Dana Blankenhorn

Newswriting in the 21st Century

I was taught two ways to write a story in the 1970s. (That's me in 1981.)

First was the inverted pyramid. Describe the story in a sentence. Then summarize the most important point. Keep going, in order or importance, so an editor can snip the story, from the bottom, and always have the gist of it.

Second was a circle. Grab the reader in your first paragraph. Then walk around the story until it’s told. Deliver a sting ending, a thank you for reading. This was my specialty. It worked great in magazines.

In 2021, the Internet has two different ways of delivering the news.

The first is what I call the “oh no.” This has replaced the inverted pyramid. If it’s good news, say “yeah, but” in the first paragraph, then describe how things are likely to go bad. If it’s bad news, scream “oh noes” and describe how things can only get worse.

The second is what I call “hide the pickle.” This has replaced the circle. Promise you’re going to say something important in the headline. Then don’t say it. Lead the reader on for paragraph after paragraph, page after page, filling their eyes with ads, until you finally get to some point (always less than was promised).

Cloudflare and the Cloudless Cloud

The Cloud Czars gained dominance by putting cash flow into cloud infrastructure.

Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook now spend billions of dollars each quarter on data centers. They upgrade the ones they have, and they build new ones. This is the cloud world we know.

Cloudflare wants to change that. The company is selling a concept called “Web3,” in which every server can be a node on the cloud network.

The offering is based on distributed technology already used for cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Cloudflare supports these efforts with gateways. The idea is that distributed software can now support cloud storage for less than what Amazon (for instance) charges to move data out of its S3 repository. It’s in moving data out that Amazon Web Services sees its biggest profits. Cloudflare says it can disrupt that. Amazon calls its storage offering S3. Cloudflare calls its new one R2.

Great theory. Harnessing the edge to take on the center makes sense. Letting anyone with unused space play in cloud markets sounds great. Exporting data with S3 is expensive.

What If Steve Jobs Were Evil?

If Steve Jobs were evil, he would be Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg was born in 1984, the year the Apple Macintosh was introduced. He founded Facebook in 2004. He launched Facebook’s program to build cloud data centers in 2011. His fortune was estimated October 5 at $117 billion, but that underestimates him. That’s because he controls the voting stock of Facebook, now worth $913 billion, so his power is greater than his money.

Facebook isn’t its eponymous service. It’s not Instagram. It’s not WhatsApp. Facebook is its 16 data centers, the thousands of miles of fiber cables connecting them with local centers, and with the world. About 1.6 billion people use Facebook services every day, according to its most recent quarterly report. Americans can take or leave Facebook, but people in the “Global South” depend upon it.

Open Source Explains It All

Back in 2005 I was asked to take over a new “open source” beat for ZDNet.

It turns out to have been the most important story of my life. And yours.

Open source is software based on the radical idea that the more eyes you get on code, the better it will be. Without getting too deep into the weeds here, it works.

The benefits of open source, however, flow mainly to its users. In the old proprietary model, they flowed to developers. Microsoft and (especially) Oracle fought it so fiercely. They saw the “little guys” as ganging up to steal their competitive advantage. Microsoft finally surrendered, building a network of cloud data centers that has made it the second most-valuable company in the world. Oracle is worth barely one-tenth as much.

All of America’s biggest companies are now built on the open source idea. Apple built its cloud on open source. So did Google, and Amazon, and Facebook. Facebook extended this into hardware with its Open Compute Project. Netflix extended it into networking with Open Connect.

But open source relates to more than software, hardware, or technology.

The Electric Car Revolution

It amazes me how many people still underestimate the electric vehicle revolution.

The chip shortage means there’s not much product in 2021. The Trump counter-revolution is tamping down demand. Millions drive their gas guzzlers like oil was King. They sit at drive-throughs rather than get vaccinated. They go racing in the streets. A 16 year old ran over 6 cyclists in Texas while rolling coal.

That won’t stop change. The irony is that self-driving isn’t even the revolution.

Electric motors are simple to make, just two parts. They can be made in any size. A generator is just an electric motor running in reverse, turning mechanical power (as from a windmill) into electricity. You can make an electric motor small enough to run a watch. They’re also nearly twice as efficient as motors using fossil fuel.

Bottom Rail on Top

It’s a fight as old as the century. (There's a signed copy available at Amazon.Com.) 

Cable operator doesn’t want to pay too much for programming, lest they be forced to raise prices and lose customers. They play hardball with the cable programmer, who tells cable viewers they’re about to “lose access to your treasured programming” should a deal not be made.

Sometimes a deal is not made. Sinclair Broadcasting, now running the regional sports networks it bought from Fox and renamed Bally’s, has lost a lot of these deals. If I want to watch Atlanta United home games, I either take MARTA to the stadium or go to a bar.

It happens a lot with sports. That’s because sports programmers overpay for their rights, then jack up the price they’re charging operators (thus you). If MSG, which has rights to New York teams, can’t get a new deal from Comcast by September 30, for instance, you may miss the New York Red Bulls’ playoff push.  (It’s going nowhere, by the way.)

So, you have the big, bad cable operator against the poor, beleaguered programmer. Comcast is a meanie, you say.

But what if it were Comcast that was doing the begging? That’s happening right now.

Comcast has owned NBC Universal for a decade. It bought the asset from GE. (This was covered extensively on the documentary series 30 Rock.) It’s a sweet deal. Programmer NBC negotiates with operator Comcast for the best possible deal, then Comcast moves money from one pocket to the other.

Who is Xi Jinping?

What kind of man is Xi Jinping? It’s the most important question in the world right now.  

Cold warriors want you to believe that Xi is the reincarnation of Josef Stalin, an absolute dictator bent on world domination. A lot of big investors believe this. That’s why the values of the biggest Chinese companies, the ones I call “Cloud Emperors,” have been cut in half this year.

But China’s policies toward tech aren’t extreme, not by the standards of American liberalism. Let small suppliers choose their markets? Enforce antitrust laws against predatory acquisitions? Raise taxes, so prosperity flows from the middle class out instead of from the top down? Why, yes.

It’s true Bernie Sanders would never give the state a monopoly on personal data. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t dare limit children to an hour of screen time a day. China’s “Great Firewall” runs both ways. Western data can’t get in, and Chinese can’t get their data out. This includes financial data, as the Bitcoin ban makes it harder for capital to flee.

But Xi’s got bigger problems than anyone here imagines.

Despite being the biggest producer of solar panels and electric cars, China is still like the Cuyahoga River in Randy Newman’s song Burn On.  The Evergrande Crisis, $300 billion in unpayable debt that must be wound down, is like the 2008 crisis that nearly took down the U.S. economy.

Young workers are revolting against a work culture called “996” – working 9 to 9 6 days a week. Those are the people whose support Xi is coveting. The people who grew up under a rising tide of prosperity since 1978 are no longer willing to pay the price  while the economic elites have everything all to themselves. If Xi stood in an honest election, I think he’d win.

The Inflation Opportunity

A lot of people are complaining about inflation right now.

In our technology age, this is nonsense.

Consider energy prices. Oil and gas prices are rising fast. But this creates an enormous incentive for anyone building solar panels or wind turbines. It blows through political objections to their installation. It brings capital to start-ups with new ideas that will dramatically increase harvesting efficiency. Harvesting energy, and increasing efficiency in our use of electricity, drive down demand and, thus, prices. The end of oil is one of the decade’s great opportunities and now is the time to seize it.

Electrify My World

When we moved to our current house in 1983, the heavy rail MARTA station next door seemed futuristic. Between 1983 and 2020 my wife took the train to work nearly every day, while I worked from home.

Today MARTA and the urban design it was meant to serve are obsolete.

Electric motors can be made in any size. Batteries are more efficient and cheaper. The cloud means warehouses can break bulk for less than physical stores. The pandemic let my wife recapture 3 hours each day, for chores and for living. She’s not giving that time back.

Work can happen anywhere. The world I wrote about 30 years ago in my book A Guide to Field Computing has arrived. An iPad can do the work of a PC, a phone, and a TV, plus it’s rugged enough for use in a manufacturing plant or warehouse.

Xi is in Trouble

Here’s something no one will tell you today.

Xi Jinping is in trouble.

There is an assumption in the West that, because China is run as an authoritarian state, and Xi Jinping is the President of that state, that he can do anything he wants.

I don’t buy it. The country is too big and too complicated for that to be the case.

Xi has been messing with China’s economy for a year now. Everything he does seems to make things worse. Going after the country’s Cloud Emperors – Alibaba, TenCent, and Baidu – made political sense. Most actions are in line with what western trustbusters would like to do with our Cloud Czars – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. But investors have been losing money.

Westerners don’t understand how much power the Cloud Emperors have. They dominate the entire economy, not just the cloud. Young Chinese are, if anything, more addicted to their phones than we are. They’re overworked, their homes are tiny, many are still living with their parents. The consumerism pushed by the economy, through the Cloud Emperors, has gotten pushback from millions who resent the “996” lifestyle pushed by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma. The 996 lifestyle means working from 9 to 9, 6 days a week. This is a 72 hour workweek, not counting the time spent commuting or preparing for work. And for what, they ask?

Xi has reacted to this by attacking the phone-based playstyle that makes all this tolerable. Telling China’s kids that they can only be on their phones for an hour each day is what American parents were doing in the 1960s, attacking rock and roll. It’s out of touch.