Dana Blankenhorn

Word of the Year: Enshitification

Enshitification is what happens when principles go out the window.

Principles like service, like honor, like honesty, like “a little looking for the other fella,” as James Stewart said in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, are what make civilization possible. When they disappear, as they have over the last several years, it doesn’t matter much what your system is or what your laws say. Those with power will take it, and only the strongest will survive.

This is mostly discussed today in the realm of politics. Words have lost their meaning and are often used to mean their opposite in the name of victory. Facts mean nothing and are simply denied in the name of power.

Twitter to Mastodon

Over the last months I’ve been spending a lot less time on Twitter, now called X, and more time on Mastodon, its open source doppelganger.

The difference between the two can be summed up in two words. No algorithm.

When you use Twitter, or any commercial social media site, an algorithm encourages you to stay online. You like fluffy bunnies? Here are posts on fluffy bunnies. You can quickly fall into a fluffy bunny rabbit hole, where fluffy bunnies are all that matters, and anyone who doesn’t like fluffy bunnies is some sick pervert. This is especially true on TikTok.

At Twitter, this is found under the tab marked “for you.” The tab doesn’t exist in Mastodon. Instead, there are other tabs. “Home” is like Twitter’s “following” tab. Federated shows the most recent posts on any site, no matter where they come from. You can input a hashtag to get news on any topic of interest, like #Ukraine. There’s also a local tab featuring messages placed on Mastodon server you are part of.

This last is important. There is no central control in the “Fediverse,” which includes many other social services, including a Facebook clone and an Instagram clone. Instead, anyone can spin-up a server or “instance” and choose who to connect or “federate” with. In practice, while Meta’s “Threads” is compatible with Mastodon, many Mastodon servers won’t link to it, fearing the force of the algorithm, the coming firehose of content, or just Mark Zuckerberg’s right hook.

What No One Wants to Hear

America is doing great. Anger burns itself out. We’re playing the 1983 Game. Ask your folks what happened in 1984.

No one wants to hear this, let alone admit it.

The Reich won’t hear it because it’s their job to be angry. The left won’t hear it because they think anger is necessary to beat the Reich.

The truth is different.

Threads and Open Source

The Clouds were built with open source.

What’s now Meta Platforms got its start not with the “social network” of Facebook, but with the Open Compute Project. It’s an open source platform for building hyperscale data centers at minimal cost.

Thanks to Open Compute, Meta owns its own infrastructure. It also has thousands of programmers on staff, whose job it is to bring traffic to that infrastructure. But even with Threads, Meta didn’t forget where it came from.

Threads is being built to support ActivityPub, the open source system behind Mastodon and what’s called the Fediverse.

Each Mastodon server will shortly have a choice, whether to connect to or “federate” with Threads. Some will. Some won’t. If you don’t like the decision of your instance’s admin, you can choose another instance that meets your needs. Or you can set up your own.

In short, you don’t need Threads. Its only advantage is its scale since it will use Meta infrastructure. That’s also its disadvantage. It’s being built to collect data and monetize it. Mastodon isn’t.

The degree to which Cloud Czars like Meta and its four peers – Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon – support the open source ethos they’re built on is always an open question. They will go back-and-forth on it, adding support here, withholding it there, based on their own business requirements.

Fall of Babel

The slow-motion collapse of Twitter leaves us all with a question.

Where do we go now?

Twitter was the Internet’s Tower of Babel. It was where everyone came to discuss everything. It wasn’t all about politics. There was finance Twitter, celebrity Twitter, and (perhaps my favorite) soccer Twitter. Companies no longer had to issue press releases. They’d just Tweet, and it would be heard by all those who wanted to listen.

Elon Musk didn’t destroy Twitter. Donald Trump did. As with everything in his life he trivialized it, made it all about him. He used it as a weapon, first against his own party, later against democracy.

Musk completed the process by engaging his own self-destructive tendencies. He has done tremendous damage to his own brand in the process but doesn’t care because his fortune has risen. This is thanks to Tesla, which is fulfilling the ambitions of its most bullish investors by scaling production of electric batteries and cars that use them.

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.

The 1983 Game

By my calculations, oil took over political dominance from manufacturing in 1968. Tech took over from oil in 2008.

That means we’re now playing the 1983 game. (This will be my 40th Peachtree Road Race. That's me at my second, in 1984.)

That was the year I bought my house. Interest rates were still high making the $49,500 price hard to afford. While oilman George H.W. Bush was VP, it was the defense and media industries who had Ronald Reagan’s ear. The oil shortage of the 1970s had turned into an oil glut, fueled by the Administration pushing the Saudis to keep pumping even while prices paid to Texas oilmen were falling.

This should sound familiar to today’s tech tycoons. Even while Californian Kamala Harris sits as VP, the industry is being battered in Washington. There are calls to break up the company, to tightly regulate the Internet. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was a bad look.

The industry thus faces a political choice.

A lot of the big swinging dicks of the last decade have made their choice. Led by Peter Thiel, a lot of them are putting all the cash they can into Republican campaigns. They see control of the government, under the leadership of a Republican party dedicated to their specific interests, as the best route forward.

Why Clouds Will Win the Streaming Wars

Since long before the streaming crash began, I predicted its Big Three would end up being Apple, Google, and Amazon.Com.

Not Netflix. Not Disney. Not Comcast or Paramount or Warner Brothers.

The Cloud Czars.

As usual, I was early to the story. But it has long been clear that, when push comes to shove in streaming, money talks. The coming result was easy for me to see and the story was easy to do.

Of the three Cloud Czars, Amazon is the best-positioned. They have the front-end technology with the Fire Stick, which has one-third of the U.S. market. They have Prime Video, which becomes a huge value if you use the Amazon store. They can re-sell every other streamer’s stuff and make money. They’re also global, something only Netflix and Disney among their competitors can lay claim to.

Business Needs Consensus

I have long believed historians misread the Progressive Era.

They see it as a victory for liberal values.

I read it as a victory for business. Which isn’t necessarily a different thing.

Fact is, the business of America is business. America has always been led by a dominant industry. Farming, then cotton, then railroads, then infrastructure, manufacturing, oil, and now technology.

Power flows to the highest-value industry and, when that is supplanted, flows away from it. Just as cotton lost to the railroads in the Civil War, I believe railroads lost to infrastructure in the Progressive Era.

What the great inventions of the late 19^th century – electricity, telephony, and the automobile – required for mass adoption was scaled, organized infrastructure. Having two or more electric utilities, two or more phone companies, or (God forbid) two or more private road networks made no sense. What Wall Street saw in the 1890s was that monopolies created efficiency.

But the monopolies would need the approval of government. The price of government approval, in a democracy, would be regulation, and some means of control over the result.

I Have a Dream for Netiquette

In the mid-1980s I joined a group called the Electronic Networking Association.

The ENA believed, naively, that if people could communicate across their differences, they might understand each other better.

Few people used the Internet then. We were all elites, intellectually at least. We were thoughtful and we shared a First World viewpoint, even if we lived in Japan, Europe or Africa. We shared values, sort of like the Quakers. 

What we believed in was Netiquette. These are simple rules for civilized behavior. Assume goodwill. Don’t yell. In short, be nice. When in doubt, apologize and resolve to do better.  

The punishment for a violation of Netiquette was a stern talking to, for both sides of the argument. The punishment for repeated outbursts was to be shunned by the group, dismissed, cast off.