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 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.

The Political Fight for Secure Identity

I took a train to Buckhead, in North Atlanta, this week to hear some executives brought in by Bloomberg talk about the future of technology.

They talked about the Internet of Things, what I started calling Always-On technologies in 2003, and the transformation this was creating on devices and in networks. But the view of their audience was negative.

They didn’t trust the technology, because they didn’t trust cybersecurity. With good reason. Because, as I noted here in 2012, the issue is tied closely to that of identity and we haven’t addressed the politics of that yet.

The Battle for Silicon Valley’s Political Soul

It’s now obvious, in retrospect that an era turned on November 14, 2007, when Barack Obama spoke at Google. 

The event was symbolic of a larger change going on in the economy, and thus in politics. Oil would be replaced by technology. Power, and responsibility, would move from Houston to Silicon Valley. The Kochs would fall, the Google guys would rise.

Of course, Silicon Valley hasn’t always been a liberal bastion. The original leaders of Silicon Valley were Republican. David Packard was an assistant secretary of defense under Nixon, during Vietnam. The Valley was always more about Apollo 13 than Woodstock. The Internet was a Cold War activity.

Corporate Autocracy

A lot of people like to say these days that America is no longer a democracy.  True, absent a crisis, and it has always been true. Most of the time, most people don’t care. Democracy, for most of us, is a gun we keep locked in the drawer.

And that is actually fine. If you’re not motivated to vote, you’re voting for the ways things are, you’re voting “yes” on whatever those who do vote wind up voting for. If you don’t vote, then bitch-and-moan that “we’re not a democracy” and “my vote doesn’t count,” you’re an idiot. Because it’s the opportunity to vote that matters.

But there is an area where in the last several decades we have lost democracy, and seem to have lost any hope of getting it back. That’s in corporations.

Cyber War in a Gibson Age

Some 20 years ago, when the Web was still being spun, my editor and I at Interactive Age saw the Internet ushering into a golden age of freedom.

(The kid on the right in this picture is me, with my dad, who passed in 1999, at the wedding of my younger sister. Just wanted to see him again.) 

The online world makes liberty binary, we argued. It’s on or it’s off. Economic growth demands that it be on, so it’s going to be on. We became among the earliest cyber-libertarians.

But human nature is not binary. It’s analog. There are degrees of good and evil in all of us. And the Internet, as part of the human world, must respond to that. It’s a misunderstanding of this fact that is at the heart of cyber-libertarian dismay with (even hatred of) the Obama Administration.

The fact is that we’ve entered an era of Cyber War. The Internet has become the focus of the key struggle of our age, between modernity and medievalism. Groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda know that the best-and-fastest way to go after the U.S. and its allies is through the Internet. North Korea has demonstrated this beyond a doubt.