Dana Blankenhorn

The Big Tech Conspiracy That Wasn’t

Once you show you like something, I offer you more of it.

Is this a conspiracy?

Not unless I’m a scaled Web site. Because this is at the heart of the charge against “Big Tech,” the companies I call Cloud Czars.

• Show a preference for certain videos on YouTube and YouTube offers you more videos like them.
• “Like” things on Facebook or Instagram, and you will get more things like them.
• Follow certain celebrities on Twitter, you’re offered more like them.
• The same with Amazon Kindle books. When you buy something from Amazon, you’ll be followed for days by ads offering the same thing.

The algorithms follow human nature. Chances are that if you like a book about 12^th century monks who solve murders, you might like another one. If you like Henry Winkler, you’ll probably like Ron Howard.

The problem is that if you like crazy conspiracy theories on Instagram, or videos describing the terrors of the Illuminati on YouTube, you’ll get more of them. Like those, you’ll get more. And more and more.

The Cold War in Cyberspace

Computing is a binary process. (Image from an album cover by Trippie Red.)

I knew this when I first came online in 1985. Back then all the modems made noise, all the screens were glass, and all the networks were owned by the phone monopolies.

It was obvious, when I was reporting on the Electronic Networking Association in the late 1980s. Computing made freedom binary. Either you were free, or you weren’t. Netiquette was never more than a suggestion. That’s why the Internet didn’t open to general traffic until 1993. The military had to give up control over its tool.

Since then, we’ve done a lot to model the analog world in the digital one. But the binary nature of networking remains. We’re either free or we’re not free.

Law has acted against this like calculus against a curve, or codecs against sound. Greater or lesser effort is applied against different levels of violation. But computing remains binary. Those who are committed to ignoring the law still have the advantage.

In the analog world, it’s true that the good guys must protect every door and window while the bad guys only need to jimmy open one. But in the digital world, jimmying open one means all the doors and windows are open to anyone who has the tool.  Software now costs nothing to distribute, and networks can’t tell the difference between software that’s stealing your money and software that’s helping you buy an iPad.

Law & Order Takes Time

Lefty Twitter has its undies in a bunch (as always).

It’s all about Trump and his henchmen. (Law & Order: SVU has now been on the air longer than the original show.)

The complaint is that justice has not yet been visited on any of them. In its way, a valid complaint. The fantasy that Biden might order Trump’s immediate arrest upon taking the oath was always just that.

What’s happening now is precisely what needs to happen. It’s far more delicious than the liberal fantasy.

After January 6, the FBI immediately began its investigations. As requisite prosecutors have had nominations approved, the Department of Justice followed.

Hundreds of insurrectionists have been arrested. More are being sought. Several have begun to squeal. A few have been sentenced. Others are awaiting trial.

Latinizing America’s Cities

One of the great fears I have for this decade is that our cities are about to be Latinized.

Blame the lack of gun control. Blame inequality. Blame whoever you like. Rich people, and the upper middle class, are scared to death, with good reason.

There’s also an historic opportunity opening the real estate market. The downsizing of office space looks permanent. Managers will complain, but it’s hard to see them foregoing the savings from renting less space. It’s hard to see knowledge workers forgoing the savings they get working from home. It’s not just the productivity. It’s being available 24-7, working until the job is done, rather than thinking of it from 9-5. It’s the clothes, the time wasted in driving to-and-from the job, the bad lunches. Uh, why?

What then happens to all that office space? It goes condo. It gets broken into apartments, with some co-working space and shops on the lower floors. I see a lot of security at the entrances. The steel construction, living above everyone, will make wealthy people feel safe. That’s Sao Paulo, skyscrapers and security surrounded by favelas, locks and armed guards, necessities for anyone with money.

SPACs Deliver Fortunes Without Results

I’ve been noodling on the SPAC problem for months now, wondering what’s wrong with them. Only recently has the answer come to me.

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are designed to take private companies public before they’re ready for the public market. That is, the SPAC buys what’s basically a venture company, then sells stock in the venture to the public.

SPACs don’t have profits or even sales to justify their valuations. What they have is the sponsor’s word, and the CEO’s presentation. These are carefully stage-managed, as though public investors were buying into a venture fund. Of course, small investors can’t buy into venture funds. We’re not accredited. We can’t guarantee that if the venture goes bust, we won’t be hurt. That’s what being accredited means. 

The Demand of 2020: Law and Order

Regulations are the guardrails of corporate law.

They kick in before people are hurt. They’re usually aimed at corporations, not individuals. Everyone is punished by the paperwork. The penalties come in the form of fines.

Regulation is the best protection business can have.

When regulation isn’t imposed by government, it comes in other forms. It comes in insurance requirements. It comes from the plaintiff’s bar. Fines come in the form of differing rates to protect truck fleets, different prices for handling transactions, and in jury awards.

World War III, The Internet War

World War III is an Internet war. It has been ongoing for over a decade.

When the conflict was between countries like Pakistan and Ireland, or Ukraine and Russia, we could afford to ignore it.

Then it came to our own shores. November 8, 2016 was this war’s Pearl Harbor.

Yet we still haven’t reacted, because once the enemy is in the tent the media thinks going after them is friendly fire.

There’s nothing friendly about it.

Sure, there are efforts underway at Google and Facebook to boost “real news” and dissuade “fake news.” Yes, there are efforts underway in Congress to control online political spending. Yes, there is the Mueller probe.

But these are nothing. We still see the Internet War as something we can stop with higher firewalls, or bigger budgets.

We can’t.

Monument to the Present

The media calls it the Lynching Memorial.

Its proper name is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.  The Equal Justice Initiative built it, and an accompanying museum, on a six acre site at Centennial Hill in Montgomery, Alabama , near where I-85 meets I-65. It is just a few blocks from the first White House of the Confederacy, the Rosa Parks Museum, and the Hank Williams museum.

Call it the duality of the southern thing.

There are 313 names inscribed there, on tombstones that also bear the names of counties across the South where men were murdered during the days of Jim Crow. There are two sets of tombstones, and the museum hopes this second set will eventually be picked up by those counties, creating memorials to the dead there.

It is, without question, the most moving monument built in America since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened in 1982.

Taking Responsibility for the Internet

Apple CEO Tim Cook angered me recently, complaining loudly about “fake news” on the Internet but failing to say he would do anything about it. Or so it was reported by many news outlets.

The truth is more nuanced. Cook is seeking a technological solution, something that scales, against what he sees as a human problem. Passing along lies may be “your prerogative” but it is the medium’s responsibility to slow the spread of lies and take action against persistent liars.

This is a hard truth the Internet industry is just waking up to, in the Age of Trump.

CrossCheck, a system for flagging fake news in France, which holds a Presidential election this spring, is Version 1 of the emerging solution. It’s important to note, however, that it’s just Version 1. Leading companies must undertake an open source process before a real solution can be implemented.

The big difference between our era in American history and those that came before is that the industry which dominates our economy also created the dominant medium. Most Americans now get their news through social media, through Web sites that deny categorically they are even media companies. 

The result is a media landscape that can easily be gamed. Russia gamed it. Donald Trump is the result.

The Crisis is Over

This is the time in the political season when negative sentiments get all the coverage.

Taking power away from an incumbent party requires negativity. You have to convince people things aren’t that good, that you’re the guys to fix things. To even make an intra-party insurgency work, you have to convince people within that party that things are wrong somehow.

But outside politics, things are actually pretty good.

The dollar is on a roll it hasn’t seen since the 1990s. 

The currencies of China and the European Union, meanwhile, are falling in value. The yen is in freefall, you can buy 123 of them for $1. Deflation has replaced inflation as the economic buzzkill, with oil leading commodities down. What we need to buy is getting cheaper, and what we have to buy it with is worth more than it has been for over a decade.

The Information Wars

Back when the Web was being spun, in 1994 (right), we all had high hopes. We all assumed that information wanted to be free, and that freedom was binary. In this brave new world tyranny would be banished.

But all big ideas must be tested. Information has become the central battlefield of our time.

Tyrants believe that, by controlling the flow of information, they can control people. Talent will still do its work if those who have talent can be isolated within their areas of interest, and convinced that politics is none of their business.

In this way, freedom becomes a continuum, a knob that can be turned this way and that. Information autocrats must allow some communication, so their talent can breathe and perform. Information libertarians must have some limits on information, lest the autocrats use it against them.