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.

The Coming Disney Breakup

Walt Disney Co. is in play. (I remember getting one of these sent to me after the Disney Channel's launch in 1980.)

CEO Bob Iger fired his replacement and can’t find another one. The company is killing its streaming service by reducing content and raising prices. Its deal with Penn Entertainment, directly running a sportsbook, means ESPN is now incompatible with the main company’s business model. The resorts business is tanking, thanks mainly to climate change.

My guess is that the entertainment company will be sold to Apple, probably within a year. ESPN, ABC, and the parks will be spun out as separately traded companies. It might happen all at once.

The only reason to keep the whole thing together was “synergy.” A bad year for one division might be offset by a good year in another. The combination would then be a better investment than the parts.

But that’s not working. The movie business is dying. Disney is doing all it can to hasten that by refusing to bargain with its unions. If management and labor aren’t partners, you can’t do business.

The TV business was dead years ago. This includes cable.

The resorts business is increasingly divorced from the rest of the company.

The Internet is doing to the streaming business what it did to print. Paywalls take away 90% of your audience. Advertising rates keep declining because there’s too much free content. Live sports are viable but the billionaires who control teams and leagues keep pricing fans out of the market. If it’s all just about money, the players will gravitate to whoever offers more of it.

40 Years an Internet Client: A History

I have been using the Internet since moving into our present house 40 years ago.

It doesn’t seem that long. It was a lifetime ago.

To the right is my original set-up. It cost $2,799. The $300 modem ran at 300 baud. That was enough in a text Internet era. I used MCI Mail to file stories with those editors advanced enough to take them that way. (MCI printed them for the rest.) I still remember a 1989 Tokyo trade show where I used my TRS100, which also had a 300 baud modem, to send copy to San Francisco, then London. Good times.

Over time modems got better. My 300 baud became a 1,200 baud when I switched to an IBM PC. Then there was a 9,600 baud unit I got for a PC compatible later in the decade. Eventually I even had one with a claimed speed of 56,000. Its maker tried to support the phone companies’ ISDN efforts and went bankrupt.

E-Books are Better

This is a take that’s going to be surprisingly unpopular, despite being obvious.

E-books are better than paper books.

They cost nothing to deliver. They’re cheaper than paper books. They don’t kill trees. They’re lighter and easier to read.

They can also be updated, and that’s important.

I got a call recently from a company wanting to reprint my 2001 book on tech history, which I called (unfortunately) The Blankenhorn Effect. I later re-issued it twice, each time under a different title, as I came to understand that tech changes too fast for books to keep up with. My next project will be another update, tentatively titled Moore’s Lore 2024: More After Moore.

What’s the advantage of a paper book? It’s permanent. Its sale process offers serendipity. There’s nothing like the smell and feel of a bookshop, or a library. You can make the same arguments for LPs over a streaming service.

There’s one more argument that book lovers use. They hate Amazon.Com.

I get it. Amazon, and its Kindle, rule the e-book market. It’s the format of choice. It holds a market monopoly. This has made Amazon lazy. The whole Kindle business is now a pimple on the butt of Amazon.Com, which was founded almost 30 years ago to sell paper books.

The First AI Crash

No technology trend goes straight up. There are always crashes along the way, as subsets of the trend fall behind, while others prove their worth.

This was true with the Internet. Search engine companies were falling even before Google was created. It’s why Wall Street wanted Yahoo to become a “portal.” (Wall Street knows nothing.)

This will be true for A.I. as well. It’s starting right now.

The “consumer side” will crash first. Things like ChatGPT were fun for a while, but the mass market is deciding it’s more like Pokemon Go than “the Google.”

For any technology to gain legs, it must prove its utility. It must create productivity. It must not only do things that weren’t available before, but it must make money doing it, and make doing other things easier.

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.

Apple: What to Worry About, and Not Worry About

Tim Cook taught Apple to play a long game.

Cook became CEO in 2011 on the heels of the iPhone revolution. By turning a PC into a handheld device, as I wrote about 20 years earlier in “A Guide to Field Computing,” Steve Jobs’ Apple changed the way we live.

Cook doesn’t roll sell revolution. He sells evolution. Turning Apple into a Cloud Czar was evolutionary, being built on an existing services business. The Apple Watch was the same, built on an existing health business. Both efforts were widely ridiculed. Services are now a $40 billion/year business, wearables lilke the Watch an $18 billion/year business.

So the $3,500 Vision Pro headset doesn’t have to be huge out of the box. It can be an executive toy, used for going to the NBA Finals from Dubai, or delivering multi-million dollar presentations to a single executive decision maker. Apple can build the business organically, letting tenants experience a newly built building or showing doctors how to do an operation with the DaVinci robot.

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.

Cable News (1980-2023)

Broadcasting is dead.

Radio is dead. TV is dead.

Networks no longer invest in these channels at all. Click around some time when you have a chance.

What most people didn’t know, until today, is that cable is also dead.

Most of what you see on major (and minor) cable networks is the same dreck you see on broadcast, reality shows and game shows that cost very, very little to produce. Scripted shows are out. The surprise is that re-runs of this crap can get a rating. Networks don’t even have to produce much new.

What everyone wants is streaming. They want to justify that $10/month (then more) of your money, paid exclusively to them, the programmers. That’s where all their money goes. It’s going to Peacock, it’s going to Paramount Plus, it’s going to MAX. They need to be the “big three” networks because they aren’t. They’re fighting for 5^th, behind Google’s YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Netflix.

Even Disney must cut corners to stay in the game. They have total domination over sports, and they’re cutting people at ESPN, which has its own problems I’ll explain later.

In that kind of world, where do you think Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC fit in?

They don’t.