Dana Blankenhorn

Phone FUD Targets Google

It may be the first challenge to the new President's tech policy.

For the last several months advocates for the nation's phone monopolists have been ginning up a public relations campaign against Google. They claim it's a monopolist. They claim it's a threat to freedom, a violator of privacy, evil.

It's being done in clever ways, through academics and think tanks you don't usually think of as Bell shills. Privacy advocates are being taken in, even the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But it doesn't take a genius to see where all this is coming for, or where it's leading. All it takes is a little knowledge of the industry's history, a quick look at who stands to benefit, and a short Google of who's cheering from the sidelines.

Just read Scott Cleland's blog. Cleland, a notorious phone monopoly booster of long standing, has been hammering Google this year at every opportunity.

Google itself seems unable to understand the situation, or properly respond to it. CEO Eric Schmidt has tried to be personally charming. The company's other officials have sought to be transparent, and answer questions honestly.

Meanwhile, the stock market crash has hit Google hard. The company is now worth only about what Verizon is worth -- AT&T is now worth nearly twice that. And Google's stock valuation has begun tracking the phone giants. Suddenly it's no longer a growth stock.

How should Google respond? Aggressively. And it needs to understand who its opposition really is, the ruthlessness of that opposition, and the nature of the struggle.

It is a political struggle.

Old Economy, New Economy

- Norah Jones "Sinkin' Soon" Lyrics

Paulson lied.

He claimed to have a coherent plan for $700 billion in workout money. I supported him on that basis. He would buy up toxic assets at the market value, find the real value in them, and re-sell them for what they were.

Instead he propped up the capital in banks and insurance companies, no strings attached, and now he claims to be trying to prop up consumer spending and housing.

Heckuva job, Henry.

Michael Brown at least had the excuse of a rotten career in the private sector. Hank Paulson was once the head of Goldman Sachs, the smartest investment banker in the world.

Markets have tanked for a good reason. It is now plain that there is no one with a brain cell alive in Washington City. If Paulson has lost his marbles, the old economy is lost.

The implications of that are painful to contemplate.

Housing has to find its level, regardless of the consequences. Consumer spending has to find its level, regardless of consequences. People have to get their own balance sheets in line, on their own, or go under. Same with all kinds of businesses, all around the world.

The old economy is dead. It can no longer be saved. And this has enormous implications for the policy of the new Administration.

Doc B and Doc C

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 42 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There are two sides to politics, science and art.

The science of politics uses data to show trends or identify change as it is happening. Data can either be a snapshot in time or a rear-view mirror.

The art of politics is based on ideas, and what rules exist are focused on how those ideas play off one another. It's inexact but more human. It's focused on the present but its study is the future.

This week Earl Black, the Herbert Autrey Professor of Political Science at Rice (and brother of Emory's Merle Black) came to Atlanta and plugged their new book, "Divided America," to the alums. It was a great chance to listen to a fine political scientist, and to see the old undergrads again.

The Blacks' book is based on hard data and clear trend lines. The most important trend is a transformation of the political parties into firm ideological coalitions, with the drift of white Christians to the Republicans balanced neatly against the move of "non-Christian whites" and minorities to the Democrats. Thus our political system is finely balanced, and increasingly resistant to consensus, he said.

The General Welfare

What we are seeing in both politics and business today is the return of something the Founders understood well.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,^[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Promotion of the general welfare has been distinctly lacking in the generation now fading from the scene. Baby boomers were chastened by the Nixon reaction and we have spent our lives looking out for number one. Our nation, too, has also been looking out for number one, and our domestic policies have taught that the general welfare is merely a calculation, our specific welfare added together.

We now see where that gets us. The banking system has had to embrace the idea of general welfare in order to merely survive, not just within this nation but globally. We have seen this week, at McCain-Palin rallies, where this obsession with our specific welfare can lead us. It can drive you crazy.

So voters are turning to Barack Obama as the alternative, but he seems more like a life raft than the more substantial recovery we need. That is because we don't know where he is coming from, a theme I have been developing here for several years.

Let me explain.

What I have been tracking through my journalism and my advocacy is what might be called an Internet Thesis, or Open Source Thesis, in politics and in business. It is based on the values and myths underlying the Internet, which can be seen this decade in the rise of open source technology.

The Internet works by consensus. It requires a technical consensus to work. Protocols like TCP.IP, the addressing scheme, the way we map numerical addresses to names (like www.danablankenhorn.com or www.google.com), the way in which this browser can visualize for you what I have written as a clear page, with pictures, even video, although it's stored online as computer code.

All this requires consensus to work.

Consensus finds what we agree upon and works outward from there. Competition, by contrast, finds points of difference and works inward. The tech industry has embraced consensus in our time, and this embrace has been extended from the way our global network works into a new business model for software code, and thus another way of looking at our industry, one in harmony with the interests of customers and users.

It is in the difference between competition and consensus, in the difference between our specific welfare and the general welfare, that we find the politics of Barack Obama.

The Big Bang of the Online Universe

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 36 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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After 25 years online, with more-and-more ways to communicate interactively being found each day, it gets harder-and-harder to actually communicate. (Picture from Steve Kay.)

Take e-mail. Please. A-Clue.Com started life as an e-mail newsletter. I just spent 20 minutes clearing out 24 hours worth of junk via Mailwasher. And what I came out with, after all that, was mainly semi-junk.  Even after a mass clearing of e-mails from my work and my favorite mailing list, most of them unread, I am still left with a pile that I can hardly get to.

Each "real" e-mail -- often an invitation to an interview or a news release -- takes several minutes to read and respond to cogently. I don't have that many minutes.  So a lot of that legitimate e-mail itself goes unread, or is read too late for me to do much with it.

Instead I have lately spent increased amounts of my time looking at RSS feeds. I can skip over items I'm not interested in, but even after I read just the ones I am interested in hours may have passed, and work may not have gotten done.

Black Camelot

It is almost certain that, in the next few years, Broadway will mount a re-staging of the Broadway musical Camelot, probably with an all-black cast.

This will happen regardless of the election results. If Obama wins, it's an echo of the Kennedy era. If he loses it's in keeping with the play's actual plot, which is that Camelot is destroyed.

How do I know? This is how Broadway rolls. They reprise musicals 50 years after their opening. Kiss Me Kate re-opened in 1999, The Pajama Game in 2005. Camelot, which first opened in 1960, is due.

That's sort of forgotten these days because, in its first run, Julie Andrews took it over. It was all about the singing. She was a marvelous singer. But at that time, she wasn't a great actress. She wasn't ready to play the villain.

That's what Guenevere is, the villain. And that's what she will be when the play is re-staged.

Why an all-black cast? Because, frankly, there are more really talented black folks ready to grab these parts right now than white ones. (Brian Stokes Mitchell doesn't count. He's played both Coalhouse Walker, a black man in Ragtime, as well as The Man of La Mancha and the lead in that Kiss Me Kate I mentioned earlier. If you want to re-do Flower Drum Song I'm sure he'd be great.)

Rather than concern ourselves with the details of the re-staging (what might be added, or dropped, what might the costumes look like, or the staging) it's far more fun to play that great Hollywood Game -- I wanted, I'd take, I got.

As in I wanted Laurence Olivier, I'd take Dick Van Dyke, I got Dom DeLuise. Only to make this game even more sporting, let's play it this way. Who plays the role on Broadway, who gets it in the Hollywood motion picture, and who goes about touring it in the sticks?

They Don't Understand (Perhaps They Never Will)

Having followed the political blogosphere for 5 years, and the Internet medium for 25, I really expected that by this point the media would be more integrated than it is.

After all, the Internet Generation is now grown. My two kids can't remember a time before the Internet. They have had broadband access in their rooms since she was 10 and he was 7. Today he never watches TV, and her TV-watching is usually accompanied by the clicking of her keyboard.

The Internet is not just integrated into their lives. It is their lives. It is the medium of their lives.

Their reality is also the reality for tens of millions of others. Not just old fogies like me. I grew up with TV and, while I now work exclusively online I'm more like a 1950s sitcom writer, translating the vocabulary of what I know into where I am.

So you would expect that, by this time, the old medium would have a fine-grained understanding of the new, and be able to bring the best of it along into the new age.

Nope. Not at all.

The Edwards Obsession

I have made an important decision.

I hate The Huffington Post. And you should too.

It's this Edwards obsession that really did it to me.

OK. I get it. John Edwards had sex with a lady, not his wife, in 2006, before he relaunched his campaign. Maybe he fathered a kid.

Frankly, big whoop.

Who is John Edwards, right now? Is he a public official? Is he even a candidate for anything? No.

Yet the bloggers of the HuffPo go on-and-on, making stuff up out of ifs and whats. Tearing their hair, rending their garments. Doing all the Republicans' work for them. Even tearing down other liberal sites in the process, for the sin of not obsessing like they do. Then complaining that the Republicans are doing this to them, when in fact they're doing it to themselves.

What Does MIT Have?

I drew nastygrams for noting that ITM Power of England only has a membrane, not a solution to the problems of solar power.

I'm all for solar, and I'm all for hydrogen, but we need to hold ourselves in check, I wrote then. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.

Now MIT has its own claims, namely a catalyst for splitting hydrogen from oxygen in water, described as an "indium tin oxide electrode in phosphate-buffered water" containing carbon dioxide.

Major discovery? Yes. Certainly worth the $20 million the team has won to move on to the next phase of its work.

But a solution? A revolution?

No.

The Golden Rule

It's always amusing to watch Netroot bloggers fulminate and rend their garments over the right-wing bias of TeeVee and print journalists. (To the right is Howard Kurtz, symbol of this new age. Married to a right-wing hack, he dares sit as judge of everyone else's work.)

It's not because the bloggers are wrong. They're right. The vast majority of people who are given TeeVee speaking time or favored print positions are supporters of this war, endorsers of this President, and supporters of Sen. McCain.

But the Netroots is forgetting The Golden Rule:

He who has the gold makes the rules.

For 40 years conservatives based their myths and values on the idea of a "liberal media conspiracy" which was dieing the moment they spoke the words. Today we have two types of TeeVee and newspaper owners:

1. People like Rupert Murdoch, Pat Robertson and Sun Myung-Moon who run their properties as propaganda organs, and
2. Media conglomerates that have benefited enormously from the Bush-inspired consolidation of the last 8 years and have sent the word down that questioning the status-quo is risky.

You can say all you want about professions like politics, or the law, or big business. But in no profession is the idea of BOGU (bend over grease up) such a key to success as journalism.

How do you become a news anchor? How do you become a newspaper columnist?

You do it by climbing a corporate hierarchy.

Despite the meritocratic pretensions of the so-called profession, quality means a lot less in the search for modern "journalistic leadership" than a willingness to reflect what management wants said, and to ape that shamelessly.