Dana Blankenhorn

This Week's Clue: In The Moment

The following essay was written for the current week's issue of my free e-mail newsletter, A-Clue.Com. You can get it in your e-mail box, too. Always free.

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I have always lived in the future.

If you have followed this letter since its inception you know this.

When I launched as A Clue...to Internet Commerce in 1997, I often warned about the dot-bomb while in the middle of the dot-boom. I was looking three years out, which made it hard for me to enjoy the good times as they rolled.

Later, after the bomb dropped, I looked for more optimistic takes. That's when I hit upon Moore's Law, in all its permutations. Since I had no other work to do I turned that into a book, which you know as The Blankenhorn Effect. (Think I should update it? Write and let me know.)

Once growth began again, I looked at a trend I was certain could create a new boom, three years out. This was the World of Always On, a wireless network used as an applications platform. I flogged this through 2003 into early 2004.

After I became involved in politics, and had my heart broken, I began looking again at what might happen in the future, creating the novels The Chinese Century and The American Diaspora. After I returned home emotionally, I began re-examining the patterns that had made me believe in Dean, and saw a generational crisis coming, three years out. This resulted in my work on open source politics at www.danablankenhorn.com.

The point is this letter has never lived in the moment. It has usually lived in the future, looking for Clues from the past to explain what might change next. And I have done this throughout my career. I foresaw the end of the Houston oil boom at my first job in 1978. I foresaw the rise of the Internet as early as 1983, and began making my living here in 1985.

In terms of money, which is the main topic of this letter, this has been a mistake. I have had a tough time enjoying or capitalizing on present trends, knowing they would end.

How Misunderstood is Open Source Economics?

It's so misunderstood that allies can't recognize one another.

Take Simon Phipps. He's presently the head of open source at Sun. He was at London this week for a conference. What he believes he said was a clear endorsement of open source economics, as described in the recent book by Yale lawyer Yochai Benkler called The Wealth of Networks.

What was written by ZDNet, for whom I blog, was something entirely different. People need to stop thinking of it as "free" and instead think of it as "connected capitalism", is how Colin Barker put it. So in my own ZDNet blog, I went with it and called Phipps' words "a scarecrow argument," a calculated stupidity.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Simon wrote me personally, and explained not only what he meant, not only where I went wrong, but where I might go to see a story which told things differently. He also led me to his own page, at Webmink.Net, which is a great collection of links to news stories and other material showing that, well, I got it wrong.  Within a few hours of getting his note, I had a new post up.

But Simon wasn't finished with me:

Could Google Become a Buy?

Google's launch of GBuy under the name Google Checkout is, as I've written before, mainly a defensive move.

In order to deal with spammers and scammers who are rendering AdSense into NonSense, Google is putting in a system that will let it not only move into transaction processing but give it detailed merchant information, the kind of information that will let it identify real businesses from frauds.

Everyone in the media is asking themselves, "who does this kill?" Most say it kills eBay. It doesn't. Techdirt thinks it kills Amazon. It doesn't. Online revenues continue growing, in every direction. The Internet is simply a more-efficient distribution medium, and over time that efficiency tells.

The real question to be asking is, does this make Google stock a real buy? (The chart above is the one-year chart of Google, from Yahoo.)

Getting It, Not Getting It

Juan Cole of the University of Michigan knows more than what he talks about.

He talks about the Middle East, but I think he has also internalized the hunger in America for a new Political Thesis, and the open source process being used to create it.

Recently he discussed the attacks on Markos Moulitsas  by the right wing. And he understood the importance, not just of cyberspace, but of Kos' role within his own site, in what's going on:

Kos and his community, in short, are at the center of a discourse revolution. Now persons making a few tens of thousands of dollars a year can be read by hundreds of thousands of readers with no mediation from media moguls. The old joke had been that anyone can own a newspaper, it only takes a million dollars (a really old joke, since it would take much more).

The lack of choke points in cyberspace means that people like Kos can't just be fired. How then to shut them up? Why, you attempt to ruin their reputation, as a way of scaring off readers and supporters. This technique, as Billmon points out, does not usually work very well in cyberspace itself, though it can be effective if the blogger moves into a bricks and mortar institutional environment where big money and chokeholds work again. A political party is such an environment.

As he didn't have to explain, a University is another such environment.

The point is that Cole is asking the right questions, as is Kos, and being vilified for even asking.

Obama and the Old Anti-Thesis

When Barack Obama told a conference recently that Democrats are rejecting people of faith he did more than play into Republican hands.

He played into the old Anti-Thesis. He made himself look and sound old.  In the generational path of Thesis, Anti-Thesis, Excess and Crisis, the most tempting and dumbest thing a politician can do is try and address a new Crisis with the old Anti-Thesis.

In this case, it’s the Clinton Anti-Thesis.

Clinton leaned against the Nixon-Reagan Thesis of politics with his “Third Way.”  It was a “yeah-but” philosophy, accepting the premise of the Republican majority and trying to moderate it in some way.

There have been several Anti-Thesis Presidents in American history, and they were successful. Dwight Eisenhower leaned against the Franklin Roosevelt Thesis and prospered. Woodrow Wilson leaned against the Teddy Roosevelt Thesis and prospered. Grover Cleveland leaned against the Civil War Thesis and prospered.

But they only propsered in terms of their times. They were transactional leaders, moving from issue to issue, synthesizing solutions between the Thesis of their time and their own Anti-Thesis.  But when the Thesis reached Excess, when it reached its sell-by date in the form of a crisis it could not address, these leaders and their philosophies were useless.

What was needed was a new Thesis, and a transformative leader who could embody it.

The example of failure given here most recently is that of Chuck Percy, like Obama a Senator from Illinois. (In 1966 he was about the same age Obama is now.) Elected as a follower of the Eisenhower Anti-Thesis in 1966, Percy had nothing to say as the Nixon-Reagan Thesis progressed. He became steadily irrelevant, and was defeated for re-election in the Reagan landslide of 1984.

Is that what Obama wants?

The Bells Will Take Nothing (And Like It Very Much)

By trying for a complete telecomm overhaul, under a bill called S.2686 Sen. Ted Stevens has managed to stall the debate about net neutrality, the Bells’ efforts to get a national cable franchise, and everything else.

The likely result is no bill at all will come out. Unless there’s something from the Senate, there can be no conference. Thus no telecomm bill.  The clock is ticking,  the campaign trail is calling, and Stevens is still locked in a committee room, with hundreds of amendments to get through. No time for a floor fight.

The Bells will say this is bad, terrible in fact. They will then be called upon, by Stevens and others, to put up whatever is needed to re-elect the Republican Congress. And they will likely put up enough to be a power should the Democrats win.

So who wins?

The Bells. (That's Ed Whitacre of AT&T, nee SBC, at right.)

By having the FCC expand the “Universal Service Fee” and impose it on Voice Over IP, the Bells gain new subsidies without any obligation to be fair to their competitors. Remember, net neutrality language was designed to keep the Bells from doing things. No bill means they can do what they want.

But don’t despair. The bill Stevens was working on was worse than nothing. As Bruce Kushnick notes, the Stevens bill would increase USF fees – all of which go to the Bells – by 233%.

And what would the Bells do for that money? Nothing. They’ve been making money by doing nothing for a decade. Qwest was paid to wire Arizona schools for broadband  and did nothing. The same promises were made in Hawaii, in Alaska – everywhere the Bells wanted to consolidate, and buy one another out, they made big promises of fiber everywhere.

They built none of it.

The Client-Server Lie

In all the talk about network neutrality, and the Internet generally, there is a big lie told by the media. (What, can't do a little kitty-cat blogging on a Wednesday?

It's a lie so big most don't even know they are telling it.

It's the client-server myth.

That is, it's assumed that we're all spending all our time getting big content from big Web sites. That we're all just clients to big servers, as we're passive consumers of TV.

Nonsense.

Most users spend most of their time looking at, reacting to, or creating work for or with other users. The Internet is a client-client network, without hierarchy. It has been implemented by the Bells as client-server, with less upstream bandwidth than upstream, but most offices, colleges, and companies offer two-way synchronous links, not the crap called "broadband" by the Bells.

YouTube is a perfect example of this mistake. Click to see why.

End Telecom Regulation

Deregulation has become liberal.

Specifically, telecomm deregulation, which has become a millstone around the neck of the Internet. The best thing to do is get rid of it and let connectivity run free.

Visicalc co-founder Bob Frankston makes this argument in a piece called Services, Infrastructure & Opportunity and it's something I agree with. Not only would it be the right thing to do, it would be great political jiu jitsu on the Bells, which have gamed the system during the Bush years to create the first subsidized, unregulated monopoly in the American economy in 100 years.

Let's see how they like the free market.

Here's the best part:

The 1966 Game: Who's Chuck Percy Now?

Charles H. Percy was a great man but a mediocre politician.

That's because, by the time he entered public life, the philosophy he ran on was already past its sell-by date.

Percy was an Eisenhower Republican. This was the Anti-Thesis to Roosevelt's New Deal, the "yeah-but" of the 1950s and 1960s. He triumphed over Roosevelt loyalist Paul Douglas in 1966,  but that night was really his career highlight. He found himself increasingly to the left of his party, and lost the seat in 1984 (over the issue of Israel) to bow-tied Paul Simon. (Imagine being a Republican going down to defeat on the day of the Reagan landslide.)

In life Percy was a classic Greatest Generation American. Entrepreneurial even as a teen, he served three years in the Navy and then built Bell & Howell, the small camera outfit he took over from his Sunday school teacher, into a leader of early 1960s technology. (The company faded after he left.)  It is interesting that his daughter, Sharon Percy, later married John D. Rockefeller IV, who is now a Democratic Senator from West Virginia.  According to Wikipedia, Percy is still with us (he'd turn 87 this year) so if you're there, a big shout-out, Senator. You've really had a wonderful life.

So who is Chuck Percy now?

Where Crises Begin

Every generational change in American politics has come heralded by immense, frightening changes.

• The Civil War could not be ignored.
• The Panic of 1893 could not be ignored.
• The Great Depression could not be ignored.
• The 1960s could not be ignored.

There are two reasons why American politics have not yet shifted decisively, despite polls which currently give Democrats an advantage.  The first is medicine. The Nixon Generation is still vital and vibrant, its knees still conditioned to jerk.

The second is the lack fo a crisis. Yes, Iraq seems bad. Yes, the economic future seems bad. Yes, the environment seems bad. Yes, energy prices seem bad. They seem bad, but most of us figure we'll muddle through.

Thus for most Americans, life continues as normal. Housing starts continue. Jobs are plentiful for new graduates. The war's costs seem sustainable. It's business as usual in cable news. While Katrina had the political impact of the 1965 Watts Riots, most Americans still think of the news as being something that happens on TV, not something that  happens to them.

It's possible that no decisive event will occur before November. In 1966 life went on as before, and while there seemed to be a shift in politics that year, Republicans remained the minority party. The explosion occurred a year later, leading to the tumultuous events of 1968.

What events might shake things up decisively? We've already mentioned some: