Dana Blankenhorn

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.

Tolerance, Technology, and the American Hitler

Donald J. Trump is the closest thing to Hitler America has yet produced.

He is the crisis. In becoming the primary object and fascination of the world, Trump has revealed both his character and that of everyone supporting him.

He is a racist. He is a fascist. He seeks dominion over the world only to seize its wealth for himself and his friends. His allies use power only as a tool against other religions, or other races, or against strawmen (and women) of their own devising. They beat the chains of their followers into swords.

We know this, now. In the summer of 2019, many believe there’s nothing to be done, that his final victory is inevitable. They see Democrats as feckless and divided. More important they see technology as Trump’s ally.

It’s this last point I come to challenge. While there are features in technology that assist any surveillance state, and the war of all against all, technology as an industry is the greatest boon to human liberty yet created.

The reason, as I’ve written here many times, is that human capital is now the gating factor to economic growth. It’s the human mind’s ability to conceive of new problems, and of ways to solve those problems, that delivers economic growth. Access to capital, and to other minds that might execute on plans, becomes a multiplying factor.

But first comes the idea. First comes the experiment. First comes science, and engineering. Later you need money, and marketing. All these things are maximized where human minds are free, where capital can choose its own home, and where people can choose their own leaders.

Capitalism. Democracy. Liberty. The more of these you have, within an ordered system, the more growth you have. It’s the need for order, for restraint, that has many people confused into thinking China’s rise at America’s expense is inevitable.

The Darkness

The Darkness is always around us.

It searches for us in the dark teatime of the soul. It tries to drag us down into nothingness. Usually we resist it.

Not always.

Wealth and fame are no immunity from the Darkness. Talent doesn’t make you immune. Knowing it, being able to name it, doesn’t mean it won’t come for you. I’m not immune to it.

We don’t know what leads people to choose eternal Darkness. We can’t know. It’s a secret they take to the grave. As with mass shootings, we’re desperate to know, but our souls are private worlds.

We think celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade are special, but they’re just people. We also think America is special. The lesson of our time is that it’s not.

The idea of America has always been built on its denying the Darkness, but Darkness has always been here. It was a snake under the table when the Constitution was being written. It remained there, despite everything, after the Civil War. It remained there after World War I and World War II, spreading its tentacles through the “Banana Republics” of Latin America. The Darkness wasn’t destroyed by the Civil Rights movement.  It just went underground.

While we pretended to have beaten the Darkness, it continued to grow in the American soul, despite the warnings of George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower that trying to police the world or build a military-industrial complex threatened everything we called our light. Now it has come out to play.

Moore’s Third Law

Almost 20 years ago I began the most important work of my career.

My working title was "Moore’s Lore,” stories about Moore’s Law. A "marketing expert" insisted I put my name in the title. 

The original Moore’s Law, described by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore for Electronics magazine in 1965,  estimated that circuit density could increase for 10 years, at the same cost, and indeed by 1975 Intel was shipping chips that had over 64,000 circuits on them. Moore then “formalized” the law, saying he expected density to continue doubling, at the same pace, for as far as he could foresee. 

That’s Moore’s First Law. Moore never mentioned a second law, but it’s there.

Moore’s Second Law is that just as circuit complexity grows exponentially, so does its capital cost. While you can make up this cost by making more chips, it means the chip-making business is consolidating. Today there are only four manufacturers of microprocessors – Samsung, China’s Taiwan Semiconductor, the Middle East’s Global Foundries, and Intel itself.

The implications of Moore’s Second Law, as it continues grinding down, is that chip production becomes a national security issue.

Ever since Moore’s 1965 article came out, cynics have been trying to call a halt to Moore’s Law. As circuit lines get close together their distance can’t be measured, the cynics note. Every increased expense or shortfall in decreasing circuit size is seen to be evidence that the “Law” is “ending.”

The 1978 Game: Our New Political Overlords

At this point in 1978, no one in politics saw oil coming.

I was getting ready to graduate from Northwestern, and would spend the next several months, mostly unemployed, back home in Houston, the capital of oil, before getting the job resulting in the picture to the right. People were becoming accustomed to the strange man in the White House and his scandals. His “Georgia Gang” of cronies was being derided as a political gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

But beneath the surface, economic change was brewing. Oil had been handed political power under Lyndon Johnson and found a ready embrace in the Nixon years thanks to former Governor John Connally, whose decision to switch sides seemed at the time like a small story but would later prove massive.

Oil didn’t want to become a Republican bulwark. They wanted to play both sides against each other. Carter, and his more liberal detractors, forced them into the Republican camp. During the 1978 campaign, and beyond, this would prove decisive.

We’re at a similar historical junction now. Washington is becoming accustomed to a strange man in the White House, and his scandals. His “Wall Street Gang” is being derided as a political gang that can’t shoot straight.

But beneath the surface, change is again brewing.

Why Prejudice Doesn’t Pay

The current economic era is unique.

In the past, economies were driven by human labor, by land and its resources, by financial capital, or by infrastructure.

Technology is different.

Technology doesn’t require land, it can replace resources, and it doesn’t require massive amounts of low-skilled labor. Singapore (right), Hong Kong, Israel and Silicon Valley have none of these things.

What these and other tech centers have, is trained minds in abundance. They can create them. They can attract them. They nurture them. They give them what they need to thrive.

Trump, Too, Shall Pass

Recently my dear heart dragged me to a wedding.

It was for the son of one of her co-workers. The groom was born here, the parents arriving from India a few years before his birth. The bride was born in China but moved here as a toddler and is a U.S. citizen.

The bride and groom grew up together. They met in high school about 15 years ago. They moved among their guests with the grace and comfort of a long-married couple, secure in themselves. Their relationship may have once been controversial, but their joy in each other buried that long-ago. They live in Boston. He is a doctor. She’s a business consultant. They came down to be with his family. Some of her relatives traveled from China to Georgia to be at the celebration, in the shadow of Stone Mountain’s Confederate carving. Some of his traveled all the way from India.

The 1940 Game: Rise of the Demagogues

We are 8 years removed from the last generational crisis, but the underlying issues of that crisis have not yet been dealt with.

Welcome to the 1940 Game: Rise of the Demagogues.

In 1940, the demagogues were organized. Germany, Japan and Italy were on the march. France was overrun and Britain was invaded. This made it easy for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was eligible for a third term, to pivot from being “Doctor New Deal” to “Doctor Win the War,” although there remained Republican isolationists, and even some who questioned the premise of democracy, against whom he fought a propaganda war with help from German refugees and British patriots like Alfred Hitchcock, whose “Foreign Correspondent”  remains a classic of the genre.

The Illegitimate Fears of Trumpistan

I spent this week in Minnesota, preparing my son for the rigors of graduate school.

I met a lot of people.

I met a woman in a hijab at our hotel, working the desk, and another in the halls, preparing to clean rooms.

I met another immigrant in a sandwich shop, working the register. And I met others at gas stations along the way, stocking the shelves.

I heard Mandarin in the street, on the campus of my son’s university. I heard it a lot.

When Trumpistanis talk about refusing entry to immigrants, we hear them cheer The Donald calling Mexicans “rapists” or those with hijabs “terrorists.” The press thinks they want to restrict specific types of immigrants from getting into our country, but when they chant “build the wall,” or curse Khizr Khan, I think they’re saying something else.

They’re not really saying no to specific immigrants over understandable concerns like crime and terrorism. I think they’re saying no to all immigrants, because they see the bright futures of their children being stolen before their eyes.

Final Warning

I have said before that America is a fortunate country.

The so-called United Kingdom is proving that right now.

The Brexit vote is a warning. It shows what can happen if income inequality becomes too large, and leads people to believe in demagogues.

The same trends that caused this catastrophe are alive in our own country. They were alive in the Bernie Sanders campaign, whose British analog is Jeremy Corbyn. They were alive in the Brexit campaign, the American analog being Donald Trump.