Dana Blankenhorn

Netiquette: The Issue for 2020

I covered the biggest issue of 2020 back in 1988.

I covered it in two ways.

On the one hand I covered the Electronic Networking Association for Newsbytes.

The ENA featured such cutting-edge minds as Mike Godwin and Joichi Ito. They met online, using software called PARTIcipate. They were communicating across nations and time zones. It was exciting.

They didn’t want to spoil it. They developed rules known as Netiquette to define proper behavior.

Netiquette can be summarized thusly: be nice. Assume goodwill. Be polite. Accept disagreement as legitimate. Don’t lie to make a point. Remain inquisitive and friendly. Understand that the person reading what you “say” can’t read your body language. Account for that.

My Congressman Has Cancer

John Lewis was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer a few days before 2019 ended.

A decade ago, that would have been a death sentence. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, after a controversial liver transplant in 2009.

But there’s a new way of attacking it, immunotherapy. James Allison and Tasuku Honjo shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine  for their discovery of immunotherapy, turning the body’s own immune system against cancer. Four years after their discovery Jimmy Carter saw his own cancer go into complete remission, thanks to immunotherapy. An old friend, David Coursey, recently reported his own pancreatic cancer is in remission, a year after diagnosis. He looks good, strong, and has all his hair.

In short, there’s hope. But there’s also the reality. John Lewis will die. Just as you will die, and I will die.

Whenever that happens for John Lewis, he will go in peace because he’s a practicing Christian. His life has been a testimony to Christ’s work among us. He has kept going forward, 50 years past Dr. King’s assassination, because of faith that will make his final moments on Earth a celebration, a going home.

Instant Family

Last year a real Hollywood movie was made on our street. 

It came out early this year, and Wikipedia says it grossed $120 million. It found life on Amazon Prime and, when I saw it was available, I gave it a look.

The film stars Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne as childless adults who spent a month being driven up and down the street in black cars on their way to filming. Primary filming was done at 262 Winter. We’re at 215. Our house was never shown.

I remember 262 from back in the day, in the early 1990s, before the neighborhood became gentrified. It was barely a shell when a man named Michael bought it and renovated.

Some history. These houses all look like Craftsman barns, a central beam and a roof that slopes to the sides. My son John calls them “double-barreled shotgun shacks.” The homes on the east side were built around 1908, in the City of Oakhurst. Oakhurst folded in 1915, and the homes were joined to Decatur. Those homes on the west side were built in the early 1920s, when the City of Kirkwood folded and became part of Atlanta. Our house dates from 1923. The developer of the Oakhurst homes was a woman in Kirkwood named Lavinia Winter. Hence the name Winter Avenue.

Martin Hellman Has Concerns

What do you do if you win one of the big prizes in math or computing and are invited to become a Heidelberg Laureate? 

Some go back to their work, like Yoshua Bengio and mentor the next generation. Others become great men who wear their celebrity like a warm coat, like Vint Cerf, who is also in Heidelberg this week.

Then there is Martin Hellman. He won the Turing Award in 2015, along with Whitfield Diffie (who is also in Heidelberg), for public key cryptography, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. 

Public key cryptography became controversial as soon as it  s was announced. The National Security Agency tried to suppress the technology under Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who later saw the problem with weak solutions, said Hellman. Another cryptography war erupted in the 1990s with the “Clipper Chip,” an attempt to give crypto a “backdoor” for cops. Hellman called it  a front door. 

The third cryptography war began only recently, with the FBI putting pressure on Apple and others to get “exceptional access”  to iPhones, and the Trump Administration now trying to ban strong encryption. “It’s in a lull,” Hellman said of the current conflict. “Hopefully it dies.” But attacks are global, with even Australia trying to limit it. “They want to defy gravity to put things in space more cheaply,” he said. Hellman has been arguing this case for decades. 

In the process Hellman has created a second life, as an activist.

Martin Hellman has concerns. He likes freedom, and hates war. He rejects attempts to ban encryption because cops already have plenty of  information on us, like security cameras and license plates that can be automatically read as you drive. “I recognize there are trade offs. The FBI is trying to protect safety. We just  have to point out when they’re wrong.”

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.

Trump is Not Unusual

Lost in The Eternal Now, reporters make One Big Mistake in writing about Donald Trump.

They call him unique.

There is nothing unique about Donald Trump. Yes, he is attempting to overthrow gains the American people won from tyranny over the course of 100 years.

But all those fights were against other Americans, and American governments. We have been here before. We have always been here.

Let’s not even talk about slavery or the Indian genocide. Let’s not even play Ragtime, the book, movie or musical where a black man is put down while a white immigrant rises.

Let’s start with that great liberal hero. Woodrow Wilson.

Loneliness

“They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness. But it’s better than drinking alone.”

-- Billy Joel, Piano Man

My late father-in-law lived long enough, and wound up prosperous enough, to write and publish his own autobiography. He asked me to ghostwrite it. I said he’d do a much better job.

He did.

He called it Never Alone.

My father in law felt blessed to have grown up in a large family, finding a great wife soon after leaving home, to spend a working life in service to the public, then aging gently amidst grown children, grandchildren, and even some great-grands. He was a member in good standing of the “Greatest Generation.”

While that generation’s reticence in talking about themselves, and their trust in governments that didn’t deserve trust (as in Vietnam), caused a rift between their generation and mine, our own values of independence and individuality haven’t worked out as well for us, and our children, as theirs did for them.

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.

Common Carriers

A key to understanding 2019 will be the issue of common carriers.

In just one decade the “Cloud Czars” – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook – have replaced the telecommunications and broadcast industries with a new system, using their infrastructure.

We don’t make overseas calls anymore. We Skype. We don’t watch TV. We stream.

The cloud was built without government subsidy or interference, in a competitive free for all in which the winners invested while the losers did not. The industries replaced by this infrastructure were built as monopolies, under systems of regulation controlled by the Federal Communications Commission and, when necessary, courts.

This made sense, in terms of both capital preservation and technology, at the time.

2019: Crime in the Suites

My adult millennial children are both conservative, but in the nicest possible way.

They have ethics. They expect correct behavior from authority. When they don’t see it, they want it punished, not with a wrist slap, but with jail time.

I agree, and 2019 will mark the start of a process toward getting it. Justice is slow, but it is certain.

If 2018 was the year when crime was stripped naked, with the MeToo movement, the Trump treason, and corporate theft, 2019 will be the first year of retribution.

This becomes certain when you look at the economy. The next year may be the most readily predicted, indeed eagerly anticipated, recession of my lifetime.