Dana Blankenhorn

Let’s See How Far We’ve Come

For all those depressed over the prospect of Donald Trump as President (no one I know will admit to having voted for him) there is this.

Technology represents an irresistible tide.

No matter how tightly Republicans cling to the resource economy technology is overtaking it and, in doing so, destroying any hope his politics may have for a future.

We are on an accelerating track of change in which human capital means more-and-more, all other types of capital less-and-less. Devotion to the interests of the resource industries is counterproductive. That’s good for China, great for India and East Asia, even good news for Africa and Latin America. All the Middle East needs is a little peace to realize that Israel is a better economic model to follow than Saudi Arabia.

Revolutions are coming. Good ones.

Biology is The Next Wave

The next few years will see technology, the industrial wave of the present, fighting to take back power (permanently) from the resource industries which seized it in 2016.

Technology will succeed. The future can’t be put back into the bottle. If it can’t succeed here, it will go elsewhere, leaving America to become just another Latin American dictatorship.

But there’s another wave following technology. Just as technology followed resources, resources followed manufacturing, and manufacturing followed utilities, railroads, and agriculture to the center of the U.S. economy, and thus its politics, so biology is following technology.

The Political Power of Human Capital

In the 21^st century there is no capital so important as human capital.

High-quality human capital consists of people who are educated, educable, and who are excited about what they are doing. They’re golden threads in the haystack of humanity. Put them together with a supportive environment and you get growth.

Since computing was invented the United States has been the leader in human capital. We attract it, we train it, and we deploy it better than anyone else.

Increase the percentage of high-quality human capital you have, in relation to the other kind, and your society can grow very quickly. Think Singapore or Hong Kong. Think Israel or great cities like London. If your cities or nation is a magnet for human capital, what Richard Florida called “the creative class,” wealth will be yours.

The Medium is the Mess

Those looking for villains in the 2016 Election are looking in the wrong places.

Politicians did not fail, they did what they do. The “mainstream media” did not fail. It does not exist.

What failed was the Internet medium.

As I indicated last week, the men who control the new medium of the Internet refused to take political responsibility for it.  They said they were not running media companies, even as the Internet media soaked up all the media dollars. The result was that the Internet industry, and its political interests, could be hijacked by movements and industries opposed to those interests. Nature abhors a vacuum, and Trump simply filled it.

The political interests of the Internet are easy to list, and were endorsed by the Obama Administration as a matter of course. The primary interest is in human capital, trained minds essential to driving the industry forward, in making it independent of older power centers, and nurturing the biological industries that need to grow and follow it into power.

Mark Zuckerberg, Grow Up

So What The Fuck happened?

How in the name of holy hell did Donald Trump, a lifetime con artist who never did a damn thing for anyone but himself, get elected President over someone who had spent her lifetime in public service on behalf of the less fortunate?

It took me weeks, and a full course of antidepressants, to figure it out.

The answer is that he hacked the Internet. Not the whole Internet, but the Internet medium that has emerged to drive politics in the Internet Age we now live in.

Trump’s supporters could do this, because those who created the medium refused to take responsibility for it. The people who built the industry refused to curate the product and protect it from liars.