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.

No Statute of Limitations on Bush Era

This is addressed to all my liberal friends who say Bush is "going to get away with it," that the abuses of this era will be swept under the rug while W and his buddies go off to Dallas and plot a counter-attack on the Constitution.

There is no statute of limitations here.

Exhibit A from the BBC. A Spanish judge has launched a criminal investigation into the abuses of the Franco era. Francisco Franco, as SNL fans of a certain age know well, died in 1975 and is still dead.

The point is, again, that there is no statute of limitations on war crimes. There is no statute of limitations on torture. And there is no way on Earth that a war criminal can immunize him against this reality.

You can't write a "signing statement" that absolves you. You can't just pardon everyone around you and avoid the International Criminal Court forever, especially as we enter an era where international law is becoming increasingly important.

Saddam tried that. Milosevic tried that. Fat lot of good it did either one of them.

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.

Segregation

The clearest fact of life in the era now ending is segregation.

Not racial segregation, although that still exists. I'm talking more of social segregation, religious segregation, economic segregation, media segregation, and political segregation.

We have modeled the cul de sac attitude in how we live, and now live lives completely separate from one another.

• When you drive to work, by yourself, you don't deal with other people except on your own terms, at a gas station or in a store getting coffee. And you can choose to shop near your neighborhood, among people just like you.
• The Internet does not help. It's easy on this medium to only look at things which validate you, and to flame anyone who questions your assumptions.

No two places illustrate this segregation better than Arizona and Alaska.

Neither could not exist without federal subsidies. Arizona would have no water without federal dams, and Alaska could not expand its civilization absent federal highways. (The picture is of a traffic jam on top of the Hoover Dam, on the Arizona-Nevada border.)

But on the ground, the people in those states have long bought into the lie that they are totally self-reliant, independent, that they are solely responsible for their own prosperity. And when you don't see the Mexican immigrants who pick your food or build your houses, and you don't see the petrodollars that subsidize your WalMart lifestyle, it's an easy lie to buy.

These are extreme versions of what we have become.  We don't see one another. We don't see what made our lives possible. We credit nothing but our own efforts. Easy, then, to dream a dream where we can have it all, fly across the state in our private plane from palatial mansion to palatial mansion, take the whole state for ourselves, declaring it independent and holding all those riches as our personal property. To hell with anyone else.

This disconnection from the world's reality made the "shock and awe" of the Iraq War possible. We could turn the massacre of thousands into a TV show, "embed" some loyal reporters with our storm troopers, and paint a moving picture of freedom on the march.

But reality has a way of intruding. For every action there is a reaction. You may control the land but you can't have the people. You may pay for that war, and more, by creating Confederate Money, but the scam will eventually be found out.

Strategy over Tactics

The most remarkable point about Friday's debate, about the whole week, has not been remarked upon enough.

That is the difference between strategy and tactics.

Barack Obama has gone after everything strategically. He has a long-range vision, of Democrats and Republicans getting along even when they disagree, of consensus that starts with agreement and moves outward, a vision driven by Internet values that has been as controversial among Democrats as among Republicans.

Obama won that argument narrowly in his own party and this week he hit John McCain over the head with it.

Obama deliberately treated McCain with respect, even some deference, beginning many responses by saying he agreed with McCain on some point. Then he hammered home a strategic vision which, whether or not you agreed with it, was at least coherent, different from the way we have been going, and fairly easy to understand.

The talking heads exploded. No knockout blows, they said. No sound bites, they complained.

Well, exactly right.

McCain, meanwhile, was all about tactics. Everything was tactical, obviously tactical, from picking Palin to "suspending" the campaign to coming back to Mississippi. And the way he debated was tactical. He treated each question like a separate event, rather than as part of some larger whole.

The key point came when discussion turned to "the surge." McCain kept hammering away that this "strategy" proved "we will win" in Iraq, that Obama was unfairly disparaging "our troops" and "General Petraeus." Obama refused to be drawn in, stating repeatedly that the surge was "a tactic," that the strategy of focusing entirely on Iraq was the mistake, and that McCain was confusing strategy and tactics.

This went right over the heads of the TeeVee Talking Heads, just as it went over McCain's head. But it was clear that the American people got it. Just as it was clear they understood why he was being deferential, why he was starting his sentences with "I agree with John" or "Senator McCain is right" about something. He was using those phrases as a digression to discuss his disagreement, laying out common ground before moving to the basic choice. Most people understood that.

New Kings of Wall Street

Here is a story you won't see first on CNBC.

There is a new king of Wall Street. Charles Schwab & Co.

The value of Schwab stock is practically unchanged since the start of the year. (I don't own any but I do keep my money there.) In the present environment this is an immense achievement.

Schwab himself finally retired recently at age 70, for the second time. Hopefully the new guy, Walter Bettinger, whose former retirement planning outfit was acquired by Schwab in 1995, has learned the lessons and will stick to his knitting.

The reason you won't hear about this on CNBC is precisely why Schwab is so strong. As with Seinfeld, this is a story about nothing.

Schwab doesn't play with its customers' money. It offers a selection of mutual funds, mostly index funds, and invests customer cash conservatively. It offers advice, but that advice is simply to diversify. It doesn't make extra money if you take its advice, and it doesn't make more if you don't.

I like to call Schwab my "bookie" and that's a pretty good description of the business model. Schwab doesn't have a horse in the race. Schwab gets its vig no matter who wins.

Faith

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 37 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This is the hardest moment in the creation of any new political thesis. You build it, you argue about it, but then you have to put it on choppy waters, into the center of the storm, and you have to believe you're right.

This is such a time for the Internet Thesis.

The Internet Thesis holds that the values of this medium -- not the values of the TV medium -- are what will drive our politics. Consensus, not conflict. Openness, not secrecy. These values have been made manifest in the person and politics of Barack Obama, and the old thesis is fighting back with everything it has.

Why not? They have nothing to lose, and everything to lose. They're going to use TV, use conflict, pull out all the Rovian stops, until the voters stop them. And we have nothing to respond with except faith that this thesis, with its online organization, with its consensual cool, with its deep pool of facts behind it, can somehow prevail.

If you believe in this thesis, then work for it. Or have the simple decency to Shut The Fuck Up. If he loses, hammer him then. But don't hammer him now, because in criticizing him you're only doing the other side's work.

The one point made by Netroots advocates for five years now is that you can't trust the Republicans to act like ladies and gentlemen, that they're dirty fighters, and that you've got to be willing to mud-wrestle them. Kerry failed, they said, because he didn't do that. (I believe he failed because people age more slowly now so the knees still jerked.)

Instead of getting John Kerry, we got to see the whole structure of Bushism collapse upon itself. Katrina, the Big Shitpile, the Iraq casualty lists, all of it. People no longer believe in the Bush Thesis. So why assume that anything McCain does can somehow lead that thesis to triumph?

While Obama has become more forceful he's not going into the mud. He has allowed Republicans to inflate the Palin balloon and assumed that it will deflate as the press pokes holes in it. He has not engaged in a mud-wrestling contest even after Republicans accused him of doing just that in order to get him off his game.

Barack Obama is a steady man. Patience and steel, Andrew Sullivan calls it. But with the polls looking bleak some, like Margaret Carlson, say that what makes for a good President may make for a bad candidate, so he should hit McCain harder, harder, and harder.

Inside the Obama Ground Game

Now is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of the party.

The 2008 election will be decided over the next month, but perhaps not where you think.

Republicans can always win an air war. They have been doing this for a generation. It is what they do. We are inclined to buy their crap so they spit it out, the knees jerk, and that's that.

But there is another way. I have been exploring it, both from my standpoint as a tech reporter and as a Barack Obama supporter, over the last few days.

I call it the ground war. It's a fascinating story. It's partly a computer story. It's also, partly, a human story. It's a story you can be part of, if you choose. But your choice, whatever it is, will decide this election.

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.

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.