Dana Blankenhorn

Timing a Turn Toward Truth

Three weeks ago, I suggested it was time Google took responsibility for the news business, paying for links through a journalistic process that would turn the industry away from fake news, clickbait, and paywalls.

Like most of what I write, the piece was ignored. But the “newspaper industry” did make what it thinks is a move in the right direction, asking for permission to bargain as a group with Google and Facebook, unionizing so it could demand cash from the industry’s bosses. 

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. The papers don’t get to define what they write as true and take someone else’s money for it. As every working journalist knows, our industry follows the Golden Rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. The papers’ suit shows they know Google has the gold. Thus, Google should make the rules.

Amazon.Com vs. Trumpistan

Given that this past week was Prime Day, it’s worth noting that if there is one company to blame for the troubles of Trumpistan, it’s Amazon.Com.

Amazon is behind all the trends that are destroying the lives of Trumpistanis, before their very eyes.

The Amazon cloud, sold as Amazon Web Services, powered the app trend that destroyed the jobs of suburban gatekeepers, the insurance agents and real estate agents, the travel agents and editors who are now apps. This took the leadership out of many suburbs, as effectively as a decapitation.

Amazon’s store, and its marketplace, have since destroyed retailing. This was another big source of suburban jobs.

The Jim Crow Project

In my studies of history here over the last decade I have learned that every crisis is based on the unfinished business of previous crises.

We are taught in school how the Civil War was made inevitable by the compromises of the Constitution. But the Civil War is still being fought. It can still be lost.

Right now, it is being lost.

Jim Crow replaced slavery as the guiding rule of the South after northern troops left in 1877. The chain gang kept black men from building lives for their families. Poll taxes and tests kept them from voting. The KKK killed anyone who disagreed with the new order from raising their voice, on pain of death. Segregation kept the races from achieving any understanding, other than that of master and servant.

Why Tech Moves Us Left

Technology creates value and productivity.

It does this at an extraordinary, even accelerating rate.

The problem is neither economics nor our politics is equipped to handle abundance.

When the basics are easily afforded, most of us go on to luxuries. This should be true for societies as well as individuals. But it’s not.

The problem is that the business models for societal luxuries can’t be created without government. Government is the only force that represents shared endeavor. And ideology has declared government involvement in the economy anathema.

The 28th Amendment

Of the 17 amendments to the U.S. Constitution approved since the Bill of Rights, almost half have had to do with voting rights.

It’s time for another one.

The present political situation is based on a concerted Republican campaign, since 2009, to deny people the right to vote, and to make sure that the voices of its political opponents is never heard. The result is a government that believes it can act with impunity, that it can ignore the will of the majority, that it has succeeded in making democracy a dead letter.

Some of the weapons in this war have been around since the nation’s founding. Others were developed over time, in the South, for racist purposes, and have now been moved north for political ones.

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

One of the most insane things I’ve seen, heard and read over the last few months has been this liberal hand-wringing which assumes Donald Trump has, or is about to, destroy the United States of America.

It’s true that a President can start a nuclear war, which could spread into a general conflagration doing untold damage to people and the environment. But that’s always true, and it’s like Bugs Bunny said about Martin Martian’s death ray, “But all my friends are on da Earth!” The point being no one wants to make that decision, unless they are truly forced to and Donald Trump is, whatever else he might be, still a human being.

Don’t count your Armageddons before they’re hatched.

Green Acres Revisited

A half-century ago, when TV comedy was all fantasy, before Norman Lear brought it back to Earth, many shows were set in a comic Appalachia.

Shows like Green Acres. 

Green Acres was the story of a lawyer, Oliver Wendell Douglas (that’s how we know he’s a lawyer), who decides to get away from it all by moving to the country.  He was a success in the city, but here he is constantly humiliated by the locals upon whom he has made himself dependent. People like Mr. Haney, who had sold him the place, and Sam Drucker, who runs the general store. Even Eb Dawson, his farmhand, seems able to outwit him.

Green Acres is set in Greater Appalachia. It is less a place than a state of mind, a byword for white, rural poverty, the kind Democrats used in the mid-60s to sell Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Nixon and Norman Lear made everything more real. There was a “rural purge” of shows like Green Acres in 1971, poverty became a black and brown thing, and under the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, or Reaganism if you prefer, good people were to recoil from poor folks.

What if you were trying to make Green Acres today?

Most of our world would be easily recognizable to folks a half-century ago – cars are cars, homes are homes, and utilities are utilities. Hooterville, and the countryside surrounding it, would not look familiar. The Internet has transformed society, and made places like this redundant.

Another View of the Carter Administration

It has been clear to me for years that the 2010s are, in many ways, a bizarre recapitulation of the 1970s.

I just didn’t know how much.

While the 1970s represented the rise of oil, the 2010s represent its twilight.

The 70s were marked by two key crises, in 1973 and 1979, during which supplies were cut and prices skyrocketed.

The 2010s have already seen one price collapse, in 2014. It is going to see another before the decade is out.

It is against this backdrop that I would like to revisit the administration of Jimmy Carter. This time, especially if you’re a liberal, try to imagine yourself in opposition.

This isn’t difficult for me, because I began the 1970s as a genuine conservative activist. My politics shifted left, slowly, during the decade, but I still voted for Gerald Ford in 1976, and still refused to support Carter in 1980. (Sorry, Jimmy.)

What conservatives saw during that decade was just what liberals see today, in reverse. In the 1970s conservatives saw a natural majority growing, with power tantalizingly out of reach. Democrats in 1977 held all branches of government, as Republicans do now, and were very optimistic about putting their program into motion.

Software Arbitraging the World

Corporations have been arbitraging the world for a century, and not in a good way.

Manufacturing industries see labor as fungible. They see pollution or waste as a cost. They seek a legal environment that assures maximum profit and tax regimes which let them keep that profit.

American corporations have been playing this game ever since the first textile mill moved south, and then on to China, India and the Philippines. Every industry does it. There are both positive and negative side effects. Hundreds of millions of people in the developing world have been raised out of poverty in this century, but low-skill jobs in the developed world have disappeared.

Taking Responsibility for the Internet

Apple CEO Tim Cook angered me recently, complaining loudly about “fake news” on the Internet but failing to say he would do anything about it. Or so it was reported by many news outlets.

The truth is more nuanced. Cook is seeking a technological solution, something that scales, against what he sees as a human problem. Passing along lies may be “your prerogative” but it is the medium’s responsibility to slow the spread of lies and take action against persistent liars.

This is a hard truth the Internet industry is just waking up to, in the Age of Trump.

CrossCheck, a system for flagging fake news in France, which holds a Presidential election this spring, is Version 1 of the emerging solution. It’s important to note, however, that it’s just Version 1. Leading companies must undertake an open source process before a real solution can be implemented.

The big difference between our era in American history and those that came before is that the industry which dominates our economy also created the dominant medium. Most Americans now get their news through social media, through Web sites that deny categorically they are even media companies. 

The result is a media landscape that can easily be gamed. Russia gamed it. Donald Trump is the result.