Dana Blankenhorn

Phone Dependence

Nothing has changed our daily lives, in all my 68 years on this planet, so much as the smartphone.

I learned that the hard way when I lost my phone last weekend.

First came the fear. All my passwords are there. My money is accessible there. I must cancel the service, but I don’t have a phone to do it with.

My wife and I drove home in a panic. She tried calling my carrier as we drove, but the proof of identity I needed to start the process was on my desktop. (Imagine if I didn’t have a desktop.)

Fortunately, we weren’t far from home. (What if we were?) On arrival I closed out the phone service quickly. I even ordered a new phone, coming in 5 days, at nominal cost. That phone will have a SIM card to get me most of my apps, thanks to the cloud.

The Wealth of AI

The battle over who gets what when productivity blossoms has been going on since the Renaissance made learning cheap 500 years ago. It accelerated with the Industrial Revolution, accelerated again with the Computer Age, and again with the Internet. It’s accelerating again.

The wealth of AI is the rocket fuel of Moore’s Law.

The late, great Gordon Moore was an engineer, who saw his theory as a self-limiting phenomenon. In various editions of my book on the subject I have tried to explain how this constant, exponential improvement works outward, from processors, to everything silicon touches.

Like software.

Software is still mostly written by hand. In the 20^th century productivity improved only in line with the tools used to write it. The 21^st century brought Moore’s Law to software. Once software goes online, in a managed cloud, it’s instantly accessible to everyone. All the barriers created over a century to cordon off markets disappear. Some can be rebuilt, but at an enormous cost to efficiency.

Open source is a big part of this new Moore’s Law of Software. The more hands on the code, the faster the code improves. Software communities mean everyone is building, together, on a constantly rising platform. There’s no more reinventing the wheel.

Media is Community

The destruction of the media by social networking was self-inflicted.

It was caused by publishers forgetting what their business is about.

They thought it was about advertising.

Here’s what I was taught in 1978, at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Organize and advocate a place, an industry, or a lifestyle. Sell ads against that audience at a premium price. Demonstrate to businesses how your paper reaches their target. Profit.

It’s this misunderstanding that led journalism astray when the Web was spun, a generation ago. I saw this coming and warned against it as loudly as I could. I argued with my teachers that the Internet would create more jobs for journalists over time.

Things Are About to Happen

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. 

A political campaign can start only after policies are implemented.

In 2023, a lot of things are about to happen that will have profound impacts on how people vote next year.

• Ukraine is coming for Russia. We’ll know a lot more about that by fall.
• Jack Smith is coming for Trump. We’ll know a lot more about that by fall.
• Gun, abortion, and education policies are being implemented by states and we’ll know a whole lot more about their effect by fall.

I haven’t even mentioned the weather, which will show in no uncertain terms just how damaging our reliance on fossil fuels has become. Droughts and hurricanes will wreak terrible havoc on the whole planet this summer, and on Americans too.

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.

China White

When the history of our time is written, 20-30 years from now, it will be clear how China beat the U.S. in the race for the electric car market.

It was China’s industrial policy that done it.

China used policies best described by Joe Studwell in his book “How Asia Works.” It’s what Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan did. Government sets the strategy and tells business what it wants. It creates incentives allowing business to ignore short-term losses and do it. Then it pulls those incentives once the mission is accomplished, consolidating the market in the strongest hands.

Chinese policymakers also knew, from the beginning, that lithium would be to electric cars what the operating system was to PCs, the point of control for everything above. Lithium has become the world’s China White. 

There is only one big winner in the electric car sweepstakes. China’s CATL dominates the battery space and is almost entirely home grown. Founder Robin Zeng is now richer than Alibaba’s Jack Ma, thanks to assuring ample supplies of lithium from his home country, but also Indonesia and the Congo. 

The Lesson of Buzzfeed

I have been out of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism for 45 years now, and the chief lesson I was taught there should still apply.

It came in my magazine business course. It was the only one I aced.

The lesson was simple. Know your reader.

Journalism is about organizing and advocating a place, an industry, or a lifestyle. You need to know who your target market is, organize that market, and represent its interests. That’s why newspaper publishers would go to chamber of commerce meetings. It’s why industry magazines organized trade shows. It’s why a publication’s mailing list was its key asset. Its why publishers exist, to sell, and why they stand above even editors on the masthead.

A Minor Announcement

Over the years my blog, and now my Substack, has covered everything from sports to history, from technology to urban planning.

Now, as I enter the last lap of my career, it’s time to focus.

From here forward, my main subject will be the business of technology. Other topics will intrude, they always do in my mind, but I have spent my entire life fascinated by the intersection of these subjects. I’ve learned a lot about them. And that’s what I want to share.

The first point I will make is, don’t get carried away by the AI hype. It’s important, but it’s not a destination. AI isn’t the Web, or the Cloud. It’s software, which can take huge inputs and deliver what appear to be rational outputs. Its key outputs won’t be music, or art, or stories like this one. It will be insights drawn from networks of sensors, on millions of devices, measuring systems as large as cities and hospitals. AI is a productivity tool, like a SaaS database, and its evolution is built on that base.

Beating Jim Crow

What Republicans in the South are trying to do is to reimpose the political and social order that went by the name of Jim Crow.

Between the 1877 withdrawal of federal troops, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the South had a social order based on racism and the misogynistic tenets of the Southern Baptist Church. This required strict separation of the races, and the sexes. Blacks were either exiled to the North or condemned to lives of brutality. It wasn’t slavery. In many ways it was worse.

What sustained Jim Crow was a leaky economic boycott by the North. Atlanta tried to resist it, with economic exhibitions, with education, then with social pressure. (To learn more about the struggle, read anything by or about W.E.B. Dubois (1867-1963).)

The “white” history of this period, from Henry Grady’s New South Speech to the story of Coca-Cola, is much less heroic.  What businesses mainly did was treat the South as a colony. Tobacco and cotton drew a price, but most of the value went elsewhere. What modernity came in, starting in the early 20^th century, was a century-old order of textile manufacture, drawn from New England by cheap labor. The South remained backward.

The status quo was protected by white race riots, by lynching, and by laws like Georgia’s “county unit system,” which prevented liberals from ever winning statewide by requiring candidates to win a majority of its 159 counties. This was defended by poor white farmers, the “wool hat boys”  whose muscle, and guns, maintained segregation.

The North built railway networks, utility systems, then scaled high-margin manufacturing. The South didn’t. That is, until the advent of air conditioning which, combined with the Civil Rights movement, blew the whole thing up.

World War III May Be Unavoidable

There are days when I am glad to be 68 and running out of time here on Earth.

This is one of those days.

A third World War would doom all human life. The only sure way to prevent it is to give up all liberty, to retreat from Taiwan and give up Ukraine, to wait for fascism to roll over us and for every country to have its own dictator. Even that’s not so sure, because the first thing a secure dictator does is go after the neighboring dictator.

That’s the world we’re facing, and it seems there’s nothing that can stop it. Taiwan has been surrounded. Ukraine is unable to get out of its own lines and is being systematically destroyed. 

The war has also come home. Fascists are on the march throughout the American south. In Texas, in Mississippi, in Tennessee, in North Carolina, and in Florida, white nationalists are pushing to see who can push the frontiers of autocracy furthest.  I would like to believe they’re overreaching, that they can be pushed back. But that reduces the national unity we need to face the external threats.