Dana Blankenhorn

World War III

History will record that World War III was fought on the Internet. It began many years ago, probably in 2003, when politicians like Howard Dean first recognized the power of blogs.

On one side are organized criminals and authoritarian leaders. On the other side are civil society and the Internet as it was designed to be in the 1990s. It’s a war of civilization, a war for civility.

So far, the bad guys are winning. The good guys have barely shown up.

Even when the good guys get involved, our hands are tied. Cybersecurity is seen as entirely defensive. Companies harden their systems, ignoring the fact that they must protect every door, window and seam, while the criminal only needs one-way in. Tyrants thus have complete freedom of cyber-movement, and the criminals they harbor have complete license. This must change. It’s time for some Internet traffic problems in St. Petersburg.

Hardening systems against attack also hardens them against visitors, as anyone who goes to a high-rise condo or office tower knows well. But that’s the price you pay. There are bad people around.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the Internet, one I saw long before the web was spun in 1994. I got into my first flame war in 1988, and it was a disquieting experience. It was easy for my opponents to wind me up, and their insults affected me personally, making it hard to get any constructive work done for weeks.

The Darkness

The Darkness is always around us.

It searches for us in the dark teatime of the soul. It tries to drag us down into nothingness. Usually we resist it.

Not always.

Wealth and fame are no immunity from the Darkness. Talent doesn’t make you immune. Knowing it, being able to name it, doesn’t mean it won’t come for you. I’m not immune to it.

We don’t know what leads people to choose eternal Darkness. We can’t know. It’s a secret they take to the grave. As with mass shootings, we’re desperate to know, but our souls are private worlds.

We think celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade are special, but they’re just people. We also think America is special. The lesson of our time is that it’s not.

The idea of America has always been built on its denying the Darkness, but Darkness has always been here. It was a snake under the table when the Constitution was being written. It remained there, despite everything, after the Civil War. It remained there after World War I and World War II, spreading its tentacles through the “Banana Republics” of Latin America. The Darkness wasn’t destroyed by the Civil Rights movement.  It just went underground.

While we pretended to have beaten the Darkness, it continued to grow in the American soul, despite the warnings of George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower that trying to police the world or build a military-industrial complex threatened everything we called our light. Now it has come out to play.

Moore’s Third Law

Almost 20 years ago I began the most important work of my career.

My working title was "Moore’s Lore,” stories about Moore’s Law. A "marketing expert" insisted I put my name in the title. 

The original Moore’s Law, described by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore for Electronics magazine in 1965,  estimated that circuit density could increase for 10 years, at the same cost, and indeed by 1975 Intel was shipping chips that had over 64,000 circuits on them. Moore then “formalized” the law, saying he expected density to continue doubling, at the same pace, for as far as he could foresee. 

That’s Moore’s First Law. Moore never mentioned a second law, but it’s there.

Moore’s Second Law is that just as circuit complexity grows exponentially, so does its capital cost. While you can make up this cost by making more chips, it means the chip-making business is consolidating. Today there are only four manufacturers of microprocessors – Samsung, China’s Taiwan Semiconductor, the Middle East’s Global Foundries, and Intel itself.

The implications of Moore’s Second Law, as it continues grinding down, is that chip production becomes a national security issue.

Ever since Moore’s 1965 article came out, cynics have been trying to call a halt to Moore’s Law. As circuit lines get close together their distance can’t be measured, the cynics note. Every increased expense or shortfall in decreasing circuit size is seen to be evidence that the “Law” is “ending.”

The Next Step in Urban Evolution

When I moved to my present house in 1983, all views of the urban future were dystopian.

Suburbs were the thing. Cities were being consigned to the scrap heap. Atlanta offered a three-bedroom Craftsman bungalow, built in 1923, a few hundred feet from a train station, and with the nicest neighbors you could want, for $49,500.

Today the house is worth over $500,000. We put a lot into it along the way. It’s bigger than it was. The kitchen is huge, with all-new appliances. All the utilities are upgraded. It’s air conditioned.

More important, views of the urban future have reversed. Now everyone loves density, and the city wants to turn the train station’s parking lot into “workforce housing” so people making under $100,000 can live here.

But the assumption that the urban future is golden today is as warped as the attitudes of 1983 were.

Nature in the City

One of my big gripes with the present time, with freedom and democracy on the line, is that it delays consideration of other important issues.

Like that of nature in the city.

We like to pretend that nature has been tamed in the city, that it has no place save what we carve out for it. This is false.

During this century, as exurbs have extended their tentacles to the deepest woods and the tallest mountains, we have seen an unprecedented, seldom remarked-upon, rush of animals to American cities. When I was raising chickens 20 years ago I only had to worry about opossums and raccoons. Now we have coyotes, hawks and falcons. We also have bunny rabbits, deer, armadillo and feral hogs roaming the local landscape.