Dana Blankenhorn

The Death of Cable (and what comes after)

On March 25 Apple announced the death of the cable television model.

What replaces it is, in a word, the Internet. Streaming services, yes, but with far more interactivity than cable or broadcasting ever offered. True integration between audiences and programming, whether you need news, sports, or entertainment. Available wherever you happen to be. All you need is a mobile phone.

This is the entertainment model of the future.

Sounds great. People are now paying $200-250 per month for bundled Internet and TV service, with the TV taking up two-thirds of that bill. They’re paying another $60 or so for mobile Internet service, with calling bundled in.

There’s a lot of money at stake.

I covered the birth of the present world. I covered it twice.

The Demand of 2020: Law and Order

Regulations are the guardrails of corporate law.

They kick in before people are hurt. They’re usually aimed at corporations, not individuals. Everyone is punished by the paperwork. The penalties come in the form of fines.

Regulation is the best protection business can have.

When regulation isn’t imposed by government, it comes in other forms. It comes in insurance requirements. It comes from the plaintiff’s bar. Fines come in the form of differing rates to protect truck fleets, different prices for handling transactions, and in jury awards.

Technology’s Dilemma

There is a bug at the heart of innovation, of technology, and of capitalism itself.

It lies in the incentives we give innovators.

It lies in stock ownership.

What liberals have condemned is the fact that nearly all the profit from innovation is going to a very small number of people. The winners’ founders, and their venture capital partners, get fortunes measured in the billions of dollars. Their key people also wind up as multi-millionaires. Everyone else, whether they’re line staff or just ordinary schmoes, can pound sand.

Sure, we all get some of the benefits. It’s cool to have cat litter delivered. It’s amazing that I can learn anything I want to know within moments. I can call my kid in Europe free. The software and hardware my son accesses, to automate cutting-edge medical tests is amazing. As a result, we’re starting to understand not only the genetic code, but what lies beneath it.

Still it’s true. The rewards are all going to a very small number of people. Jeff Bezos will never be able to spend the $150 billion he has access to. Bill Gates will never be able to give away the fortune he has won. Philanthropists are taking on the role of governments, self-appointed boards deciding the priorities on the nation’s wealth.

Capitalistic Feudalism

The central problem of our time is the march toward feudalism.

It began among capitalists.

Democracy is essential because it lets people change their minds and, upon changing them, reform the institutions that control their lives. That’s what the Declaration of Independence is about. It argues that despotic systems must be overthrown when they threaten our “life, liberty” or pursuit of happiness.

Many people, including me, have argued that the current attack on democracy began with The Jim Crow Project.

But long before one of our major political parties abandoned democracy, business did. It happened as these things usually do, with the very best of intentions.

As I noted last week, the system that came into effect in 1789 had only property owners voting.  The true genius of succeeding generations has been to expand the right to vote, thus the pool of those who can effect change, to more and more people. This work continues, and it’s important.

But there’s another kind of democracy, corporate democracy. It may be even more important than electoral democracy because even functional democracies operate by the Golden Rule – he who has the gold makes the rules.

Before we can hope to have electoral democracy, then, we must have corporate democracy.

We Are All Founders

There are two distinguishing features to the existential crises in American history.

The first is it makes us return to first principles, causing us to re-examine, criticize, and eventually deify the past.

In the run-up to World War II, a crisis that really began four score and seven years ago, in 1932, there was a vogue for Abraham Lincoln. Henry Fonda and Raymond Massey did popular biopics, and his memorial became a sort of Ground Zero for what was best in our political natures.

In our time, Lin Manuel Miranda did this to Alexander Hamilton while Ron Chernow, who did the biography of Hamilton on which the movie was based, proceeded to resurrect U.S. Grant. The purpose of both these pieces of art was political. Miranda wanted to highlight the importance of immigrants in getting the job done. Chernow wanted to push back against a Confederate-inspired view of history that still, 150 years later, has those who supported human rights being disparaged while those they fought are exalted.

We love to call America the world’s oldest democracy. We revere the founders as giants.  We even call them the Founders.

But the original Constitution was profoundly anti-democratic. Women couldn’t vote. Neither could blacks, nor native Americans. The franchise was reserved for white males, and not even all of them. You had to be a property owner.