Dana Blankenhorn

The Jim Crow Project

In my studies of history here over the last decade I have learned that every crisis is based on the unfinished business of previous crises.

We are taught in school how the Civil War was made inevitable by the compromises of the Constitution. But the Civil War is still being fought. It can still be lost.

Right now, it is being lost.

Jim Crow replaced slavery as the guiding rule of the South after northern troops left in 1877. The chain gang kept black men from building lives for their families. Poll taxes and tests kept them from voting. The KKK killed anyone who disagreed with the new order from raising their voice, on pain of death. Segregation kept the races from achieving any understanding, other than that of master and servant.

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.

Why Tech Moves Us Left

Technology creates value and productivity.

It does this at an extraordinary, even accelerating rate.

The problem is neither economics nor our politics is equipped to handle abundance.

When the basics are easily afforded, most of us go on to luxuries. This should be true for societies as well as individuals. But it’s not.

The problem is that the business models for societal luxuries can’t be created without government. Government is the only force that represents shared endeavor. And ideology has declared government involvement in the economy anathema.

Sport and the New Political Divide

The political divide today is less the traditional left-right than nationalist-internationalist.

This was brewing before Trump. But it has become the new normal. It’s a fault line people are still willing to cross, because it’s new. We love our nation, but can we love another without betraying it?

My point today is that this fault line has appeared in every area of our lives. Not just in politics, but in economics. It has appeared in music and art. And it has appeared in sport.

I have described how it works in sports here in Atlanta, where the Atlanta United “football” team has taken intown’s love from the Atlanta Braves. They moved to Trumpistan, specifically suburban Cobb County, with its long history of racism aimed at the central city. The bridge on I-75 over the Chattahoochee to Cobb County is still named for Lester Maddox, for gosh sakes.

Stupid Starts to Bite in Qatar

When people in business figure out the guy across the table from them is an idiot, they don’t take pity on him. They take him for all he’s worth.

America is led by a very stupid man, and the world has recognized this.

A good example was on the Idiot’s trip to Saudi Arabia, where he apparently agreed to isolate Qatar.

To the Saud royal family, which let’s not forget is the closest thing the world today has, to the 18^th century Bourbons, Qatar is like Voltaire, a pain in the ass. Qatar is the leading edge of the Muslim World’s efforts to engage the Western World.

Think of Qatar as 15^th century Florence, and the Qataris as the Medici. 

The 28th Amendment

Of the 17 amendments to the U.S. Constitution approved since the Bill of Rights, almost half have had to do with voting rights.

It’s time for another one.

The present political situation is based on a concerted Republican campaign, since 2009, to deny people the right to vote, and to make sure that the voices of its political opponents is never heard. The result is a government that believes it can act with impunity, that it can ignore the will of the majority, that it has succeeded in making democracy a dead letter.

Some of the weapons in this war have been around since the nation’s founding. Others were developed over time, in the South, for racist purposes, and have now been moved north for political ones.

The Next Recession

What recessions all have in common is that they’re unexpected.

The only people you’ll hear yelling “get out” beforehand are a few cranks, and the usual rascals who think they can profit from the panic.

Why have I suddenly become one of the cranks? Because I know bad economic policy leads to bad results, and Trump economic policies are stupid. But there are other signs.

I went for a bike ride over the weekend, and the most amazing thing happened. I was nearly run over. Several times. (Not by one of Thomas Friedman’s Third World cabbies, either.) One idiot screamed “sidewalk” at me as he blew past, 20 miles over the speed limit. While it was nice to be thought 25 again – I felt the same disregard on my bike when Houston’s oil boom was peaking – disregard is a symptom of a larger economic problem.

Greed.

That 1999 Feeling

I was awakened recently with a feeling I have only had a few times in my life, most recently in 1999.

It’s the feeling of a major market top, of the deep breath before the plunge.

I spent most of 1999 screaming about it through my newsletter, a-clue.com. When the top came, the purchase of Time Warner by AOL showing the highest possible valuation for Internet assets, I knew the top had been reached and the Internet boom was over.

This did not save me. I lost all my work, just like everyone around me. In 2002 and 2003 I made zero dollars. My investments plummeted along with everyone else’s. It took years for me to get back to even.

After the fall, it took me a long time, and a lot of reporting, to find an investment thesis that would work, and that would get me on the path of positive economic change. But clouds, and devices, have been that path.

What’s been growing this decade are those companies that can justify the capital expense of cloud through cash flow earned somewhere else. Amazon does this with commerce, Apple does it with phones, Google does it with search, Microsoft does it with software, and Facebook does it with social. In China, Alibaba does it by making markets between producers and consumers, Baidu does it with search and Tencent does it with chat.

These are the market’s winners. Everyone else is a loser. Retail is a loser, oil is a loser, resources and manufacturers are losers no matter what Trump may do, transportation is a loser, and any kind of service that can be turned into an app is a loser. Ultimately, even Tesla is a loser. All the great tech names of the past – HP, IBM, the phone companies, they’re all going away, or have gone away. They’re dust in the wind. Computers scale in ways people do not. You are either there or you’re nowhere.

Blockchain!

Recently I was asked by my latest big client to start a new column. As always, not much money in it, but lots of good learning ahead.

It is a tech column. Specifically, it’s about financial technology, or fintech.

Square is fintech and Apple Pay is fintech. But they’re all fintech of a type we have had now for two generations, ever since the Los Angeles Chargers derived their name from a credit card, Carte Blanche. They’re taking existing payment networks and putting them inside cell phones, or providing access through the phones.  

They’re not that exciting.

You know what is exciting? Blockchain is exciting. Over the next 10 years blockchain is going to kill more jobs than the self-driving car. (Don Tapscott, to the right, was an early blockchain advocate. Follow him on Twitter.) 

At its heart, a blockchain is very simple. Think of a database. Now imagine that each entry in that database is encrypted. Now imagine that the entries are connected, just like entries in a database are often connected, but in the form of a general ledger.

Now you’ve got a blockchain.

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

One of the most insane things I’ve seen, heard and read over the last few months has been this liberal hand-wringing which assumes Donald Trump has, or is about to, destroy the United States of America.

It’s true that a President can start a nuclear war, which could spread into a general conflagration doing untold damage to people and the environment. But that’s always true, and it’s like Bugs Bunny said about Martin Martian’s death ray, “But all my friends are on da Earth!” The point being no one wants to make that decision, unless they are truly forced to and Donald Trump is, whatever else he might be, still a human being.

Don’t count your Armageddons before they’re hatched.