Dana Blankenhorn

The Ghost of the Eternal Now

I’ve been a reporter for over 40 years, and I’m still angry at the same thing that upset me in journalism school. (That's me on my first journalism job, wondering why someone is taking my picture.)

This is the attitude of an eternal now. It’s driven by this old chestnut – a journalist is someone who works for someone who buys ink by the barrel. The key to that sentence is the phrase “who works for someone.” Journalists are supposed to leave their minds and hearts at the door of the newsroom.

Reporters are taught to have no sense of history, or of the future. Mainly we’re taught to pretend we know nothing, and everything we’re told is equally valid. As a result, most reporting has no context, and we can’t call out stupid when it’s right in front of us.

That’s how Trump gets away with it. Any reporter who likens what he’s doing to Jefferson Davis or Adolph Hitler is accused of malpractice by agents of stupid at The New York Times. We’re just supposed to print what he says and repeat what he does, like good little stenographers. Then let Bret Stephens or Ross Douthat tell us what it means. Everything’s fine.

It’s even worse in business, which is my beat. Because we are taught to ignore the broad sweep of business history, we send readers down blind alleys. We pretend that making cookies is as cutting edge as writing software.

The past and the future have always been there in front of us. It was clear in 1979 that oil was taking over from manufacturing, but people reported from Detroit then as if that city could be saved. It was also clear that oil was a boom-and-bust business, but I was told to report from Houston that the boom would go on forever.

The 2020 Game

The Tell on what will happen in 2020 came in late July of 2019.

Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, attorney general William Barr and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin (far right), issued existential threats against the Cloud Czars. Under Trump’s orders.

The Cloud Czars, for those unfamiliar with my current work at InvestorPlace, are Microsoft, Amazon.Com, Google, Apple and Facebook. As technology has come to dominate the economy, the Czars have come to dominate technology.

They’re the Cloud Czars because the tool which dominates technology is cloud computing. It combines parallel processing with virtual operating systems and open source techniques to hold down costs.

The 1979 Game

An industry’s takeover of politics tends to be defensive.

It happens when that industry seems to be riding high. It acts against leaders whom neutral observers may credit with that rise.

I covered this story 40 years ago. In Houston.

The oil industry did great in 1979, despite Jimmy Carter’s cardigan sweater. Saudi Arabia, more Texas’ ally than America’s, had proven the economic power of resources with its 1973 embargo. Iranian mullahs believed they could use the same economic force against America. Oil understood this as a threat to its interests. Carter saw oil’s profits as leverage he could use against the Iranians.

Making Local News Great Again

A quarter-century ago, when the Web was being spun, I asked local newspapers how hungry they were to sit at the Internet’s banquet.

They weren’t hungry at all.

They took none of my ideas. They laughed at me as an outsider (I was writing online even then) and thought they could “repurpose” their existing print effort to win the online game.

Frankly they deserved what they got. When I read whinging about how local newspapers are failing, or being taken over by politicians for propaganda purposes, I have no sympathy. While I’m a journalist, I was trained as a business journalist, and I have always seen journalism itself as a business.

This Medium Cries Freedom

Throughout the decade now ending there has been a steadily growing drumbeat of elite opinion to the effect that this medium enables tyranny.

I blame Trump. The Russian manipulation of Facebook made Trump possible. Now tech must live down that legacy.

It means every collection of private data, whether by corporations, government or hackers, whatever the motive, is seen as evidence we need to throw our computers out the window. Every new technology meant to thwart abuse, meanwhile, is seen as a threat to human liberty.

Tech can’t win.

Technology can, in the hands of a ruthless dictator, enable terrible abuses. But there’s a limit.

The Political Triumph of Tech

Some 40 years ago, when I was commuting up the West Loop of I-610 for the Houston Business Journal, oil seemed to be in big political trouble.

We know how that turned out.

Today, in 2019, it seems that “Big Tech” is as friendless as “Big Oil” was then. But history sort of rhymes. These only seem to be different days, and you don’t have to be able to rhyme benzodiazepine to figure it out.

Reporters without brains call the reaction against tech their big story. But it’s the reaction to the reaction we need to be looking at.

The Sun Shines, The Wind Blows, and Watch Houston Become Detroit

Nearly a decade ago, having been tossed to the curb by ZDNet for calling out a “privacy” lobbyist as an industry shill, I changed the headline of this blog to focus on renewable energy.

“There is no energy shortage. The sun shines, the wind blows, the tides roll, we live on a molten rock.”

Tidal and geothermal energy have yet to make major contributions to our energy mix, but the Sun does indeed shine and the wind does indeed blow. More important is the cheapest form of renewable energy, efficiency, and which is always before us.

Today, U.S. energy demand is just passing its year 2000 peak. This is true despite Gross Domestic Product, the economy’s production of goods and services, rising from $13.131 trillion in 2000 to last year’s $18.566 trillion.  That’s 41% more economic activity with no increase in energy use.

Human Capital and the 1980 Game

In 2020, we will be 12 years removed from the first political triumph of technology, the generational election of Barack Obama. All his progress is now being undone, much as a generation ago oil’s gains were threatened by Jimmy Carter and his cardigan sweater.

As we prepare to play the 1980 Game the question becomes, who is Ronald Reagan now? (It’s usually phrased, “Who Can Beat Trump?”) The answer lies in what drives our economy today, and in what drove it then.

I remain confident in the ultimate triumph of Democracy because, today, human capital is the gating factor to economic growth.

Where Elizabeth Warren is Wrong

Like a lot of people, I admire Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, or as the great Charlie Pierce calls her Senator Professor Warren (SPW).

But, again like most people, I can’t vote for her for President.

The reason, in my case, is Warren’s attitude to the Cloud Czars. Warren is staking a big part of her candidacy on running against them.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that the Czars – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook – now command a combined market cap of nearly $4.5 TRILLION. Never mind that they dominate the business world, or that democracy always follows the Golden Rule – he who has the gold makes the rules. Democrats aren’t going to win the White House over the objection of the Czars and the bulk of the technology industry.

My beef here has to do with her proposal to break up the Czars, starting with Amazon.

Her argument against Amazon is that the company can see which brands people are buying, then put an Amazon version into the market and wipe out the other seller. It’s like she never heard of store brands.

Store brands have been a feature of American retailing practically since brands. Kroger does it with food. Target does it with clothes. Walmart does it with both. Walmart calls their store brands “Great Value.”

Copyright Wars 2020

My #1 life goal is to be plagiarized. THERE IS NO GREATER ACHIEVEMENT OR HONOR.

                                                                                ---Tom Peters 

                I first wrote about the Copyright Wars in 1997, when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was being debated.

                I predicted, in my first version of Moore’s Lore, which came out in the year 2001, that “East Coast” laws like this would fall to the “West Coast Law” of code.

                This is not the way things are working out in 2019. The Internet’s ability to serve mankind is threatened as a result.

                As Tom Peters notes, there is no real value in an idea. An idea is only worthwhile if spreads, or if it’s acted upon. For this to happen it must be communicated, disseminated, and digested by many other people.

                The Internet, specifically the World Wide Web, is the means by which this now happens. The Internet lets any idea, from anyone, reach an audience and change people. Or not.

                But two things are happening. First, bad ideas are getting the same power to change people as good ideas, because no one can credibly tell everyone the difference. Second, the copyright industries have moved to stop the distribution of ideas, under the mistaken belief that there is value in them, and that anyone repeating them should pay.

                Trump illustrates the first point well, although anti-vaxxers and other idiocies would exist even without him. It’s in the nature of the Internet to eliminate gatekeepers, and those companies that have risen to that position, like Facebook, Google and Twitter, eschew the role, fearing it will let government prevent protest (which it can).