Dana Blankenhorn

Fixing Twitter on Mastodon

Twitter is broken beyond repair.

But it can be fixed. On Mastodon. If users learn something I learned back in 1988.

I’m @danablankenhorn@journa.host on Mastodon. Journa.host is run by Adam Davidson, formerly of The New Yorker. It’s one of thousands of servers supporting Mastodon on the Internet.

Users can block users on Twitter. But on Mastodon servers can also block servers. Users can also move between servers. This means people choose whatever server conforms to their standards on what should be blocked and what allowed. You can have alt-right servers, alt-left servers, and alt-bicycling servers.

A lot of people, looking at Mastodon over the last few weeks, have looked askance at this. People are isolating behind their server walls, they complain. Or they might.

But that was always true for Twitter. It was designed to be. The problem is that many people didn’t use their block commands aggressively enough. Journalists amplified extreme views by retweeting them. Hate was amplified by user outrage.

Urban Game Changer

I’ve been a bicyclist my whole life. My present one dates from 1981, and it works great. (Here it is in Centennial Olympic Park last year.)

I know most people aren’t me. Bicycling remains a niche activity. Bike lanes are rare because there is little demand. Rail lines scale, but they’re inflexible. Cars offer comfort, but roads don’t scale. The urban environment is little changed from when I came to Atlanta in 1981.

I’m getting older. At 67, the heart rate needed to maintain a good speed for a half hour is near my limit. All I’m good for at the end of 10 miles today is a nap.

But electric bikes are a game changer. I finally bought one this week, a Lectric 3.0. It unfolded from its box in about an hour and took no tools to set up. The battery runs 20-40 miles between charges, for which you use a 3-prong wall plug and a power supply just like your old laptop. Anyone can get it to go 10 mph, even over hills. You can buy a passenger seat or grocery baskets.

A Community Model for Web Publishing

Even before the Web was spun, I was arguing against the standard publishing model for the Internet. (Picture from Wikipedia.)

That model was built on advertising. You aggregated people based on their location, industry, or lifestyle, by covering their interests and advocating for them. You then sold billboards alongside that content and, if charging for the paper, only get back its distribution costs.

What I argued for instead, as early as the mid-1990s, was for a marketplace model. You’re still collecting readers, but your content leads them down a sales funnel, and you’re seeking commissions on those sales from your business partners based on your credibility.

One of my favorite memories is of the 1995 Christmas party of the Atlanta Press Club, where James Cox Kennedy, then the local paper’s publisher, claimed he could repurpose content online by putting different URLs in front of it, like yall.com. I laughed so hard I cried. I nearly doubled over.

By the time publishers expressed interest in the marketplace model, of course, it had become useless. This was thanks to Doubleclick, which was founded in Atlanta and later bought by Google. Google made it possible for anyone to aggregate their own audience and buy it at a run-of-network rate. The fact that you’d need 10 times more impressions to get the same impact was seen as a feature, not a bug. And the price of those ads continued falling, thanks to the Web’s unlimited inventory.

Is This The End of Crypto?

I wrote about cryptocurrency a lot, late in the last decade.

I finally decided it was trash.

There’s no there, there. I can find no blockchain applications superior to what you can do in other ways. Bitcoin and Ethereum claim they’re better than other coins, but the market remains crooked and opaque.

All this came crowding in this week when FTX collapsed. FTX was the creation of a 20-something (now 30) named Sam Bankman-Fried, whom my son now calls Bank Man Fried, as in French fries.

The Intranet of Systems

 

A warehouse is a system.

A factory is a system.

A hospital is a system.

The Machine Internet is now ready to take its next step, toward the transformation of systems.

Vendors have been adding intelligence to machines for a decade. My car can now tell me when my tires need air. Many machines can tell their owners when they need preventive maintenance.

An Intranet of Systems would get all the software on these machines working together, the way orchestration software lets a company control its supply chain.

What Xi Jinping Doesn’t Know

Dictators can do many things.

They can hold territory. They can terrorize people, even kill them.  They can force our bodies into lives of drudgery and poverty.

What they can’t do is whip people into creativity.

Xi Jinping is betting he can. By controlling what people see and hear, by whipping up patriotic fervor, he thinks he can make China a dominant economy. Many western analysts agree.

He’s wrong. They’re wrong.

This has nothing to do with western investment. It lies in the nature of the 21^st century economy. Because money no longer comes out of the ground. It rains down from the clouds. Technology provides added value. That trend is accelerating.

The Time Is Now

Here is what 45 years of studying business cycles has taught me.

Now is the time to work on your next great startup.

Right now. When the whole world is collapsing around us. When old business models are failing. When everyone is worried about their job, or about to lose it.

Look at the opportunities. I detailed them three years ago. The end of oil. The machine Internet. DNA as a programming language.

These boil down to renewable energy, control systems, and medicine.

Nurture Talent

The biggest threat to America’s cultural and economic dominance is our winner take all system.

We have succeeded because we nurture talent. Talent is what dominates the world economy in a cloud-based world. Talent must be nurtured if it’s to turn potential into reality. There is no limit to how much talent a cloud-based economy can absorb.

Talent needs comfort. Talent needs to focus on itself. Talent needs freedom.

Anyone who studies talent in any sphere will tell you this. So will all talented people. They will say that their parents let them dream, that their schools nurtured their potential, that their first bosses mentored them. They will talk a lot about patience.

You don’t know where talent will come from, or when it will form. You can’t just focus on those who display talent at a young age. Some take time to find their talent. Matt Turner, who will play in goal for the U.S. team in next month’s World Cup, wasn’t drafted after college. In soccer mad countries like Brazil, he wouldn’t have gotten a chance.

This is America’s secret sauce.

The Time to Buy

The time to buy a bear market depends on your time horizon and your risk appetite.

If you’re in your early 30s, for instance, it’s a great time to buy the U.S. stock market. Stocks are at pre-pandemic levels, including some companies that still have great growth prospects. Most of the Cloud Czars fall into this category, as well as cloud applications like Salesforce.

If you’re in your late 60s, like I am, you should probably hold off. You still want to maintain enough cash to get through if things turn south, as the ultra-bears insist that they must. But ultra-bears are wrong. Markets do bottom, and they do go back up. If we’re about to have nuclear winter, cash won’t save you.

Beyond the PC

I’m surprised more people didn’t anticipate this year’s tech wreck.

Once computing mastered video, as it did early in the last decade, there were no obvious new horizons. What resulted was crap without application. Crypto has no application. The metaverse has no application.

Without new files to deal with, this year is featuring a shakeout in how to deal with them. PCs were already being hurt by Chromebooks, which move most workloads to the cloud. PCs even accepted it. Most of my own PC’s files are now cloud-based.

But what I didn’t anticipate (and should have) was the death of writing.