Dana Blankenhorn

Facebook is Not Immoral

Facebook is amoral.

There’s a difference. The New Yorker knows this.  But, like Mark Zuckerberg, Conde Nast doesn’t care.

An immoral actor deliberately does things they know are wrong.

An amoral actor does things without regard to whether they’re wrong or not.

Facebook can’t afford to be moral. No tech company can. Creative destruction happens so fast I barely have time to call a company “clueless” before it faces the consequences. (Hello, Zillow.)

Corporate graveyards are littered with the molding corpses of companies that tried to defy this axiom. I have been watching tech for four decades now. It’s beyond obvious.

Obama vs. Trump is Google vs. Facebook

There’s a false assumption in the land. Democrats are doomed in 2022.

For evidence, there’s the fact that parties in power lose in off-years. That’s been true 4 times in a row. But in 2002 Bush filled people with patriotic fervor. In 1998 Clinton filled them with anger over his impeachment. The real lesson is that political upsets happen when people are motivated. In or out doesn’t matter.

Republicans are in power in most states. Impunity is getting people angry. And when government is doing what you want, you’re as likely to relax Election Day as to crawl over crushed glass to vote.

The 2022 election will be a battle between Google and Facebook.

Barack Obama won because of Google. After holding a highly-publicized meetup with employees in 2007, the Obama campaign was created in Google’s image. It built giant voter databases, donor databases, volunteer databases. Based on those databases, it activated people through email to call on neighbors. It scaled the intimacy of the 2004 Dean campaign, which ran a popular blog but refused to build the database. It worked.

Donald Trump won because of Facebook. His team hacked the system. They used Facebook’s algorithm to gin up anger, to turn the social medium to their side. Anyone who clicked on a pro-Trump story was run down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. They became immune to anything outside the conspiracy. It worked.

Trump ran an identical campaign in 2020. It didn’t work. In 2020 he was the incumbent. In 2020, America was going to hell in a hand cart. Reality triumphed over conspiracy.

Stacey Abrams, who lost Georgia narrowly in 2018 to a Trump-like opponent, drove much of what happened last year. Hers was an inside-outside effort. Inside, her FairFightAction learned how the rules worked and fought to keep them as they were. Outside her databases identified Democrats and activated them.

Bottom Rail on Top

It’s a fight as old as the century. (There's a signed copy available at Amazon.Com.) 

Cable operator doesn’t want to pay too much for programming, lest they be forced to raise prices and lose customers. They play hardball with the cable programmer, who tells cable viewers they’re about to “lose access to your treasured programming” should a deal not be made.

Sometimes a deal is not made. Sinclair Broadcasting, now running the regional sports networks it bought from Fox and renamed Bally’s, has lost a lot of these deals. If I want to watch Atlanta United home games, I either take MARTA to the stadium or go to a bar.

It happens a lot with sports. That’s because sports programmers overpay for their rights, then jack up the price they’re charging operators (thus you). If MSG, which has rights to New York teams, can’t get a new deal from Comcast by September 30, for instance, you may miss the New York Red Bulls’ playoff push.  (It’s going nowhere, by the way.)

So, you have the big, bad cable operator against the poor, beleaguered programmer. Comcast is a meanie, you say.

But what if it were Comcast that was doing the begging? That’s happening right now.

Comcast has owned NBC Universal for a decade. It bought the asset from GE. (This was covered extensively on the documentary series 30 Rock.) It’s a sweet deal. Programmer NBC negotiates with operator Comcast for the best possible deal, then Comcast moves money from one pocket to the other.

Eternal White Majority

When my Irish ancestors came to America, this is how they were portrayed.

The whole point of the Scorsese movie Gangs of New York was to illustrate the contempt with which the Anglo-American majority treated Irish immigrants. They saw them as black.

The same thing happened later, with the Italians. Then with the Russians. But today you wouldn’t see Bruce Springsteen or Jerry Seinfeld portrayed as anything but white. Like Alec Baldwin. Like me.

When people write that America will soon be “majority non-white” this is what they’re ignoring. People can easily be made “white” when it’s convenient. By being made “white,” these same people can then look down upon other people, darker people.

Who is Xi Jinping?

What kind of man is Xi Jinping? It’s the most important question in the world right now.  

Cold warriors want you to believe that Xi is the reincarnation of Josef Stalin, an absolute dictator bent on world domination. A lot of big investors believe this. That’s why the values of the biggest Chinese companies, the ones I call “Cloud Emperors,” have been cut in half this year.

But China’s policies toward tech aren’t extreme, not by the standards of American liberalism. Let small suppliers choose their markets? Enforce antitrust laws against predatory acquisitions? Raise taxes, so prosperity flows from the middle class out instead of from the top down? Why, yes.

It’s true Bernie Sanders would never give the state a monopoly on personal data. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t dare limit children to an hour of screen time a day. China’s “Great Firewall” runs both ways. Western data can’t get in, and Chinese can’t get their data out. This includes financial data, as the Bitcoin ban makes it harder for capital to flee.

But Xi’s got bigger problems than anyone here imagines.

Despite being the biggest producer of solar panels and electric cars, China is still like the Cuyahoga River in Randy Newman’s song Burn On.  The Evergrande Crisis, $300 billion in unpayable debt that must be wound down, is like the 2008 crisis that nearly took down the U.S. economy.

Young workers are revolting against a work culture called “996” – working 9 to 9 6 days a week. Those are the people whose support Xi is coveting. The people who grew up under a rising tide of prosperity since 1978 are no longer willing to pay the price  while the economic elites have everything all to themselves. If Xi stood in an honest election, I think he’d win.

It’s 1969 All Over Again

One advantage to aging is you get to see patterns in the history before you.

1968, for instance. It was a terrible year. I was there. There were riots, and assassinations, and a whole lot of young men who’d been drafted died in Vietnam. Then came the crisis election and we got Nixon.

Beginning in 1968, politics turned slowly to the right and continued to march that way until the vast majority of those alive in 1968 were dead.

Then came 2020. It was a terrible year. I was there. There were demonstrations, and environmental destruction. A whole lot of people died of COVID. Then came a crisis election and we got Biden.

The Decade of Immersive Technology

Back in 2019, while at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, I wrote about three key trends that would define the 2020s.

They were the end of oil, the Machine Internet, and DNA as a programming language .

Since then, there has been progress in all three areas. The pandemic, and resulting parts shortages, have delayed but won’t prevent the end of oil. You can see the Machine Internet in all the hype over 5G. The Moderna vaccine is indeed using DNA as a programming language.

Turns out there’s a 4^th trend, and there may be more.

Bin Laden Won

Twenty years ago, the fall of the American Empire began with the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Osama Bin Laden gambled that Americans would overreact, be driven crazy by the attack. He was right.

As a direct result America began a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan that cost over $2 trillion. As a direct result we invaded and overran Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack.

Even after most Americans recognized the overreaction, electing Barack Obama in 2008, half the country remained consumed by fear. It was easy for the resource billionaires funding the Republican Party to transfer that hate onto Obama, then onto his party, then onto its individual members, just as 60 years earlier fear of Communism morphed into McCarthyism.

Thus came Trump. Thus came Trumpism.

Thanks to Trumpism’s excesses, almost half of us remain so tied to hate that we’d rather than die than take a vaccine. Most Americans, even most Texans, are against snitching on neighbors who miscarry. Most of us even believe in democracy. But enough of us stand against progress, and enough of those people are powerful, that as I write this the future of the American experiment remains uncertain.

Thanks to 9/11 and thanks to Trump, America no longer has any moral authority. China can get away with Xinjiang, and with seizing Hong Kong, because we look no better to the rest of the world.

Thanks to Trumpism, authoritarians are on the march and democracy is in retreat around the world. Putin can interfere in our elections, can use trolls to spin lies that tear at the heart of our system and prosperity. But we do nothing in response. Dictators simply close off the Internet from the outside, impose their own censorship on their people, and force feed propaganda to them. There’s an economic cost to all this. America’s technology dominates the world to an even greater degree in 2021 than in 2001. But that doesn’t matter.

Open Source is Business

Open source was born at a time of high tech unemployment.

In the wake of the dot-com bubble bursting, early this century, the ideas found in Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar found salience. The more eyes you could get on the code, the higher you could build the stack. This created competition for proprietary software. Anyone could build off the common framework.

Open source built the cloud, and the 5 Cloud Czars came to dominate it. They all use open source, but in a proprietary way. They support only the projects they’re using or those they’re seeking access to. In the 2010s developers all found jobs, often at 6-figure salaries, often dripping with stock options and grants. The idea of sharing with others went out of fashion.

Open core was one way to get around the open source idea. The center of the stack was shared, but everything the sponsor built above it was theirs. While small companies that did this ran into criticism, the fact is that if a stack has a commercial sponsor, the software is open core. The sponsor is building proprietary tools on an open source stack and calling it support.

Today, most contributions to open source have financial motives. Companies are trying to get access to the full stack, connecting their own stuff to the stack, and the core of the stack is enhanced mainly by its commercial sponsors. Programmer time is expensive. No one works for free. Young programmers may start their careers contributing to an open source program, but they’re quickly snapped up and go to work making money.

Thus the decision by LiveCode to “abandon” open source, putting their old code in an archive and building proprietary above it, drew headlines but it’s not really a story.

Because everyone is doing it.

A Simple Plan for Saving College Football

It’s Labor Day. Put down the tech, put down the markets, put down the politics and the media.

Let’s talk sport.

Specifically let’s talk about a game that’s dying before our eyes. College football.

Football is dying because of its cost. You need over 100 players, 10 coaches, training facilities. It’s impossible, except for the small number of teams that can fill huge stadiums and get on TV every week.

As with so many things today, there’s a simple solution to the problem. It starts by admitting that colleges don’t compete with professionals. The job of a college isn’t to build NFL rosters. It’s not to be a free minor league.

It’s not the job of a college to train anyone for an athletic career. Most sports recognize this. The best soccer players leave the academic environment in high school. The best basketball players are also being directed, increasingly, toward professional training.