Dana Blankenhorn

This Is Not A Medium: It's An Extra Large

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 47 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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The Internet is not a medium, in the way that newspapers, magazines, or even TV are media.

The Internet is, and always has been, something else entirely. It is so vast, so complete, and so easy to use that the vast majority of us can't conceive of all its capability, let alone use it.

What schools should be teaching right now isn't so much writing, or math, or even science, but the proper use of the Internet, and how to get what you want from it. That's not just a question of teaching people to find stuff. It's a question of teaching people how to ask better questions, and frame what they get into something meaningful. The reason it's not taught is because no one knows exactly how to do that, even now, so educators are baffled as anyone else.

Thus Wall Street has always treated the Internet as just-another medium. And it has misled no company so much as Yahoo.

Impeaching Your Own President

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 46 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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During America's last political crisis, which began with Richard Nixon's election and ended with the validation of his political coalition through Ronald Reagan, a huge strategic mistake was made.

Watergate delayed the conservative movement's march to power by nearly a decade. They'd had a 60-40 win over McGovern, they were well on their way to taking over the South, but because Nixon over-reached, because he was inherently distrustful of democracy – as other conservatives remain – we had six years of what was, in hindsight, an apotheosis of liberalism.

Democrats are, en masse, threatening to make the same mistake, turning away from Barack Obama.

The Money Strike

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 45 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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When your politics is rejected, you feel rejected. When you feel rejected, you predict disaster. When you predict disaster, you dump everything for gold or Bitcoins. When you dump everything for gold or bitcoins you feed a disaster. When you feed a disaster you get a disaster, but not the kind you want.

Don't feed a disaster.

There is a growing chorus predicting imminent disaster for the U.S. economy. They see the dollar becoming worthless, or stocks becoming worthless. They see the economy falling into a black hole.

Populism Costs Republicans the Future

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 44 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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Political analysts of the left, right and center all misunderstand the nature of the Tea Party.

They're not “conservatives,” as we usually define the term. They're populists.

Populism is as old as the Republic. Thomas Jefferson ran as a populist in 1800, but eventually accepted renewal of the U.S. Bank. Andrew Jackson was our most successful populist, and he killed the bank.

The Panic of 1837, which followed soon after, killed populism as a governing principle. It only ended after American imperialism seized the southwest from Mexico, and we found gold in California.

Populism then merged with anti-immigrant Know Nothingism. It infected the Democratic Party through non-slaveowners supporting the Ku Klux Klan. It only became associated with liberalism thanks to William Jennings Bryan's “Cross of Gold” speech.

But populism was never about economic theory. It was and is about relative advantage, about people losing their edge -- or assuming they're losing it -- against newcomers rising up around them.

Populism, at its heart, is about a fear of change, the assumption that everything is a zero-sum game. And it's the nature of America that it's not a zero-sum game, that history sides with the newcomers. 

Populism also doesn't have to be internally consistent. It isn't. 

Blowing Up The World, or Blowing Up the Internet

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 43 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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Computers are binary. Yes or no, one or zero. Nuance is not what they're good at. Their logic is also absolute. A program either works, all the way through, or it doesn't.

People, on the other hand, are analog, We are not always logical. We rely on intuition, half-formed thoughts being the root of many breakthroughs.

Laws are a human construct. Their enforcement is also a human process. Cops, and even prosecutors, set priorities, limiting their attention on some things, focusing it on others. The law is not absolute.

There are, of course, some priorities that are absolute. Keeping someone from blowing up the world, or our part of it? That's an absolute. Beyond that, we get into gray areas, preferences, where people are bound to disagree.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is charged with keeping people from blowing up the world (unless it's on orders from the President). They're as absolute a group as you could have. The people who might blow up the world, or cooperate with those seeking to blow it up, are increasingly connected through technology. So the NSA feels it's an absolute priority to gain, and maintain, all the data it can on everyone, in hopes that when it gets a clue about the world being blown up it can sift that data and prevent it.

Cloud technology has transformed what we can do with data. The NSA wants to do all of that.