that Moore’s Law — which predicts that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits doubles every year — is actually slowing down, and with it, the amount of useful stuff a computer can do. The trend is now moving to optimization and capitalizing on what smartphones cannot do.

Cue the city of Shenzen, an electronics manufacturing hub that grew out of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform — and with it its own brand of tech entrepreneur. This isn’t a hacker in the traditional sense, but of the rise of the imitator-maker. The growth of an extremely strong manufacturing base, which also serves a middle class not yet as affluent as the West, has favored the counterfeit maker, whose ingenuity and healthy disregard for copyright laws has led to much cooler versions of gadget’s like robots, drones, fitbits, and other personalized hardware tech. In the business sense, this new innovation center is now fast becoming the place to rapidly prototype, manufacture, and get to market these devices. You can catch the documentary on Youtube here (run time: 1:07:50)