Dana Blankenhorn

What Follows Evil Done in Our Name

What makes America exceptional isn’t that we don’t do evil.

Anyone who has gone through more than high school history knows that the United States is, at its heart, a European empire given a veneer of idealism we have yet to live up to.

America’s governments have endorsed slavery, committed genocide, taken power by force (starting in Hawaii), and overthrown any government of color we didn’t like. You may tell your kids whatever lies you like. Kids elsewhere aren’t fooled.  If anything, the evil done in our name has only gotten worse in my lifetime. Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq are just the highlights.

What’s most interesting is that other societies can call this history what it is, history. When Trump threatened to destroy 52 Iranian cultural monuments, “one for every hostage,” he was talking about something that happened 40 years ago. The median age in Iran is 31. I talked with a Vietnamese math genius last year, age 28, and asked him about The War. His parents had no memory of it. It was from his grandfather’s time.

We’re stuck in a memory hole. The developing world is not.

The year 2020 is a turning point because the gating factor to growth today is human capital. Trained, agile, active, ambitious minds are where the money is at today, not oil.

America has dominated the economy of this century, so far, because we imported such minds. We also offered the greatest support to them, in terms of education, capital, and market opportunity. Trump has tossed things into the fire with everything else. An economic and demographic cliff yawn before us and his supporters don’t even see it.

Netiquette: The Issue for 2020

I covered the biggest issue of 2020 back in 1988.

I covered it in two ways.

On the one hand I covered the Electronic Networking Association for Newsbytes.

The ENA featured such cutting-edge minds as Mike Godwin and Joichi Ito. They met online, using software called PARTIcipate. They were communicating across nations and time zones. It was exciting.

They didn’t want to spoil it. They developed rules known as Netiquette to define proper behavior.

Netiquette can be summarized thusly: be nice. Assume goodwill. Be polite. Accept disagreement as legitimate. Don’t lie to make a point. Remain inquisitive and friendly. Understand that the person reading what you “say” can’t read your body language. Account for that.

Truth

Since finishing my book on Moore’s Law (for delivery on the Amazon Kindle after Thanksgiving), I’ve begun a new project.

It’s called 1933. (This is not it. It's a history by Philip Metcalfe I've been using in my research.)

It’s an alternate history novel. It’s based on the idea that FDR, and the people around him, understood the threat of Hitler from the start and acted against it.

That era had a lot in common with our own. Manufacturing was acting on the economy as Moore’s Law is acting on ours. Efficiency created more supply than bankers could create demand for. A few wealthy men presided over a society of millions of fearful people who couldn’t keep up with the pace of change.

The most charitable thing I can say about Donald Trump is that he wants to make Warren G. Harding great again. His policies are identical. Fealty to Wall Street, corruption, laziness, isolationism. He even uses the phrase Harding used to describe this – America First. Democrats, by contrast, have a Harry Truman view. They have learned from the Hitler era, and the long Cold War following it, about concepts like collective security. From 1947-1990, we used all our strengths, overt and covert military action, but also the “soft power” of diplomacy, our economy, technology, and liberty, to take down the Russians. Moore’s Law, and everything that came with it, began as a Cold War activity.

Now Trump’s throwing all of that on the fire.

It’s almost impossible to conceive a world where World War II did not happen. But it began quite suddenly. Hitler gained power as Chancellor in late 1932. By the middle of 1933 democracy had been dismantled, Jews were being brutalized, the first concentration camps were being built. Hitler, and his henchmen, were completely transparent about their aims. They accomplished those aims, and this led Germany down the road toward its complete destruction.

Fall of the Moolahs

A political tsunami is most likely when Wall Street gets out of step with the economy.

While it’s not yet showing up in the statistics, the U.S. economy is already in recession.

If you import or export, your business is down. If you’re a retailer, your business may be gone. If you’re a farmer, only the government is holding you up. If you’re a manufacturer and you’re not named Boeing, you’re struggling. If you’re in transportation you’re hurting. If you’re in the oilpatch, you’re dying.

The reason this isn’t apparent can be seen in the latest headlines from Maersk, the Danish shipping company. Their sales are down, but so are their costs, so their profits are up, and so is their stock. 

How can profits be rising, and thus stock values, if we’re in a recession?

Apotheosis of Nationalism

An apotheosis is the glorification of something to a divine level, the treatment of a human or institution as a god.

It’s a climax state. As with a swamp that has become a forest due to the steady deposit of leaves, it’s unstable. It’s the last step before a fall. Anyone and anything can become Icarus. Our doom is sealed when we get too close to the Sun.

Nationalism was born in the 18^th century. Ours was the first new nation. Nationalism has dominated political organization since the 19^th century, because it delivered leaders beyond those of royal blood. The reign of Louis XVI, then, was an apotheosis for the imperial model. The tumbrel began the end for the divine right of kings.

We’re now at the apotheosis of the nation state. Everyone is now part of a nation state. We can’t conceive of any other structure. Nation states, their leaders, and their philosophies send their people off to war for the glorification of “the people.” It’s a continuing competition for resources, both human and physical. Nationalism is the ultimate zero-sum game. For my nation to prosper, other nations and people must suffer.

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.

Trump is Not Unusual

Lost in The Eternal Now, reporters make One Big Mistake in writing about Donald Trump.

They call him unique.

There is nothing unique about Donald Trump. Yes, he is attempting to overthrow gains the American people won from tyranny over the course of 100 years.

But all those fights were against other Americans, and American governments. We have been here before. We have always been here.

Let’s not even talk about slavery or the Indian genocide. Let’s not even play Ragtime, the book, movie or musical where a black man is put down while a white immigrant rises.

Let’s start with that great liberal hero. Woodrow Wilson.

The Twilight of Nationalism

If mankind still exists in 2119 their historians will write about this era as the Twilight of Nationalism.

Nationalism was essential when economies were based on resources, machines or muscle. In the era of clouds and devices it’s increasingly irrelevant. The global nature of our existential crisis makes nationalism an outright impediment to the survival of mankind.

Thus, it’s no coincidence that nationalism has been a rising force in the decade now ending. Just as it concentrates the mind to know you’re to be executed in the morning, so it is for leaders and political movements. Seeing sunset in the distance you do what you can and ignore the consequences you know are coming.

The Trump election acts as a midpoint and permission slip for all this. Nationalism was already on the march, in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Asia, through the agency of Russia, when Trump came to office. But Trump has given nationalistic impulses around the world permission to act. There is no American opposition to ultra-nationalism anywhere, no alliance worth protecting, no counter example to follow.

Thus, nations push their boundaries outward, fearing any force that might threaten their power, and ignoring the natural internationalism essential to economic growth and climate action.

That’s why Brazil is going after its rain forest. That’s why India is going after Kashmir. It is why China is going after Hong Kong. That’s why England wants to detach from Europe, why Eretz Israel is a thing, why Saudi Arabia seeks dominion over its whole peninsula. If you can afford it, nationalists think, seize the day. The window is closing.

One Nation. At War. With Itself

In August of 2019, the United States is a nation at war with itself.

We are at war with fundamental changes that must occur if the country, and the world, are to be saved from the Industrial Revolution.

We’re also at war with the essentials of economic growth in our time.

As I have written many times, the gating factor in technology is human capital. Trained, eager, free minds, willing to think the previously unthinkable, to model it and make it reality. This is where money is made today.

The more such people you have, the fewer of the other kind, the more money you make. The more freedom these people have, the greater their access to money, to new ideas, and to one another, the more your society prospers. This is Israel’s secret sauce.

Resources don’t matter. Machines don’t matter. Muscle doesn’t matter. Minds matter, more than anything.

The 2020 Game

The Tell on what will happen in 2020 came in late July of 2019.

Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, attorney general William Barr and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin (far right), issued existential threats against the Cloud Czars. Under Trump’s orders.

The Cloud Czars, for those unfamiliar with my current work at InvestorPlace, are Microsoft, Amazon.Com, Google, Apple and Facebook. As technology has come to dominate the economy, the Czars have come to dominate technology.

They’re the Cloud Czars because the tool which dominates technology is cloud computing. It combines parallel processing with virtual operating systems and open source techniques to hold down costs.