Dana Blankenhorn

The Anti-Thesis Breaks Down

One really scary thing about a time of Crisis, such as we’ve entered, is that not only does the Political Thesis of the last generation break down, but so does its Anti-Thesis.

I’ve been joking around about Joe Lieberman missing this Clue, but what I forgot, or ignored, is that the Netroots might forget it as well.

The biggest problem with the Netroots, in terms of its belief structure, is that it is united mainly by opposition to the existing Thesis. That is, it’s an Anti-Thesis movement. It is just as at-sea with the present Crisis as the Thesis movement is. The Huffington Post, Eschaton, Talking Points Memo,  even DailyKos, have nothing really useful to say.

Just like a generational Thesis, an Anti-Thesis also breaks down in a time of crisis. The best example of this was in the 1850s, when the Anti-Thesis Whig Party completely disintegrated in the face of events, with the Republicans founded as a true anti-slavery party in 1854.

But in all cases there was something like a New Thesis movement bubbling up. The Progressive movement (which Teddy Roosevelt wound up representing), the Liberal movement and the New Right all said, at their heart, that the old debates were worthless, and that only new thinking could solve the new problems of their new days.

It is this central idea that the Netroots have not grasped. Markos Moulitsas has been messing around with it in his call for Libertarian Democrats, but most in the Netroots have just ignored the point.

And this has become very striking in the reaction (or lack of it) to what is happening now in Lebanon. To both the Thesis and the Anti-Thesis, loyalty to Israel is a given. So, too, is the importance of Israel. It’s a democracy, it’s capitalist, yadda yadda yadda.

But in terms of open source politics, in terms of saving the planet from global warming, in terms of the issues and concerns that must motivate a New Thesis, Israel is largely irrelevant.

The Gap Has a Champion

Around the time I first launched this blog, I wrote A Champion For the Broadband Gap in which I speculated (hoped really) that XMission founder Pete Ashdown might use the Internet as a wedge issue against incumbent Orrin Hatch.

Well, he dood it.

There's a new legislative proposal up for net neutrality with a lot of friends and heavy-hitters signed-off on it. (Naturally, I wasn't asked to sign. Hey, they got standards.)

Look whose name is listed at the top (because it starts with an A). Pete Ashdown. He's listed by his corporate title, but it's the same guy you'll find here, running for US Senate against ol' Orrin (I write bad country songs and demand you pay for 'em) Hatch.

Google ChecksOut With Chase

One story few pursued in the wake of the Google Checkout announcement was just how they were doing the checking-out.

In other words, who's running the cash register?

Basically they’re re-selling Paymentech. This was confirmed to me this week by a Google spokesman, although PaymentNews guessed it right away based on the terms on offer.

Paymentech was launched by First Data (the largest merchant processor) in the 1990s specifically to go after the Internet processing market, which is different from what goes on at your favorite restaurant, in part, because there’s no card, thus more open to fraud. Since last year it has been 51% owned by JP Morgan Chase, and is thus known as Chase Paymentech.

Open Source and Internet Infrastructure

Should cities be involved in building Internet infrastructure?

Yes.

But let's look at what we're talking about. (That's an out of date map on muni broadband controversies, at right.)

The plain fact is that the costs of Internet bandwidth are undergoing compression. They are going down. The per-bit costs of running fiber continue to decline. The per-bit costs of radios keeps going down.

The Bells and cable operators are defying this market gravity. They are doing it by acting as monopolies, demanding monopoly rents from everyone -- users, sites, and (now) extra-popular sites. That's what the network neutrality debate is about.

Now understand the risk. You're building infrastructure whose value will decline. This is not like building sewers (whose value remains for decades) or electricity, or even an old-fashioned "phone" network.

The radios a city puts in this year will have become worthless in three years. A fiber build which a city undertakes today will be obsolete in five years.

So what should be done?

Hire an operator. Make sure your contracts are explicit, that the capital costs you sink into the system now much be recouped (and re-invested) as the system ages. Then assure that the operator is willing to sell bandwidth to all comers, essentially at cost (and their management costs are rolled into the contract).

In other words, you don't let the municipal system become a monopoly. You maintain it as infrastructure, and you operate it as infrastructure that must be replaced regularly.

Trouble is, there is no historical model for this kind of thing. Governments understand capital projects. Corporations understand the idea of continual investment, even shared investment.

A Credit To His Rice

Several years ago, then-Rice President Malcolm Gillis came through Atlanta on one of his periodic alumni tours. Since I was covering e-commerce, and happen to be an alum (PoliSci '77) I asked him his policy regarding the Internet.

"We want to be a few steps behind the bleeding edge," Gillis said.

Successor David Leebron is brighter than that. (I credit the hairline -- a Truly Handsome Man as I like to say.) He's turning the school's academic imprint, Rice University Press, all-digital, using the open-source Connexxions system. The announcement follows 10 years in which the press, due to its costs, simply didn't exist. (The football program, which loses $10 million/year, continued to exist, but that's another subject.)

One Word on the Day's Headlines

Irrelevant.

The words meaningless, waste, and useless also come to mind.

What happens in the Middle East, today and tomorrow and in the future, means nothing to me, and should mean little to you. A nuclear exchange? The destruction of the oil fields?

Short-term annoyances, frankly, compared to the real threats.

Which are, that the Earth is dying and America is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the world, the 21st century's Argentina.

This can be changed, but we first have to accept, all of us, that what happens in Israel, or Iraq, will not assure a future for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Our continued engagement in these places -- the necessity of that engagement -- is killing them.

Oil, coal, hydrocarbons, and our crack-like reliance on them for our economic comforts -- these are the problem. Nothing happening in today's news solves any of it.

So what are our politicians (and demi-politicians) talking about today?

No Soup for You

I guess MySpace has entered the third stage of fame:

1. Who's X?
2. Get me X!
3. Get me someone like X!
4. Get me a young X!
5. Who's X?

Of course you understand (if you read our previous item) what is wrong with this picture. "I want to be the MySpace of (insert niche here)" makes little sense when you don't know if MySpace itself is either a profit center or a money pit.

But don't let that stop anyone.  After all, remember how Web 1.0 (let's build a news site) grabbed Lou Dobbs? (Mexicans in space! Holy illegal aliens!)

Long story gets shorter.  Joe Lockhart (former Clinton press secretary), Matthew Dowd, (former chief strategist for Bush in 2004) and Ron Fournier (former writer for the   Associated Press) have gotten some VCs interested in having them create (wait for it) a MySpace for Politics.

It's called Hotsoup. (Hence the visit from the Soup Nazi.)

Let me ask just a few questions:

Murdoch Investment Sinking

I have been watching (with increasing amusement) Rupert Murdoch's efforts to "get" the Internet, especially his purchase of MySpace.

It's almost as funny as Jon Stewart's take on network neutrality.

Fact is, Murdoch has been taken for a rube, and taken for a ride, by a bunch of sharks. MySpace has traffic, but no business model. That would have made it valuable in 1997, but here in 2006 we want to see some "there" there before we plunk good Clevelands (he's on the $1,000 bill) on something.

And then there's the PR hit. That cost just keeps rising.

We're starting to see some confirmation I'm right. Techdirt reports that MySpace's rates are dirt cheap. Murdoch's recent attempt to "auction" off "search rights" on the site are also likely to come to naught.

I am not a Murdoch fan, but I'm also no fan of watching old men have their money stolen from them. So in the interests of comity, I'm reprinting some advice I offered last year to Murdoch, free, that might help him turn a profit on this thing yet.

It will cost him (and you) exactly one click to read them:

The 1966 Game: Who's Bob Hope Now?

The aim of The 1966 Game is to have fun tracking the similarities between our time and the last period where a Political Thesis (in that case the New Deal thesis of Franklin D. Roosevelt) exceeded its reach.

Mostly, we have been playing with politicians, but last week, I gave you something else to ponder, an entertainer. Bob Hope.

Let's set the scene. In 1966 Hope was 62. (He died in 2004 at nearly 100.) He had been unaffected by the crisis which created the New Deal era. As an entertainer he made a smooth transition from vaudeville to radio and movies. He didn't suffer as the country did.

Hope was among the great stars of World War II, those USO troopers who went around the world, went right up to the cannon's mouth, in order to entertain the troops. But unlike his contemporaries, like Marlene Dietrich, Hope kept right at it. He went out during Korea, and he went out again during Vietnam.

This put him squarely on the political line. As opposition to the war grew, Hope was pushed toward the new Thesis, the Nixon Thesis of conflict. The Thesis that now has reached its own excess, a time it cannot explain, nor hope to deal with.

On a personal note, Hope was a great man. In 1966 he actually connected with what would become my family. The man who would become my father-in-law had to build a new elementary school in San Antonio. Being a Great Man himself, he asked the kids what to name it. Hope, they said. So he called Bob Hope. And called. And called. He needed a commitment of time to schedule the ceremony. Finally (and here my father-in-law can't contain his joy over the memory) he called and said, "If I don't get a commitment today I'll name the school for Bing Crosby."

Five minutes later, the phone rang. "This is Bob "don't name it after Crosby" Hope." The school did take his name, and he later called it among the proudest moments of his life. He hadn't graduated elementary school, you see.

Anyway, who's Bob Hope now?

Ban Astroturf

The so-called Progress & Freedom Foundation is a Bell tool. (They’re also a Microsoft tool.) They are, in fact, a tool to anyone with the money to employ them.

They are funded by corporate donors, and the Bells have long been among the biggest lobbies in Washington. So it’s not a surprise that they are what they are. What I can’t stand is their pretense that they are something else, like impartial, like academic.

Yet this is how they masquerade. Exhibit A today is a supposed “debate” among academics on “net neutrality issues,” titled “Net Neutrality or Net Neutering”  (Notice that the book on all this is already out  -- this is going to be an honest debate the way WWE is an honest athletic contest.)

Net neutering is not, in fact, on offer. Net neutering is, in fact, a buzzword the Bells’ lobbyists have created to confuse the issue. The idea is that if you oppose the Bells’ agenda of a non-regulated, taxpayer-subsidized, bit-limited, and Bell-controlled Internet you’re somehow “regulating” and “neutering,” when in fact you’re enabling the free market to work.

But don’t let the facts get in the way of an argument. And this is the problem, in a nutshell. Washington listens to these jerks as though they speak for academe, when in fact they do not.  They’re like the oil company Astroturfers who try to set up “debates” on whether man is responsible for global warming, or Religious Fanatics who try to set up “debates” on whether evolution is real.

The terms of the “debate” are deliberately phony, and aimed at getting the result of the sponsor, not at enlightenment.