Dana Blankenhorn

AutoPilot

My confidence over the American political future is not based on the strength of the Netroots, nor on any assumption of evil on the part of the Bush Administration.

It's about time, about the expiration of political assumptions (time wounds all heals), and of a simple observation everyone has made about this Administration.

They're on autopilot. (No offense to this fine database administration package, at right.)

It's the very fact that the Bush Administration refuses to change course in any way that we can be confident, not only that their course is wrong, but that people will demand a new course -- not just a new pilot.

• Did Lyndon Johnson change course on Vietnam? Even when the course was obviously seen to be wrong?
• Did Herbert Hoover change his approach to the Depression? Even when Hoovervilles started springing up and one-third of families had no income?
• Did Grover Cleveland embrace any alternative to the Gold Standard? Even when it was obvious he was bankrupting the countryside?
• Did James Buchanan do anything to reduce the tensions leading to Civil War?

History tells you the answer. No, in all cases. Were these men evil? No, in all cases.

They were on autopilot.

Two Party System

There are actually two Democratic Parties:

• The Washington Party is accustomed to losing, and offers an Anti-Thesis to the dominant Nixon Thesis.
• The Netroots Party is tired of losing, and seeks a new Thesis to destroy the Nixon Thesis.

The Nixon Thesis, remember, is a Thesis of conflict, of enemies within and without. It's the set of political assumptions that have dominated America for nearly 40 years. It's all the Washington Party knows. The Netroots Party understands, instinctively, that the Thesis needs to be overthrown. The Washington Party resists this, afraid of again walking into the trap the Thesis was designed around.

Frankston Calls for Always-On

In a discussion of Google's problems in finalizing its plans for WiFi in San Francisco, Bob Frankston took me back to my work of three years ago.

Frankston says that the emphasis on "networks" is overblown. Connectivity is the thing. Under the Internet protocol, if you have connectivity, and whatever you connect with has connectivity to something else, then eventually your bits are going to get where they're going. And that's the key -- bits getting where they're going.

Instead even municipal WiFi plans, like those of Google, emphasize building "a network" that will cover "a whole city." A better way, says Frankston, is for consumers to build their own connectivity "at the edge," then work to link those bits to other Internet connections.

So here are the Frankston statements which got to me:

We’ll get more  incentive when companies making products and services, such as alarms and monitoring, see the value in using shared connectivity rather than creating their own special solutions and negotiating new relationships each time. If that effort went into extending IP connectivity we’d start to get benefit.

I’m taking about modest IP connectivity – the most valuable services such as medical monitoring or supporting infrastructure is akin to a slow modem and can be deployed over any path – no need for DSL or all that. Just put a simple packet transceiver at both ends of a copper line and you have a 24x7 data path for devices and services without a large footprint deployment.

Hurd, On The Street

The very idea that H-P CEO Mark Hurd knew nothing (nothing!) about the eavesdropping scandal at his company, that it was all the work of Cruella deDunn, is Clueless.

Hurd played Sgt. Schultz before the media today but took no questons. He laid it all off on Dunn, along with her security people, and sent her packing.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyear there is no evidence yet linking Hurd to the identity thefts. The key word in that last sentence -- yet.

The real problem, however, goes much deeper, and the real culprit, I think, remains Carly Fiorina. She should have done what General Electric has done for decades -- sell the slow-growth stuff and concentrate on something moving faster, something the CEO understands, something that needs innovation.

Instead she bought a lie and saddled H-P with it.

Why is Politics So Quiet

You're right. This political campaign has been quiet, even sedate.

Republicans are taking comfort in that. They jump on every poll which hints people don't hate them.

But the reality is quite different. (Buy the Exploding Penguin here.)

The reality is we have something approaching a consensus. We're so accustomed to narrow divisions we don't see a consensus when it's in front of us.

The consensus is that our present course is a disaster.

Howard Dean has said that Katrina ended the Presidency of George W. Bush. It exposed him as a fraud. He is absolutely right.

This doesn't mean Republicans stopped being Republicans or Democrats stopped being Democrats. We're just agreed that the present direction of world events is unsustainable.

This is the real reason why it sometimes seems that Republicans have lost their marbles. They go down the road they've been traveling for decades, and the road doesn't lead anywhere, so they look for another, more extreme road to walk down. Make all taxes sales taxes. Put up a fence to stop immigration. Nuke Iran. These are ideas which, at a sober time, are simply raving lunacy. Yet they are being purposely proposed by the Party in Power, because otherwise they got nothing (except alliteration).

Democrats and independents, meanwhile, have to fight to find something to disagree about. Mainly it's inside baseball stuff. What role should corporations or political pros play? Who cares? Fact is we agree on the big issues -- Bush is an ass, Iraq is a quagmire, global warming is real, the economy needs to lift all boats and not just Paris Hilton's.

It's like the Monty Python Election Special sketch -- the Silly Party vs. the Sensible Party. Only in the sketch the silly party won. (Hence the penguin.)

The Singularity is Here

A reader pointed me to the idea of a Technological Singularity, a point where computers with human intelligence will spark an exponential growth in new science that will transform the Earth and life itself.

Well, like the idea of Internet Values driving politics, you're soaking in it.

The Singularity, such as it is, has already arrived. Moore's Law and its cousins in storage and transport have made it real. We're seeing more technological progress, coming at a faster rate, right now than at any time in the past. And that rate of progress is continuing to accelerate, despite an anti-science bias on the party of the U.S., which is the largest tech country.

Now there is a missing ingredient, both in discussions about the singularity and my own analysis of it. That missing ingredient is programming. Programmer productivity is increasing, but only at an arithmetic rate. There is, as yet, no Moore's Law of Programming. All that happens is that the other Moore's Law impacts cause programming to happen at higher-and-higher levels of abstraction. But people must still code.

In fact, the West now has a large and growing shortage of programmers, owing to the enormous new demands of Moore's Law-driven technologies combined with the slow pace of programming productivity gains. As a result the prices for all this new capacity are dropping to the floor, and aggregate demand is not growing as it once did.

Reformers Only Morning Glories

The dirty secret of politics is there's really no money in it.

Well, there's no money in honest politics. Never has been. Magazines like The New Republic and The National Review have relied for decades on contributions to continue publishing.

The rise of the Netroots, the home of open source politics, the heirs to the Goldwater tradition does, like that and previous reform movements over generations, bring a lot of amateurs to the party. (And the Party.)

But for those who have been in the game for a while, who have townhomes in Washington and fancy dinners to pay for, politics isn't that way. For those who can't make it as media stars, corporate lobbying seems the only way to go (after a time). Thus we have Mike McCurry and (now) Joe Lockhart, who is apparently now creating phony polls for the Bells.

This is the reality that the Bells, and other industrial lobbyists, have relied upon for decades. Political actors need to eat. Thus, both parties have their favored industries. Democrats' are the legal industry, the entertainment industry, the pharmaceutical industry, insurance, and the Bells. There's overlap -- the Republicans get money from these areas too. (Especially the Bells.) They just add extractive industries, government contractors, bankers, and a few others.

The result is a permanent form of corruption, in both Washington and all our State Capitols. It is the job of open source politics and the netroots to expose and replace this system.

But with what?

The Nature of the Political Blogosphere

I have been reading coverage of political blogs for some time and it's simply nonsense.

The blogs are being covered as though they are newspapers or, worse, candidates. There is a he-said, he-said quality to the coverage that is completely false.

The problem with those who cover the blogosphere, like the National Journal, is a basic one of process.

Why? Because the IN in Internet, as I have written many times, stands for INtimate. Or at least, interactive.

The heart of the Internet is interaction. It's not what I say, but what you say, what we say and do together.

This is especially vital in the political realm, where the whole idea is to change policy, to get your guys (and gals) elected, and to develop a point of view.

A few rules:

• Blogs without comments are not blogs.
• The Best Blogs are Always Human.
• The value of a community is in what its members write, not its leaders.
• What bubbles up is more important than what is passed down.
• Dollars, events and ideas are everything.

Let's take these one at a time:

Lies In the Regulatorium

Lots of people lie before regulators. Phone companies do it routinely. (Yes, if you do this for us we'll bring fiber to every home.)

What we don't expect, and what I can't abide, is the regulators themselves lieing.

Apparently, the FCC has done just this, suppressing studies showing that media ownership means less diversity of opinion not once, but twice.

It was done to allow more media consolidation. You didn't read about these spiked studies, in part, because of media consolidation.

The good news is that, thanks to the Internet, media consolidation is actually reversing. Not entirely, of course. Those who don't use the Internet, who have their Internet access neutered by government, or who simply remain uncurious about the Internet, they don't learn things which are on the Internet and their media (or politicians) choose to suppress.

Not directly.

A Project for Open Source Politics

When government defies the values of the Internet, we need to call them on it. Even if we sound, at first, stupid, we're at least using others' stupidity as an educating moment.

Here's an example.

The government is placing its anti-drug ads and other PSAs on YouTube. Everyone in the media is treating this as a win-win-win.

In fact, it's a nothing-nothing-nothing.