Dana Blankenhorn

Living With Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future

This is actually the fourth edition of this book, which I have been writing and rewriting for 20 years now. 

Living With Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future is a collection of essays I have been working toward all my working life. It describes what Moore's Law is, how it developed, and how it extended into every area of computing through the 20th century.

Then it does more. I take the story into the present and explain just what we need to do, as a society, to take advantage of these miracles.

Then it does more. I have written an extra chapter about what comes next, the miracles that await us by harnessing the capabilities created by Moore's Law -- clouds, devices, and wireless networks. 

I consider it must reading for anyone interested in technology, in what it has done for us, what it's doing to us, and how we need to work with it to save the planet. 

Also, it's just $2.99. Free if you get it through Kindle Unlimited, Amazon's $10/month lending library. 

Cheap as chips.

Previous versions were offered as The Blankenhorn Effect in 2002, as Moore's Law: Better and Better, Faster and Faster in 2010, and as Technology's Big Bang: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Moore's Law, in 2019. 

Mugwump

Mugwumps were a now obscure group of 1880s intellectuals who wanted honest government. (They were also a 1960s folk group , but that’s another story.)

Mugwumps started political life as Republicans who supported the civil service reform and regulation policies of James Garfield. They wound up switching sides in 1884, dooming any political ambitions, and supporting Democrat Grover Cleveland. (Theodore Roosevelt, who identified with them, didn’t switch in 1884, preserving his political career.)

The term originated with a man named Dana, in this case New York Sun editor Charles Anderson Dana. It sounds like it could have been coined by Mark Twain, who identified as one. It supposedly derived from an Algonquin term meaning “war leader,” and Mugwumps were derided at the time as political fence-sitters, their “mug” being on one side of the divide and their “wump” being on the other.

Know Your Enemy

My biggest frustration with Lefty Twitter these days is they don’t know what they’re facing.

They think it’s Trump. Or Marjorie Greene. Or the Texas Legislature. Or Fox News.

It’s none of those things. These perceived enemies are merely front-line targets. Take them out and there are others behind them.

The Republican Party isn’t in disarray. It isn’t incoherent. It’s very coherent. I’ve already identified where most of its foot soldiers come from.

But the Great Awakening is just one element in a broader coalition. It’s a coalition familiar to any Latin American, from Mexico to Argentina. It’s a coalition that was Made in the USA and imposed on their home nations by Americans. We’ve been at it for two centuries, ever since John Quincy Adams wrote, and James Monroe endorsed, what became known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Kids are taught that the Monroe Doctrine told Europe to keep its hands off the Americas. It did. But it didn’t say the USA wouldn’t keep its hands off the rest of the Americas. We have been doing it ever since. Nearly every nation in this hemisphere has seen an American invasion, either directly or by proxy. Most have had governments imposed on them, and they’ve all been driven by three basic elements:

• Militarists – These governments have been led by generals. Armies and police can impose whatever order they want, especially if they have a bigger army, like ours, behind them.
• Oligarchs – A few rich men can organize an economy however American sponsors want. It’s about controlling the land on behalf of some activity. The phrase “banana republic” comes from American control over Central American countries on behalf of United Fruit. We have also used oligarchs to control minerals, and oil, even tourism.
• Religion – This is how you control a people. You tell them this is what God wants, and you may not question it. The more extreme the religion, the better it works. You put the other race down, the other sex down, and tell them it's God's will. 

Obligations of Capitalism

Capitalism isn’t a free ride. As described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, wealth carries obligations to the common good.

This isn’t a new concept. The whole story of Buddhism is of a man in mid-life who renounces the pursuit of wealth in favor of spirituality. Even Mohammed was a trader before he was a prophet. The idea is that you spend the first half of your life building wealth, recognize how shallow that is, and spend the back end doing for others.

Against that we have Nietzsche, for whom self-interest was the whole of the law. Against that we have Nietzsche’s acolyte, Ayn Rand, who brought him to America with badly-written novels that were thinly-disguised political screeds telling the poor to fuck off.

Tech’s Democracy Problem

Somewhere in the Caribbean, there’s a 12-year old kid poised to control the fate of a trillion-dollar company.

Google has what’s called a “dual-share” structure. There are GOOG shares, which supposedly convey ownership. Then there are GOOGL shares, which hold most of the voting rights and convey control. This was put in place by co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Through GOOGL they control the company in perpetuity.

This is tech’s democracy problem. The democracy in corporate governance is disappearing.

Alibaba came public in New York first, rather than China, because it had this dual-share structure. You can’t buy Alibaba except through Jack Ma. China had to relent on this before Alibaba would list in Hong Kong. Yes, China’s market was (it isn’t now but it was) more democratic than America’s.

In a democracy it’s one man one vote. In a corporation it should be one share one vote. Increasingly it isn’t. The whole thing became a comedy in the mess around WeWork. Softbank’s Masayoshi Son sent billions to WeWork under the mis-named “cult of the founder.” He structured the deal so that founder Adam Neumann couldn’t be ousted. When it became apparent that Neumann was an idiot or perhaps worse, it cost WeWork billions to get rid of him. The same thing happened at Uber with Travis Kalanick.

This idea that founders should control their companies indefinitely arose in tech during the 1980s. Wall Street was able to oust Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, installing “adult supervision” that nearly wrecked the company, before Jobs was asked to return. Even after that, Jobs’ stake in Apple remained a minor one. His estate left nearly as much value from his Walt Disney shares, from Pixar, as from Apple.

Reckoning With The Great Awakening

If any period in American history deserves re-examination today, it’s The Great Awakening. 

Following a similar movement in 18^th century Britain, America’s Great Awakening came in the first half of the 19^th century. Most of our popular Protestant denominations – Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Mormons – had their heyday then.

But the most historically important group were the Millerites. They initially followed a man named William Miller who claimed to know when the Second Coming of Christ would happen, followed by the end of the world. It didn’t happen. But The Great Disappointment led, in turn, to the creation of 7^th Day Adventists.

A version of Millerism has been alive in America ever since. It was the primary reaction to the 1960s. Evangelical and fundamentalist risings occurred in both Catholic and Protestant churches. This was accompanied by rising political involvement, the “Religious Right” that stood behind Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump.

Liberals who pretend that current events are unprecedented, that mass denial of reality hasn’t happened here, haven’t studied the Great Awakening. That, too, was a rejection against elites. Its political tool was Andrew Jackson, who owned slaves, expelled Indians, treated women like dirt, and destroyed the economy along with the Second Bank of the United States. It’s no coincidence that Trump put Jackson’s picture over his desk. His is the same type of movement.

The Gun War is a Race War

 

This is something not enough people say out loud.

The “Second Amendment” bullshit of the modern GOP was always meant to create a race war.

The plan was simple. Flood the country with guns. When white people use guns, defend them regardless of the circumstances. When black people use guns, attack not just the users of those guns but their political leaders, the places where they live, and any liberal impulse.

In today’s Republican Party whites are always the victim, blacks always the perpetrators. It’s precisely what southern Democrats did after the Civil War. Eventually, northern Republicans anxious to do business relented, ending Reconstruction and damning U.S. Grant before history along the way.

When I moved to Atlanta, historians were still in the thrall of Henry W. Grady, who edited the Atlanta Constitution in the 1880s, soon after Reconstruction ended in northern defeat.

His “New South”  speech basically said, “We still hate n%*## but we’re ready to do bidness.” There’s still a statue to Grady in downtown Atlanta, although his name was recently taken off the high school my daughter graduated from. For his time, Grady was considered a liberal. This is what Republicans now have in store for everyone, if the current "Second Reconstruction" can be beaten back. 

The GOP plan, using the Grady approach, is the same false choice employed by autocrats around the world. Divide and conquer. If you shout loud enough, nuance looks like weakness. If you shout loud enough about victimhood, even genocide can be countenanced.

The Biden response is to get past the virus and get people back to work. The question is whether that will be enough. Election Twitter seems to believe it won’t be. Lefty Twitter is increasingly in agreement. 

But if delivering jobs and prosperity is worthless in the face of a race war, maybe democracy isn’t a good system of government after all. Maybe, in that case, strong man rule is the only possible outcome, hoping that the strong man has smart Mandarins behind him.

If the President is wrong, maybe it’s time all of us learned Chinese.

Bubbles Don’t Really Pop

History will record that the Trump Bubble burst on January 6, with a coup attempt organized by Donald Trump. (The picture is from Doc Searls' blog.)

I have seen many bubbles pop in my experience as a business reporter. The best-known was the dot-com bubble. It popped on January 10, 2000 when Time Warner announced it would “acquire” AOL.

The precise date of the popping is only remembered in retrospect. At the time, business went on. That spring I attended a trade show called ad:tech, on my employer’s dime. Even a year later I was able to take my wife on a trip to Hawaii because of an Internet commerce conference on the Big Island.

My most vivid memory of that ad:tech conference was on a bus, heading back to our hotel after a day spent on the water, sponsored by an Internet ad agency that eventually sank with the rest. A young entrepreneur was complaining that each new round of funding was requiring more equity from him and generating less cash. “It’s unfair,” he whined.

I’m a cruel man. I laughed until I cried. Later, at the event’s award show, a block “CNN” ad won awards for creativity. I laughed until I cried again. The people around me thought I’d gone crazy. It was just that I saw the handwriting on the wall.

The point is that even after a bubble pops, many people will remain unaware of it. They will continue to take the bubble as a real thing. They’ll go in even-deeper. They’ll consider falling prices an opportunity, telling folks to “buy the dip.”

#NeverAgain

If #NeverAgain doesn’t apply to everyone it’s just special pleading.

This statement that nearly got me fired last week, from both my jobs. It’s a stance that, if made to a conservative Israeli in 2021, gets you branded an anti-semite.

Of course, even that term is loaded. Anti-semitism refers to prejudice against any semitic people. Palestinians are semites. So are all Arabs. How Israelis can commit daily outrages against Palestinians and call their critics anti-semite is beyond me. But there it is.

In saying this, I’m not denying the Holocaust or diminishing it. Most of the people I grew up around were children of survivors, or the soldiers who liberated them. But genocide is not the unique property of Jews. Armenians were victims of a genocide years before Hitler, no matter how much Turks reject that even today.

White Americans committed genocide against the native Americans, a fact obvious whenever you look into the eyes of Mexican immigrants. Most are descended from Indians. We killed ours. The Spanish just enslaved theirs.

America’s genocide, meant to create “living room” for European settlers, became Hitler’s model for his eastern war, German “lebensraum.” Another American idea that turned out to be nonsense was “eugenics,” the idea that certain races were genetically superior. (In fact, genetic diversity makes a species stronger.) Hitler adopted that, too.

The Holocaust was born in America.

We still hear echoes of it in Republican rhetoric. They won’t be “replaced?” By whom? Immigrants are as human as Tucker Carlson.

Genocide is more than prejudice. It’s more than oppression, or murder. It’s mass murder, meant to exterminate an entire race of people. Americans are committing genocide as I write this. We make guns into totems and kill 100 Americans each day with them. We ignore science and have lost 550,000 in one year. Why won’t Republicans speak out? Because most of the victims are black or brown or immigrants. Never again? Really?

Class Struggle in the 2020s

In the 2020s there are generally two classes of people. (The Class Sketch was first broadcast in 1966. See the whole sketch here.) 

There are the highly educated with their hands on the code. Then there are the uneducated whose actions are controlled by the code.

The result is that instead of having three economic classes in America we mostly have two. Both sides feel bad about it.

The controlling class, understanding that human potential has value, support all kinds of aid to the controlled. We’re liberals. We’re “woke.” We oppose discrimination because it’s inefficient. We support education because we want more of us. Health care, infrastructure, all the social costs that let us focus on the work we do rather than the rest of life, we’re all for it.

The controlled class sees accepting aid as demeaning and they have they pride. It may be all they have, but it’s a potent political force. Knowing that they lack skills, they’re also deathly afraid of being replaced. They lash out in anger at anyone they think might do this – at minorities, at gays, at smart women. They’re focused on protecting what they have.