Dana Blankenhorn

The Medical Oilpatch

One of the first business stories I covered was the Houston oilpatch, in the late 1970s.

The oilpatch, or the oil exploration industry, has always lived in a boom-and-bust cycle. When I was in my early 20s it boomed, and so did Houston. We were Dubai before Dubai was cool. Then prices busted in 1981 and the city followed.

The oilpatch had another boom early in this decade, with the rise of fracking. The idea is credited to George Mitchell, a man I interviewed while at the Houston Business Journal, and involves shooting water, sand and chemicals down a wellhead to break apart the rock, allowing oil and gas to seep out of the new cracks.

Resurrection

Almost a decade ago, I dedicated a week of this blog to the story of Bruce Springsteen. 

I told the tale of a musician called to public service by the horrible events of 9/11 and recounted how he told America’s story through his music during that decade.

Today I want to tell a different, more private story. It’s a story of redemption and triumph, through the power of love, starting with the bitter acceptance of loving yourself.

It’s the story of Jason Isbell 

When I wrote my Springsteen story, Isbell was a mess. As he admits. In 2009 he was a 31 year-old guitarist and singer for the Drive-By Truckers, a southern rock band in the tradition of Lynyrd Skynyrd based in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, near Huntsville.

Skynyrd, I should note, is not my thing. Neither, at the time, were the Truckers. I had never heard of Isbell.

I first heard of him a year after what he might call his “conversion,” on Mark Maron’s WTF Podcast.  Maron had run out of comics to talk with, he was on something of a roll after a New York Times profile, and the call went out for musicians. DBT lead Patterson Hood took Maron through the Truckers’ story, and it was intriguing, because they weren’t a bunch of ignorant hippie kickers out to recapture rock for God’s own people. Quite the opposite. They were a bunch of serious, middle-aged musicians, second generation rockers really, and family men. Such is the duality of the southern thing, as Hood wrote. 

Isbell was the “genius boy” always hanging around the studio, who they brought into the group to liven things up. Which he did. He also partied. Hard. Drink and drugs and wild, wild women. The whole lifestyle. The boy was too much for the good men of the Truckers, and despite their financial success with him, including the title track to 2003’s Decoration Day he was out.

The firing was where our story begins.

Time for Tech to Choose

Technology companies will dominate the politics of my children’s generation.

It’s inevitable. The politics of oil and resources dominated my time because the key political issues of that time revolved around resources and access to them. That’s what the Arab oil embargo was all about in 1973. It’s what the Iranian embargo was about in 1979. It’s why we went to war in 1990. That’s why we invaded Iraq. It was oil. Anyone who denies this is like those who deny the Holocaust, or who claim slavery to have been good for black people. They’re lying and should not be heard again on any subject.

In the same way, the politics of manufacturing dominated the lives of my parents. That’s what the Great Depression was about, what World War II was about, what the development of the military-industrial complex was about. It was about creating new markets for the abundance of factories. That’s what the suburbanization of America was about. It was about ginning up demand. Mass consumption leads to mass production.

The point is every American generation has a dominant industry, one whose problems and demands come to control American politics. It will be the same with technology. I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

I do, that is, assuming they make the right choices now, assuming they understand where their own self-interest lies, and assuming they take steps to defend it.

How Google Must Take Responsibility

If I could blame any single company for the mess America finds itself in today it would be Google.

Don’t be evil? All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. When you gain great power, you also gain grave responsibility. You can be evil by doing nothing, just as the people who watched Kitty Genovese be murdered in 1964 became evil by doing nothing. Just as the good Germans who watched Hitler’s rise and did nothing became evil by doing nothing, or the southerners who stood by while generations were lynched became evil by doing nothing. It’s a stain that does not wash out.

In this case, evil is at the heart of Google’s business model, and that of Internet advertising generally, which has become divorced from the content it sits beside.

This is something I’ve covered before, but briefly Google eliminated the advantage publishers previously got from aggregating audiences.

On Merit

What tripped up the technology industry in 2016, more than anything else, was the question of merit.

Technology is a meritocracy. We want the brightest, most engaged, most passionate minds we can get, and we don’t care where they come from, what sex or race they are, or who they love.

But for those who fail the meritocracy test, and it’s assumed that will be most people, tech today has nothing for you. This, is why technology lost the election. People who work with their hands, people who don’t go to prestige colleges, feel locked-out of the game, except as drudges. They took their revenge in November.

The problem is made worse by the behavior of the elite institutions. Increasingly top colleges are taking students from overseas. They’re taking the elite from China, charging them full freight, and they know the kids can do the work.

Put those two things together and you get Trumpistan’s nightmare. Their kids can’t get into the game, and all the money from that game is funneling into fewer-and-fewer hands. The assumption is that technology, which cut out middlemen, then salesmen and retail clerks, is now coming for anyone who drives. What are their kids going to do?

It’s enough to make you a Luddite.

Biology is The Next Wave

The next few years will see technology, the industrial wave of the present, fighting to take back power (permanently) from the resource industries which seized it in 2016.

Technology will succeed. The future can’t be put back into the bottle. If it can’t succeed here, it will go elsewhere, leaving America to become just another Latin American dictatorship.

But there’s another wave following technology. Just as technology followed resources, resources followed manufacturing, and manufacturing followed utilities, railroads, and agriculture to the center of the U.S. economy, and thus its politics, so biology is following technology.

The Political Power of Human Capital

In the 21^st century there is no capital so important as human capital.

High-quality human capital consists of people who are educated, educable, and who are excited about what they are doing. They’re golden threads in the haystack of humanity. Put them together with a supportive environment and you get growth.

Since computing was invented the United States has been the leader in human capital. We attract it, we train it, and we deploy it better than anyone else.

Increase the percentage of high-quality human capital you have, in relation to the other kind, and your society can grow very quickly. Think Singapore or Hong Kong. Think Israel or great cities like London. If your cities or nation is a magnet for human capital, what Richard Florida called “the creative class,” wealth will be yours.

The Google Content Fund

It’s ironic that a company founded in Atlanta wound up breaking journalism.

Doubleclick was launched in early 1995, in Atlanta, but moved to New York shortly thereafter. It was bought by Google a decade later.

Doubleclick sold ads based on intrinsic targeting. The system used cookies to learn things about you, then buyers took out ads aimed directly at what you were doing. This led to things like a mother being offered cookie recipes at a gun site, or a gun owner being shown a magnum when he’s looking into champagne vacations.

These kinds of ads are intrusive. They invite blocking. They’re irrelevant to where your head is right now and their performance is thus very, very poor. But this doesn’t matter to an advertiser who can buy 100 such ads for what a specific web site on, say, guns might ask for a single impression. They get it back on volume.

Educating Trumpistan

On most issues the politicians representing TechLand are right and those of Trumpistan are simply wrong.

It’s not that Trumpistan lacks answers. The trouble is they don’t know the questions. Trumpistanis believe a politics of nativism, populism, and militarism can save them from the forces of change battering down their suburban splendor. They can’t, because politics had nothing to do with it. What is happening is that the same technological forces that built those suburbs now demand new economic structures, built around software and research, and the need for trained minds to be in constant contact, 24-7 rather than 9-5.

Bankers and insurance agents, the middlemen who held the country together through the 20^th century, are no longer needed in the 21^st. They’re like John Henry, the steel-driving man. They’re coal miners, they’re auto workers, they’re ditch diggers, they are in the way, and they are being replaced by machines.

Life After Trump

Donald Trump is not going to become President.

America has not surrendered to tyrants, or would-be tyrants, for 225 years. We are not about to start now. There aren’t enough angry white men in the world to elect him.

The question is what happens to the anger that he generated? We have several examples of that in American history, and none should leave you sanguine.

The most peaceful outcome was what happened in the last turn of the cycle, from manufacturing to oil. War in the 1970s became our chief economic export, but it was at least kept far away. The domestic objections, the anti-war crowd, generally left politics after 1972, gradually accepting their role in opposition, suffering the “hippie punching” that distinguished our politics right until the next crisis, in 2008.

World War II followed the 1932 crisis, beginning first in China, then erupting in Spain, before engulfing the world. World War I came in the wake of the 1896 crisis, preceded by a decade of American imperialism, while Filipinos died, Columbians saw their country broken, and Theodore Roosevelt became the first great avatar of American imperialism.

Also, the Civil War, which began right after the 1860 election.