Dana Blankenhorn

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Facebook is Not Immoral

Facebook is amoral.

There’s a difference. The New Yorker knows this.  But, like Mark Zuckerberg, Conde Nast doesn’t care.

An immoral actor deliberately does things they know are wrong.

An amoral actor does things without regard to whether they’re wrong or not.

Facebook can’t afford to be moral. No tech company can. Creative destruction happens so fast I barely have time to call a company “clueless” before it faces the consequences. (Hello, Zillow.)

Corporate graveyards are littered with the molding corpses of companies that tried to defy this axiom. I have been watching tech for four decades now. It’s beyond obvious.

The Gilded Age of Software

Rising prices have given a new boost to software stocks.

It’s because software is the best way to fight inflation. Automate what people did, replace humans with code, and you cut costs. It’s just Moore’s Law in action.

A year ago, the pandemic gave a big boost to software stocks. Software was the best way to keep the economy going.

There’s irony in this because software is still made by hand. And unlike this story, software maintains its utility, even increases in value, the more it’s used.

This has long been obvious in my house.

My wife became a computer programmer in 1982, supplementing my income as a business reporter. My career remained on a high until the dot-bomb in 2000. Since then, hers has gone from strength-to-strength.

Newswriting in the 21st Century

I was taught two ways to write a story in the 1970s. (That's me in 1981.)

First was the inverted pyramid. Describe the story in a sentence. Then summarize the most important point. Keep going, in order or importance, so an editor can snip the story, from the bottom, and always have the gist of it.

Second was a circle. Grab the reader in your first paragraph. Then walk around the story until it’s told. Deliver a sting ending, a thank you for reading. This was my specialty. It worked great in magazines.

In 2021, the Internet has two different ways of delivering the news.

The first is what I call the “oh no.” This has replaced the inverted pyramid. If it’s good news, say “yeah, but” in the first paragraph, then describe how things are likely to go bad. If it’s bad news, scream “oh noes” and describe how things can only get worse.

The second is what I call “hide the pickle.” This has replaced the circle. Promise you’re going to say something important in the headline. Then don’t say it. Lead the reader on for paragraph after paragraph, page after page, filling their eyes with ads, until you finally get to some point (always less than was promised).

Cloudflare and the Cloudless Cloud

The Cloud Czars gained dominance by putting cash flow into cloud infrastructure.

Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook now spend billions of dollars each quarter on data centers. They upgrade the ones they have, and they build new ones. This is the cloud world we know.

Cloudflare wants to change that. The company is selling a concept called “Web3,” in which every server can be a node on the cloud network.

The offering is based on distributed technology already used for cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Cloudflare supports these efforts with gateways. The idea is that distributed software can now support cloud storage for less than what Amazon (for instance) charges to move data out of its S3 repository. It’s in moving data out that Amazon Web Services sees its biggest profits. Cloudflare says it can disrupt that. Amazon calls its storage offering S3. Cloudflare calls its new one R2.

Great theory. Harnessing the edge to take on the center makes sense. Letting anyone with unused space play in cloud markets sounds great. Exporting data with S3 is expensive.

Dealing With China

I have a dog in the China policy fight.

Our 30 year-old son has a job waiting in Taiwan. He just needs a visa. Taiwan is slow-walking it because of COVID. China’s belligerence toward Taiwan means we have worries.

Most of what is being written about America’s China policy is bullshit. It’s Cold Warriors anxious for a fight, Republican apparatchiks looking to take Biden down, human rights activists who see China “getting away with it.”

Here’s what I think. Xi Jinping is in trouble. He pretends to be Mao but he’s not. There is opposition to his policies kept inside an opaque party. Jack Ma is still a party member.

China has huge debts. Property debts, government debts, corporate debts. There’s still room to maneuver because the Yuan trades at 6.45 to the dollar. That’s not a manipulation. If China were manipulating the currency it would trade at 7 to the dollar or more.

China has an energy crisis and an environmental crisis going on at the same time it’s the world’s biggest producer and buyer of solar energy. The floods that overtook the country this summer are a lot like California’s fires and Louisiana’s hurricanes, but they’re happening to 20 times more people.