Dana Blankenhorn

Peak Carter, Peak Trump

One thing that has surprised me over the last two years is how almost no one understood my point right after the 2016 election, that Donald Trump is a sort of Bizarro Carter. 

By that I meant he is completely the opposite of Jimmy Carter. Carter was a Democrat. Trump is an Autocrat. Carter believed in human rights. Trump believes in the divine right of kings. Carter championed the environment. Trump trashes it. Carter said he’d never lie to us. Trump lies 6 times before breakfast.

What they have in common is they represent the end times for the Political Thesis that birthed them. Carter was elected 44 years after Franklin Roosevelt and was the last President to run on those principles. Trump came 48 years after Nixon and will be the last President elected under the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. 

That 1999 Feeling

For most of the last two years I have felt much as I did in the late 1990s.

Soon after launching a-clue.com, my e-commerce newsletter, in 1997, I began warning of dark days ahead. True, the Internet was cool. Yes, e-commerce was great. But when companies barely have sales, let alone profit, and there are many companies trying to get through the same door, all acting like they’ve gotten through it, and people are still throwing money at all of them, I say nay.

Here’s a life confession. I’m early to any party. I became an avid bike rider in the 1970s. I was arguing with my teachers about what the Internet might mean to the journalism business in 1977. My dear wife was commuting to an office by bike, in sneakers, in 1980, and by train, in Atlanta, starting in 1983. I began telecommuting the same year and became a professional Internet reporter in 1985. I began covering Internet commerce full-time in 1994.

But in 1999 my “spidey sense” was tingling, big time. People were throwing too much at the space, too fast.

When AOL swallowed Time Warner on January 10, 2000, getting 60% of the deal, I knew the jig was up and said so. But I didn’t shift my money away from the space.

As a result, I was as burned as anyone else. In 2002 and 2003 my total income was zero dollars. But I was younger then. I stuck to my guns, found other beats, and today I’m richer than I ever imagined being.

The Daily News

A lot of people are shocked (shocked) about the demise of The Daily News and countless other newspapers across the U.S.

I’m not.

One of the primary obsessions of my 40-year career as a reporter has been journalism business models. How do you get money out of customers and leave yourself a profit? How do you replicate that process so that profits flow constantly through your business?

Northwestern’s Medill School taught that this was simple. You aggregated a group of readers based on their location, their industry or their lifestyle. You served them through your editorial effort. You monetized them by selling access to businesses in the form of advertisements, billboards along your editorial road. The price readers paid was the cost of delivering the paper to them. The editorial effort was paid for entirely by ads.

Even before graduating from Medill, 40 years ago last month, I was focused on the question of how writers and editors might make even more money, for even better work. I knew that the online world would let journalists do more than sell billboards. You can run an entire business here, taking people down the sales funnel, selling them goods or services, then supporting them after the sale. As early as the mid-1990s I was asking publishers, “How hungry are you,” and salivating over the possibilities.

The answer was that they were not very hungry at all. I remember back in late 1995, hiding in the back of an Atlanta Press Club Christmas party, laughing my butt off as Cox Enterprises CEO James Cox Kennedy, whom I’d once interviewed, talked about making easy money online by simply “repurposing” existing content. His naivete was hilarious, because even then I knew, in this new world, publishers would quickly find themselves competing with advertisers.

Stupid on Stupid

Recessions are a little like the Spanish Inquisition

Nobody expects them.

Their chief weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthlessness. They come in when they’re least expected, they do incredible economic damage, but when they’re gone they’re forgotten.

I have seen three recessions during my business career, each one worse than the last.

The 1991 recession wasn’t expected, because we’d just won the war in Kuwait. But we’d also poured enormous effort into our military, which was no longer needed, and it took years to get something sustainable to replace it.

The 2000 dot-com bust certainly wasn’t expected, but I saw it coming in 1997, when I launched my newsletter a-clue.com. I cried bubble for three years, but when it burst I won no prizes. I lost out like everyone else and had zero income in 2002 and 2003.

The 2008 recession also wasn’t expected, although I’d been writing about the “big shitpile” for two years before it exploded all over everyone, taking Wall Street down with it. We might have never gotten out of it but for the leadership of Barack Obama, who used the opportunity to pass a $1 trillion stimulus bill that is still providing economic benefits.

Humility and Democracy

America has been the terror of the world for nearly 75 years now. Along the way we have overthrown many elected governments, killed and brutalized millions. When the Cold War ceased to be our excuse, we did it for oil, or because “terrorists” were doing it back.

We glory in our military excess. This is bipartisan. President Obama attacked Libya to get rid of Qaddafi, which is now a hellhole and source of migrants destabilizing Europe. He got involved in Syria but did nothing to stop the war there. Europe’s refugee crisis has “Made in USA” stamped all over it.

We’re still in Afghanistan. Obama refused to get out. He never moved against the military control of sporting events, the staged reunions, “God Bless America” replacing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” or thank you for your service.

The United States spends more of its treasure on the military than all our conceivable rivals do, combined. We have usually gotten away with it, but not always. We still haven’t gotten our heads around losing in Vietnam, or the Iranian Revolution.  

Thanks to Trump, the price of arrogance is now going to be paid. Trump’s stupidity guarantees it. And there’s nothing for us to do but take it.

This is where the next Democratic Administration will get its fiercest pushback.

The Reckoning

Are we the baddies?

The British comics David Mitchell and Robert Webb did a sketch about that a decade ago, portraying two German soldiers. It was funny because, indeed, we couldn’t conceive of ourselves as the baddies.

But we often are. We usually are.

Even Barack Obama didn’t stop us from being bad. He didn’t get out of Iraq until he had a government there of his choosing, not the Iraqis’. He never got out of Afghanistan. Those detention centers kids are languishing in were built under his Administration.

World War III

History will record that World War III was fought on the Internet. It began many years ago, probably in 2003, when politicians like Howard Dean first recognized the power of blogs.

On one side are organized criminals and authoritarian leaders. On the other side are civil society and the Internet as it was designed to be in the 1990s. It’s a war of civilization, a war for civility.

So far, the bad guys are winning. The good guys have barely shown up.

Even when the good guys get involved, our hands are tied. Cybersecurity is seen as entirely defensive. Companies harden their systems, ignoring the fact that they must protect every door, window and seam, while the criminal only needs one-way in. Tyrants thus have complete freedom of cyber-movement, and the criminals they harbor have complete license. This must change. It’s time for some Internet traffic problems in St. Petersburg.

Hardening systems against attack also hardens them against visitors, as anyone who goes to a high-rise condo or office tower knows well. But that’s the price you pay. There are bad people around.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the Internet, one I saw long before the web was spun in 1994. I got into my first flame war in 1988, and it was a disquieting experience. It was easy for my opponents to wind me up, and their insults affected me personally, making it hard to get any constructive work done for weeks.

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.”

Memorial Day During Wartime

Memorial Day was created to remember the Civil War.

It was controversial from the start, especially in the South. Southerners created their own Confederate Memorial Day, and state offices in my hometown still close for it. 

But what do you do when Memorial Day falls during War Time?

With foreign wars, we use it to pay tribute to our soldiers fighting “over there” for “freedom.” Memorial Days near the start of the Iraq War were especially poignant. We’ve now had people fighting, and dying, in Afghanistan for over 17 years.

But there’s another war going on right now. It’s a Civil War. Like the one that happened over 150 years ago, it’s being fought in 10,000 places. Because it’s a Civil War, however, it’s not acknowledged by both sides. Probably because all the casualties are, by the definition of warfare, civilians.