Dana Blankenhorn

Elizabeth Warren on Tech Street

Ronald Reagan was not oil’s first choice in 1980.

John Connally was first. George H.W. Bush was second. Oil accepted Reagan and, through Bush, won political power for a generation, power it still has in the face of tech’s need for human capital.

So it is that we come to the 2020 game. Tech has been in the economic driver’s seat for 12 years, but in the political back seat for three. Tech has suffered for this. Its priorities have been ignored. It has been scapegoated by an Administration working in the interests of oil.

Technology is Democratic. It’s not a question of who tech prefers. Tech needs a seat at the political table, it will have a seat at the table, and that table will be Democratic. Assuming, of course, that democracy survives.

The 2020s: DNA as a Programming Language

(This is Part II of a three-part series on technology in the 2020s, for publication while I’m on vacation with my best friend of 44 years.)

CRISPR is an Apple II with Visicalc.

It will take a generation to turn DNA into a programming language, just as it took a generation to get from the Apple II and Netware to the iPhone and cloud-based Internet.

But in 1979 the future of my generation was set in stone. Most of my Rice classmates wound up in the technology world, either as programmers, engineers, executives or (like me) just observers. Few of us were in any of those roles then. It happened gradually, as we saw opportunities and took them.

If you were in the computing field in 1979 and you stayed the course, you’ve probably had a pretty good life. The same is true for the worlds of biology and biochemistry today. This is where your kids are heading, whether they know it or not.

Mine know it.

The 2020s: A Future in Three Parts

Moore’s Law accelerates change. Aging accelerates time.

Hard as it may be for me to believe, the 2010s will be over in less than 5 months.

In technology the last decade has been a Golden Age for clouds and devices. So, too, in business and in politics. The refusal of cloud companies to lock-down their technology elected Donald Trump. The result has been a march toward civil war, global war, trade war, the biggest crisis since the late 1960s.

But you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Moore’s Law of Health means I may live much longer than my parents did, long after history should have rolled over me. At least that’s true in those places where people can afford medical care. The likeliest replacements for Donald Trump are both older than he is. Al Gore is younger than either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. We’re still debating Woodstock, 50 years on.

We’re going to start turning the page on the current era in 2020. The hold of the autocrats is weakening. It’s weakening in Russia. It’s weakening in China. It’s weakening in Texas.

Moore’s Law continues marching onward, better and better, faster and faster, reaching further and further afield.

In this decade it has made Africa accessible to global markets, made India as well as China an economic power. Over 1 billion people have entered the middle class this century – they have homes, some material comforts, and they have hope.

What might the next decade bring? If I make it to the end of this decade, I’ll be 75, so this may be my last shot at predicting the future.

But here goes.

The Fight in My Front Yard

I’m leaving next week for Europe.

Perhaps the most important day on my trip will be September 28, when I’m due to see my daughter in Vienna.

It’s not just important because I love her. It’s important that I check in with her regarding the most important issue facing mankind, climate change.

My daughter has been studying most of her life to be on the front lines of the battle. But what I’m finding is that the key to this battle may be right back here, in what was her front yard. If you want to know whether the climate crisis can be overcome or not, that’s where to start.

My daughter’s focus has been on urban animal policy. It sounds arcane, but it’s not. Whether or not we admit it, our cities and suburbs are part of nature, just as our forests and beaches are. They are ecosystems, where plants and animals live or die depending on our actions.

In Atlanta, that battle is being lost.

Fall of the House of Oil

There is no energy shortage. The sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. We live on a molten rock.

At the start of this decade, when I first began covering the War Against Oil, and changed the sub-head of this blog to reflect that, I believed the key to victory was bringing enough investment to the space, public and private, so that the cost of renewable energy would fall below that of fossil fuels.

It’s happened.

Crossover happened just as I expected, in 2016. The cost of energy from solar panels is now lower than that from burning coal. The cost of energy from windmills is now falling below that of burning natural gas.

The only thing keeping fossil fuels alive in the big utility model is the sunk cost of infrastructure. When that proves unreliable, as it did in Puerto Rico a few years ago, it’s replaced by solar power, batteries, and micro-grid technology, just as Al Gore predicted two decades ago. 

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.

The Climax State

One advantage that biologists have over economists and political analysts is a clear understanding of a “climax state.”

A climax state, whether it’s a swamp filled in by peat, a redwood forest, or a planet filled with huge dinosaurs, is the most vulnerable thing in nature. It only looks stable. But a fire, or any sudden conflagration, can destroy it utterly. Mankind has, in the last thousand years, created such a climax state.

This was all described to me in the summer of 1991, when we took our family vacation around our home state of Georgia and found ourselves riding in a canoe through the Okefenokee swamp. Our guide described how the life-and-death competition among plants and animals leaves organic matter behind, which fills in the water and creates little islands, which are eventually connected as more water disappears. But these islands are highly flammable. A fire in the swamp clears them out, leaving a new swamp for creatures to compete in.

It's lack of competition that makes ecologies vulnerable.

Nature in the City

One of my big gripes with the present time, with freedom and democracy on the line, is that it delays consideration of other important issues.

Like that of nature in the city.

We like to pretend that nature has been tamed in the city, that it has no place save what we carve out for it. This is false.

During this century, as exurbs have extended their tentacles to the deepest woods and the tallest mountains, we have seen an unprecedented, seldom remarked-upon, rush of animals to American cities. When I was raising chickens 20 years ago I only had to worry about opossums and raccoons. Now we have coyotes, hawks and falcons. We also have bunny rabbits, deer, armadillo and feral hogs roaming the local landscape.

Speaking Your Own Truth

In his book The Tools, Phil Stutz found a way to make me cry.

One of his tools is that you should imagine yourself as a child, insignificant and broken, flawed. Not your best self, just the opposite. Then, when it’s your turn to speak, speak through that child. Once you’re unafraid of being seen for what you are, or what you’re afraid you are, you’ll be fearless.

I’ve been using this tool all my life without knowing it. I desperately want to be heard. It’s what I’m about. So, I shout, on this typewriter, as loud as I can, every day. When I’m done, I’m satisfied, whether a lot of people were listening or just a few. This gives me inner peace. It’s not what I do, or my job, it’s what I am, I tell people.

I didn’t understand the meaning of this until I faced a child who didn’t have it. I would tell this child, every day if I could that what mattered to him wasn’t what he was learning, but how he integrated it, and how he expressed what he knew to teach new truths others. The kid didn’t believe me. The fear was too great. He went around the world, learning, but afraid to speak his truth, and no one ever heard what he had to say.

There are many success stories, however, who are just like this child. They just parrot what teachers tell them. They say what they’re told to say. They memorize a script and recite it, believing that they’re saying something but, in fact, contributing nothing new to the conversation.

Nature of Money, Nature of Man

When I wrote my “anti-Trump polemic” early this year I thought I was writing about politics.

It turns out I was writing an economics book.

I learned this while reading a biography of the late Jane Jacobs, best known for her fight against the “urban renewal” of Robert Moses. After that fight Jacobs moved to Toronto, becoming one of Canada’s most beloved intellectuals, and there she wrote an economics history book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations. 

In this book Jacobs identified cities, rather than farms, as the original source of wealth. It was cities that turned wheat into bread and beer. It is cities that transform everything.

True, as far as it goes. But how and why remained a mystery to Jacobs. The nature of money eluded her. It’s something my recent book explains by looking at American history and seeking what I first saw as political patterns in our national life, and later concluded were economic patterns.

The answers, in our time, strike at the nature of money, the nature of man, and why, even after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, there remain people like John Stossel who continue to deny the reality of man-made climate change. 

Wealth, it turns out, is entirely man-made. This is more controversial than it seems. Politicians have always believed wealth to be a product of holding land, or of exploiting it. They see history as great men moving lesser men around like pawns on a chessboard. Social historians, by contrast, focus on the real lives of ordinary people. These are important, but they are no more relevant to economic history than land is.