Dana Blankenhorn

A Hundred Million Miracles

I have switched full time to a new beat -- devices which harvest the energy all around us.

In terms of this technology transformation, we're about where PCs and the Internet were at time time in 1970. Back then, you'll remember, Intel was just starting work on what would become the 4004 chip and a researcher had just sent-and-received the first online message.

Skepticism abounded. Computers were seen as giant machines useful only in accounting and scientific applications. New "minicomputers" from companies like Digital Equipment Corp. were starting to drive prices down. But the main interfaces remained the punch card and the print out.

We're at the same stage today with energy technology. Skeptics abound. Working, cost-effective systems seem thin on the ground.

Windmills work, the technology is stable, but they cost big money to erect, they do require maintenance, and each new windmill increases our supply of wind energy by one unit. Geothermal units work best where a source of Earth heat is relatively too close to the surface (to minimize drilling and energy loss from lifting the hot water) but the underlying rock structure is stable. We have not yet learned how to tap volcanoes.

Evidence of coming abundance is all around us

One of the great amusements of my life is looking at how technology was portrayed in the past.

It's fun because it's usually wrong. The issues are portrayed, but views of the future are always locked inside their own time.

Take computers, for instance.

Information is at the heart of most business processes, and the inefficiency of this process sparked many of our great dystopic visions. Those untold rows of desks in Metropolis are based on the same false assumptions about the future which marked Marxism and Luddism. A refusal to see problems for what they are, namely a business opportunity.

The first assumption with any new technology's introduction is that it will concentrate wealth and leave people impoverished. This was also true for computers. Even an innocent movie like Desk Set, perhaps the least-known Tracy-Hepburn romance, was driven by the idea that a computer Tracy sold for Hepburn's network research department would leave her without a job.

It's silly, naive. More never leads to less. More leads to more.

When computers were becoming microprocessors, 40 years ago, few believed today's abundance of computing resources was even possible. Digital Equipment CEO Ken Olsen notably questioned whether every home would ever need a PC, but my home today has 7 dedicated, general purpose PCs in it. And most everything else here is computerized, designed by computers, absolutely infected with them.

Your home is probably the same way.

Just as computers in our time eased the fears of a previous generation, so manufacturing transformed the world before that. Each generation's breakthroughs end the previous one's nightmares, and are built on top of that previous generation's breakthroughs.

That's why dreams are important.

Dreams like the original Star Trek series and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 brought the possibilities of computer control to the American mind. They inspired my generation. But when I was a teenager I could not believe I would make my life around computers. Most of my Rice classmates have made their careers in this field. We're all a little surprised at just how profitable it has been.

It happened because of innovations that took place while we were in school. Ethernet. Arpanet. The microprocessor. Souls for new machines.

It's happening again.

Believing in Abundance

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 48 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It may be the hardest test of a political leader or of a people.

How do you get people to believe in abundance? How do you believe in it, when the evidence you see around you screams scarcity?

This feeling of hopelessness has been at the heart of all America's past political crises.

• Can America remain one country or will it become like Europe, a collection of warring states?
• Can America grow when monopolists control essential prices and manipulate the markets to their benefit?
• Can American democracy survive this Great Depression which seems to prove it doesn't work?
• Can America keep growing in the face of social divisions tearing it apart?
• Can America keep growing in a world dominated by the price of oil and other energy resources?

These questions were all based on an assumption of scarcity. They narrowed what we could see to horrors in front of us. War. Money. Depression. Division.

You know the response. Can we? Yes, we can.

Tapping the economics of abundance

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 47 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When I first started studying our political history here and looked for patterns, almost five years ago now, it was with the assumption that political change leads society's changes.

What I have found is just the opposite. Politics lags, badly. It always lags.

The political subtext of the TV show "Mad Men" involves politics. The agency is contacted by the 1960 Nixon campaign, but the campaign eventually backs away. As time goes by the protagonist, Don Draper, increasingly identifies himself with the Nixon story of the "self made man." In next year's final season, my guess is he'll be falling and flailing, but the political habits of his future life will be set in stone. And the Nixon order will finally come in.

The Nixon Thesis, in other words, wasn't created by his 1968 victory, nor by Spiro Agnew's 1969 speeches. It was set in motion by previous events. Society leads politics.

But which society changes are we talking about? Not the kind you think.

Why not let the Bush tax cuts expire and then come in to the State of the Union with the Obama tax cuts?

History and the War Against Oil

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 46 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The big advantage of history is you can learn from it.

This is especially true for business history. And technology history.

In contemplating a War Against Oil I have emphasized the importance of standards. If I know the marginally-efficient solar panel I buy today can be replaced later, at just the cost of the panel, I am more likely to buy it.

In computing history a lot of the important standards work was led by government.

The Internet was entirely a government project -- only after its standards were established was the private sector allowed in. I think it's because there was so much money on the line that private companies just refused to cooperate. They focused on who would pay who and not on how do we move the data. (Picture from the University of Alberta.)

So private sector standards are easier to establish when an industry is new.

There is no TV so we need a War Against Oil

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 45 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Why were Democrats hammered so bad, after doing so much? Is my own "thesis" dead?

Much of the explanation lies in Jon Stewart's speech above, where he complains about cable TV yakkers not acting more like, say, Walter Cronkite.

TV is dead.

TV, as a medium, has been dying for decades. It's been dying since Ted Turner first saw the opportunity in bouncing a signal from his WTCG off a satellite with re-runs of "The Andy Griffith Show" in the mid-1970s.

What killed TV is the same force that made Jon Stewart possible. It was the disappearance of the mass media market created by cable.

Back in Cronkite's day a show needed a 30 share to be considered a success. Now "Mad Men" is a big hit even though it gets a rating of less than 1.

The right business strategy is to niche. You do what magazines do. You find people who are passionate about something and serve them, only them. Whether the passion is for food or comedy, sci-fi or romance, right or left, cable networks aren't newspapers.

They're magazines.

This is what Fox learned in the 1990s, what MSNBC learned in the last decade, what CNN still doesn't understand. There is no such thing as mass media on TV. There is only niche media.