Dana Blankenhorn

Jimmy

Jimmy Carter was born in 1924, in the heart of the Jim Crow era, and in the center of the Jim Crow south.

This was one year before the Scopes Monkey Trial, five years before the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The year saw the KKK march down Pennsylvania Avenue in full regalia and with police protection.

Protection also came from the faith Carter’s family practiced. Alcohol was illegal, abortion was strictly illegal, but lynching was very legal. The Southern Baptist Convention into which Carter was born had supported slavery, it supported segregation, and they called it all God’s law.

It has been hard for me to understand, just how and where this good man was raised, the beliefs he overcame to become what he was. I didn’t even start to understand it until I moved here, after his presidency, and saw how the struggle continues today, on both sides.

Carter didn’t enter politics until he was 42, running for State Senate. While Governor in 1973 he appeared on the game show “What’s My Life,” saying he was running for President. While the panelists weren’t blindfolded, no one recognized him. His entire political life lasted just 14 years.

Fire Sundar Pichai

Recessions are good for markets.

They show us where the rot is, where the poor performers are.

This current one is no exception. It revealed that some of our Cloud Czars, the companies dominating the global economy with hyperscale datacenters paid for with cash flow, aren’t as clothed in gold as they seem. Some are downright naked.

Early this month, I identified one source of rot and urged Jeff Bezos to fire Amazon.Com CEO Andy Jassy. But it’s also time for two other founders to get back in the game. Larry Page and Sergey Brin need to push out Sundar Pichai.

Pichai is the kind of numbers-oriented manager Wall Street loves, but Silicon Valley should despise. He’s the kind of go along, get along guy who can make the trains run on time, but completely lacks vision. In technology this is a fatal flaw.

It’s obvious in how he dealt with artificial intelligence, the new hotness of 2023.

This is not about firing an ethicist. It’s a more basic failure to see where things were going, and deploy the necessary resources to get there. 

ChatGPT

Hate to rain on y’all’s parade but…ChatGPT is not the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not the Macintosh. It’s not the iPhone.

It’s software that translates search requests and results into what seems like plain English. Whether it’s useful depends on the input it gets. Garbage in, garbage out.

That doesn’t mean ChatGPT is Bitcoin or blockchain. It makes search accessible again. But it also makes search messy again. It creates imprecision in a world of 1s and 0s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Humans are imprecise. We’re messy. And it is fun to see computer output seem as imprecise and messy as we are.

It’s very easy to get a lie out of ChatGPT. Ask it about a subject where there are lots of lies on the Internet. They will appear in your answer. ChatGPT doesn’t have a filter. Yet.

Where Computing Happens

I met my first computer in 1976, in the basement of Herman Brown Hall, on the campus of Rice University in Houston.

The computing happened in a big room, separated from me by a window. I passed a stack of punch cards, tied with a rubber band, through the window. They came back along with my output. Which usually said the program had died on Line 3.

By the time I got out of journalism school, two years later, computing was moving to desktops. A neighbor bought a $20,000 Cromemco machine that could run 3 terminals. She hired friends to work at the terminals, transcribing court records. I think they got 50 cents a page. Computing had come home.

The Limits of Senior Power

If I were around 100 years ago, I would be dead. Instead, I’m rich. (Pictured are my grandparents, May and Edmund O'Donnell, in 1918.)

It’s a demographic and economic transformation that is destroying hope for change in America and (perhaps) making us the last generation.

Until recently, people lived their first 20 years dependent on parents, the next 20 as parents, the next (if they were lucky) 20 as grandparents and anything past that dependent on the children. Most of the world still lives this way.

But starting with Social Security in 1934, and continuing through general prosperity to today, America has turned this on its head. Seniors aren’t just living to an average age of 83, we’re doing it with money. I’m just a 68-year old journalist but, thanks in large part to a wife who works in tech, I’m a millionaire. We own our house. We have enough invested to guarantee a fine retirement, God willing. There may even be something left when we’re gone.

This has changed political incentives. There’s no better example than Florida where The Villages, a huge retirement town of 150,000 (almost all of whom vote), has turned the state’s politics on its head. Add them to those already living up-and-down the state’s east, west and south coasts, and you get a huge state entirely devoted to short term thinking. Education, the environment? Fuck ‘em. We’ll be gone.

The New Class Struggle

One of the biggest stories of 2022 is the discovery of a new class struggle, happening right under our noses.

It’s the product of our technology society. It’s between those who own this society and those who “merely” manage it.

When I was focusing my work on American political history, starting in 2006 with the launch of this blog, I assumed technology would lead us toward equity.

That’s because technology runs on human capital. Talent is the gating factor to growth. Not land, not people. Talent.

What does it take to nurture talent? You have to set a wide net, because it can come from anywhere. You have to educate everyone, because anyone could be great, and anyone who’s even good provides value. You can’t care where talent comes from, the color of its skin or the way its heart works or something called “disability.” Let talent find the ability it has, and exploit that.

Let people be free and make them comfortable. That’s the best way to raise children. It’s also the route to economic growth and saving the planet.

Positives of a Tech Recession

Despite some stunning investment losses, I’m enjoying the latest tech recession.

No one likes a recession, but sometimes it’s like spring cleaning, necessary to clear the excess. There were a lot of zombie technologies, zombie companies and zombie assumptions that have been overrun since the Fed decided that money should cost money and there should be less of it around.

Web3, the metaverse, and crypto were all fake from the jump. Advocates for streaming and podcasting didn’t understand that the gating factor is time, not money. A lot of companies were selling themselves based solely on sales growth, ignoring the need for profit.

This means there’s now opportunity, in the form of talent, for new ideas that will power the economy forward. The main trends I described in 2019 – the end of oil, the Machine Internet, and DNA as a Programming Language – they’re still on. But there’s a lot more, too.

The Enemy is Religious Nationalism

The 2022 election mostly put Trumpism into the rear-view mirror.

What it revealed was the larger political battle of this decade, between secular democracy and religious extremism.

I’m not against God. But there are two problems with religious nationalism.

First, it’s intolerant. Wherever one religion rules, its adherents outlaw any faith but their own. This is true for Hindus in India, for the Russian Orthodox, even for Buddhists in Burma. It’s true for Jews in Israel and for fundamentalist protestants in the United States.

This remains true despite every great religious teacher, from Gautama to Vishnu to Confucius, from Moses to Jesus to Mohammed, all the way to Joseph Smith, teaching first the way of tolerance. Love your neighbor. Care for the less fortunate. Seek the enlightenment of faith for yourself.

It’s the leaders of these faiths, the Popes and the Mullahs, the Rabbis, and the Brahmins, who twist it into something else. There is a reason for this. Those faiths that adhered to tolerance were, over time, wiped out by leaders of the intolerant. This is the true original sin.

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.

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.