Dana Blankenhorn

What Follows Evil Done in Our Name

What makes America exceptional isn’t that we don’t do evil.

Anyone who has gone through more than high school history knows that the United States is, at its heart, a European empire given a veneer of idealism we have yet to live up to.

America’s governments have endorsed slavery, committed genocide, taken power by force (starting in Hawaii), and overthrown any government of color we didn’t like. You may tell your kids whatever lies you like. Kids elsewhere aren’t fooled.  If anything, the evil done in our name has only gotten worse in my lifetime. Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq are just the highlights.

What’s most interesting is that other societies can call this history what it is, history. When Trump threatened to destroy 52 Iranian cultural monuments, “one for every hostage,” he was talking about something that happened 40 years ago. The median age in Iran is 31. I talked with a Vietnamese math genius last year, age 28, and asked him about The War. His parents had no memory of it. It was from his grandfather’s time.

We’re stuck in a memory hole. The developing world is not.

The year 2020 is a turning point because the gating factor to growth today is human capital. Trained, agile, active, ambitious minds are where the money is at today, not oil.

America has dominated the economy of this century, so far, because we imported such minds. We also offered the greatest support to them, in terms of education, capital, and market opportunity. Trump has tossed things into the fire with everything else. An economic and demographic cliff yawn before us and his supporters don’t even see it.

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.

2019: Into the Mouths of Wolves

As 2019 draws its last breath it seems the entire world is beset by tyrants, ravening wolves feeding at the souls and bodies of their people. (Cartoon by Michael de Adder, fired in 2019 for telling too much truth in his cartoons. 

Lovers of democracy and of liberty look upon the world map and despair. Everywhere we see retreat, destruction and death. Even in our country, which should be the torchbearer of freedom, the Trump darkness grows ever darker. Every effort, by anyone, to rein him in is met with ever-greater outrage. The center, despite its best efforts, cannot hold.

I have been banging my brain to find an analogy for this year in American history. It’s the summer of hate, against 1967’s Summer of Love. It’s 1939, the beginning of the war. It’s 1859, the eve of the war.

Of course, it’s none of these things. But 2019 has things in common with all past climax states in our history.

I’ve read a lot of American history this year. Until recently America’s history is an almost nonstop string of white racist provocation. The only kindness we’ve shown has been to our European “brothers,” and then mainly with our own interests at heart. Trump is not as out of bounds as he sounds.

Moore’s Law of Health

One topic in the coming re-write of my Moore’s Law book, now called Moore’s Law Explains it All, involves what I call Moore’s Law of Politics.

Moore’s Second Law, the rising capital cost of chip making, offsets Moore’s Law itself. Moore’s Law of Software, its value increasing with use, offsets Moore’s Law of Content, because most content doesn’t gain in value once you read, hear or see it.

At the same time Moore’s Law of Health, the fact that technology lets us live longer, creates a negative in Moore’s Law of Politics.

Political decision-making is stuck in the past.

I got a reminder of this during my recent trip to Heidelberg. I met a young Vietnamese mathematician. He was about the same age as my own son, 28.

I asked him about the Vietnam War. To him it’s an historical relic, like our Civil War. Even his father wasn’t impacted by it. It’s something from his grandfather’s time.

Truth

Since finishing my book on Moore’s Law (for delivery on the Amazon Kindle after Thanksgiving), I’ve begun a new project.

It’s called 1933. (This is not it. It's a history by Philip Metcalfe I've been using in my research.)

It’s an alternate history novel. It’s based on the idea that FDR, and the people around him, understood the threat of Hitler from the start and acted against it.

That era had a lot in common with our own. Manufacturing was acting on the economy as Moore’s Law is acting on ours. Efficiency created more supply than bankers could create demand for. A few wealthy men presided over a society of millions of fearful people who couldn’t keep up with the pace of change.

The most charitable thing I can say about Donald Trump is that he wants to make Warren G. Harding great again. His policies are identical. Fealty to Wall Street, corruption, laziness, isolationism. He even uses the phrase Harding used to describe this – America First. Democrats, by contrast, have a Harry Truman view. They have learned from the Hitler era, and the long Cold War following it, about concepts like collective security. From 1947-1990, we used all our strengths, overt and covert military action, but also the “soft power” of diplomacy, our economy, technology, and liberty, to take down the Russians. Moore’s Law, and everything that came with it, began as a Cold War activity.

Now Trump’s throwing all of that on the fire.

It’s almost impossible to conceive a world where World War II did not happen. But it began quite suddenly. Hitler gained power as Chancellor in late 1932. By the middle of 1933 democracy had been dismantled, Jews were being brutalized, the first concentration camps were being built. Hitler, and his henchmen, were completely transparent about their aims. They accomplished those aims, and this led Germany down the road toward its complete destruction.

The Death of the Oil Patch

Lost in my commentary on the coming decade was its first chapter, called The End of Oil.

The global economy has become dependent on oil since I was in college. Oil is behind most of our current problems, from global warming to the rise of Putin.

But the fall of oil is made possible by one fact. At the start of this decade I called it crossover. It’s the point where wind energy, and solar energy, become cheaper than energy from fossil fuels.

We made that crossover on schedule, in 2016. Since then, as I predicted, costs for renewables have continued to fall.

This is especially true for the most important form of renewable energy, efficiency. Insulation, LED lights, better furnaces and appliances, and computer controls mean demand for electricity in the U.S. has been stable through this decade. As a result, utilities have embraced electric cars, a technology as old as fossil fuels, but abandoned early in the 20^th century because electrical systems hadn’t scaled but oil infrastructure had.

All this should be good news. But it’s not. It’s a crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since World War II.

Even OPEC now sees demand for its product falling. The International Energy Agency has cut its demand forecasts repeatedly this decade, and now agrees with me.

Apotheosis of Nationalism

An apotheosis is the glorification of something to a divine level, the treatment of a human or institution as a god.

It’s a climax state. As with a swamp that has become a forest due to the steady deposit of leaves, it’s unstable. It’s the last step before a fall. Anyone and anything can become Icarus. Our doom is sealed when we get too close to the Sun.

Nationalism was born in the 18^th century. Ours was the first new nation. Nationalism has dominated political organization since the 19^th century, because it delivered leaders beyond those of royal blood. The reign of Louis XVI, then, was an apotheosis for the imperial model. The tumbrel began the end for the divine right of kings.

We’re now at the apotheosis of the nation state. Everyone is now part of a nation state. We can’t conceive of any other structure. Nation states, their leaders, and their philosophies send their people off to war for the glorification of “the people.” It’s a continuing competition for resources, both human and physical. Nationalism is the ultimate zero-sum game. For my nation to prosper, other nations and people must suffer.

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.

Vint Cerf: The One and Only

Try to summarize an hour in the presence of Vint Cerf in 500 words.

I can’t do it. 

Cerf is the most famous name at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. He accepts that. Wherever he goes he is surrounded by eager young researchers. They come hoping for wisdom but also get lessons in charm, and his full attention. These are important lessons, that if you want to be heard you should listen as well.

Cerf helped design the TCP/IP protocol, 45 years ago.. He is still one of the most vital voices on the Internet and will answer any question asked, at length, and in complete sentences. 

Take autonomous cars. 

A single car is like a peppercorn, he said. A bunch of them are a peppermill, getting in one another’s way. Things get very complex, very fast. 

“Don’t make assumptions about the behavior of systems, especially if they’re large and complex and have many interacting parts,” he said. “There are some airports without controllers. So pilots get on a common channel ad the pilots negotiate with each other. I can imagine self-driving cars taking advantage of these mechanisms to negotiate .”

That’s the way Cerf’s brain works. Every question gets an extended, thoughtful answer, leaving his listeners with much to think about, and wanting more. 

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.”