Dana Blankenhorn

E-Books are Better

This is a take that’s going to be surprisingly unpopular, despite being obvious.

E-books are better than paper books.

They cost nothing to deliver. They’re cheaper than paper books. They don’t kill trees. They’re lighter and easier to read.

They can also be updated, and that’s important.

I got a call recently from a company wanting to reprint my 2001 book on tech history, which I called (unfortunately) The Blankenhorn Effect. I later re-issued it twice, each time under a different title, as I came to understand that tech changes too fast for books to keep up with. My next project will be another update, tentatively titled Moore’s Lore 2024: More After Moore.

What’s the advantage of a paper book? It’s permanent. Its sale process offers serendipity. There’s nothing like the smell and feel of a bookshop, or a library. You can make the same arguments for LPs over a streaming service.

There’s one more argument that book lovers use. They hate Amazon.Com.

I get it. Amazon, and its Kindle, rule the e-book market. It’s the format of choice. It holds a market monopoly. This has made Amazon lazy. The whole Kindle business is now a pimple on the butt of Amazon.Com, which was founded almost 30 years ago to sell paper books.

The Wealth of AI

The battle over who gets what when productivity blossoms has been going on since the Renaissance made learning cheap 500 years ago. It accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, accelerated again with the Computer Age, and again with the Internet. It’s accelerating again.

The wealth of AI is the rocket fuel of Moore’s Law.

The late, great Gordon Moore was an engineer, who saw his theory as a self-limiting phenomenon. In various editions of my book on the subject I have tried to explain how this constant, exponential improvement works outward, from processors, to everything silicon touches.

Like software.

Software is still mostly written by hand. In the 20^th century productivity improved only in line with the tools used to write it. The 21^st century brought Moore’s Law to software. Once software goes online, in a managed cloud, it’s instantly accessible to everyone. All the barriers created over a century to cordon off markets disappear. Some can be rebuilt, but at an enormous cost to efficiency.

Open source is a big part of this new Moore’s Law of Software. The more hands on the code, the faster the code improves. Software communities mean everyone is building, together, on a constantly rising platform. There’s no more reinventing the wheel.

Save the Kindles

You can be comfortable in a big company. But you can also miss opportunities because they don’t look big enough.

Take Amazon.Com. They’re on track to bring in $500 billion this year. About half will be in merchandise sales. The other half will be in services of various kinds. The stock fell after earnings because the cloud unit projected slower growth, some of it driven by its own effort to help customers lower their cloud costs, some by the cost of adding AI software to AWS. Overall, Amazon stock is a buy.

My problem is Amazon has become such a sprawling business that some divisions are just too small to merit attention.

Take the Kindle book division. This is funny because Amazon started as a bookstore.  

I like the Kindle. An e-book reader is lighter than almost any book. You can use it with the lights off. A Fire Tablet can cost just $40 and serve as a personal TV. You can get refurbished Kindle readers dirt cheap.

E-books make printed books seem an environmental disaster. E-books also save money. Amazon offers a $10/month library service called Kindle Unlimited. I consider it a bargain. It offers lots of e-books at $1 to $3.

But in all the efforts by some states to ban books and close libraries, you haven’t heard a word from Amazon. That’s because the Kindle business is so small, by Amazon standards, that the company would rather keep quiet than pursue an opportunity that might be controversial.

Bezos Come Back

Since Jeff Bezos left his post as CEO of Amazon, in mid-2021, the stock is down 43%.

That’s 5 times worse than the average stock in the S&P 500. It’s more than twice as bad as Google. It’s as bad as the performance of Meta, the artists formerly known as Facebook.

Amazon is also shedding employees faster than Bed, Bath & Beyond. Some 27,000 have been let go this year alone. 

The job of running this company is simply too big for Andy Jassy.

The store is at war with itself, with third party sellers sabotaging Amazon’s own merchandising. The company’s physical retail effort has been a disaster. Walmart is beating it all to hell. The streaming unit is on an island. Jassy replaced himself with an outsider. Adam Selipsky had been at AWS 11 years but left to join Tableau Software and was recruited back by Jassy.

Morale at Amazon is at an all-time low. My own Amazon drivers used to be cheerful folks who looked forward to driving new electric vans. Now they’re in beat-up gas-powered garbage, they don’t say hello, sometimes they’re in personal cars, and one even blocked my driveway the other day. (I’m not going to report her. She was obviously overworked and under stress.)

The New Class Struggle

One of the biggest stories of 2022 is the discovery of a new class struggle, happening right under our noses.

It’s the product of our technology society. It’s between those who own this society and those who “merely” manage it.

When I was focusing my work on American political history, starting in 2006 with the launch of this blog, I assumed technology would lead us toward equity.

That’s because technology runs on human capital. Talent is the gating factor to growth. Not land, not people. Talent.

What does it take to nurture talent? You have to set a wide net, because it can come from anywhere. You have to educate everyone, because anyone could be great, and anyone who’s even good provides value. You can’t care where talent comes from, the color of its skin or the way its heart works or something called “disability.” Let talent find the ability it has, and exploit that.

Let people be free and make them comfortable. That’s the best way to raise children. It’s also the route to economic growth and saving the planet.

The Decade of Immersive Technology

Back in 2019, while at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, I wrote about three key trends that would define the 2020s.

They were the end of oil, the Machine Internet, and DNA as a programming language .

Since then, there has been progress in all three areas. The pandemic, and resulting parts shortages, have delayed but won’t prevent the end of oil. You can see the Machine Internet in all the hype over 5G. The Moderna vaccine is indeed using DNA as a programming language.

Turns out there’s a 4^th trend, and there may be more.

Living With Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future

This is actually the fourth edition of this book, which I have been writing and rewriting for 20 years now. 

Living With Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future is a collection of essays I have been working toward all my working life. It describes what Moore's Law is, how it developed, and how it extended into every area of computing through the 20th century.

Then it does more. I take the story into the present and explain just what we need to do, as a society, to take advantage of these miracles.

Then it does more. I have written an extra chapter about what comes next, the miracles that await us by harnessing the capabilities created by Moore's Law -- clouds, devices, and wireless networks. 

I consider it must reading for anyone interested in technology, in what it has done for us, what it's doing to us, and how we need to work with it to save the planet. 

Also, it's just $2.99. Free if you get it through Kindle Unlimited, Amazon's $10/month lending library. 

Cheap as chips.

Previous versions were offered as The Blankenhorn Effect in 2002, as Moore's Law: Better and Better, Faster and Faster in 2010, and as Technology's Big Bang: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Moore's Law, in 2019. 

Martin Hellman Has Concerns

What do you do if you win one of the big prizes in math or computing and are invited to become a Heidelberg Laureate? 

Some go back to their work, like Yoshua Bengio and mentor the next generation. Others become great men who wear their celebrity like a warm coat, like Vint Cerf, who is also in Heidelberg this week.

Then there is Martin Hellman. He won the Turing Award in 2015, along with Whitfield Diffie (who is also in Heidelberg), for public key cryptography, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. 

Public key cryptography became controversial as soon as it  s was announced. The National Security Agency tried to suppress the technology under Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who later saw the problem with weak solutions, said Hellman. Another cryptography war erupted in the 1990s with the “Clipper Chip,” an attempt to give crypto a “backdoor” for cops. Hellman called it  a front door. 

The third cryptography war began only recently, with the FBI putting pressure on Apple and others to get “exceptional access”  to iPhones, and the Trump Administration now trying to ban strong encryption. “It’s in a lull,” Hellman said of the current conflict. “Hopefully it dies.” But attacks are global, with even Australia trying to limit it. “They want to defy gravity to put things in space more cheaply,” he said. Hellman has been arguing this case for decades. 

In the process Hellman has created a second life, as an activist.

Martin Hellman has concerns. He likes freedom, and hates war. He rejects attempts to ban encryption because cops already have plenty of  information on us, like security cameras and license plates that can be automatically read as you drive. “I recognize there are trade offs. The FBI is trying to protect safety. We just  have to point out when they’re wrong.”

Trump is Not Unusual

Lost in The Eternal Now, reporters make One Big Mistake in writing about Donald Trump.

They call him unique.

There is nothing unique about Donald Trump. Yes, he is attempting to overthrow gains the American people won from tyranny over the course of 100 years.

But all those fights were against other Americans, and American governments. We have been here before. We have always been here.

Let’s not even talk about slavery or the Indian genocide. Let’s not even play Ragtime, the book, movie or musical where a black man is put down while a white immigrant rises.

Let’s start with that great liberal hero. Woodrow Wilson.

Fall of the House of Oil

There is no energy shortage. The sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock.

At the start of this decade, when I first began covering the War Against Oil, and changed the sub-head of this blog to reflect that, I believed the key to victory was bringing enough investment to the space, public and private, so that the cost of renewable energy would fall below that of fossil fuels.

It’s happened.

Crossover happened just as I expected, in 2016. The cost of energy from solar panels is now lower than that from burning coal. The cost of energy from windmills is now falling below that of burning natural gas.

The only thing keeping fossil fuels alive in the big utility model is the sunk cost of infrastructure. When that proves unreliable, as it did in Puerto Rico a few years ago, it’s replaced by solar power, batteries, and micro-grid technology, just as Al Gore predicted two decades ago.