Dana Blankenhorn

Dealing With China

I have a dog in the China policy fight.

Our 30 year-old son has a job waiting in Taiwan. He just needs a visa. Taiwan is slow-walking it because of COVID. China’s belligerence toward Taiwan means we have worries.

Most of what is being written about America’s China policy is bullshit. It’s Cold Warriors anxious for a fight, Republican apparatchiks looking to take Biden down, human rights activists who see China “getting away with it.”

Here’s what I think. Xi Jinping is in trouble. He pretends to be Mao but he’s not. There is opposition to his policies kept inside an opaque party. Jack Ma is still a party member.

China has huge debts. Property debts, government debts, corporate debts. There’s still room to maneuver because the Yuan trades at 6.45 to the dollar. That’s not a manipulation. If China were manipulating the currency it would trade at 7 to the dollar or more.

China has an energy crisis and an environmental crisis going on at the same time it’s the world’s biggest producer and buyer of solar energy. The floods that overtook the country this summer are a lot like California’s fires and Louisiana’s hurricanes, but they’re happening to 20 times more people.

Obama vs. Trump is Google vs. Facebook

There’s a false assumption in the land. Democrats are doomed in 2022.

For evidence, there’s the fact that parties in power lose in off-years. That’s been true 4 times in a row. But in 2002 Bush filled people with patriotic fervor. In 1998 Clinton filled them with anger over his impeachment. The real lesson is that political upsets happen when people are motivated. In or out doesn’t matter.

Republicans are in power in most states. Impunity is getting people angry. And when government is doing what you want, you’re as likely to relax Election Day as to crawl over crushed glass to vote.

The 2022 election will be a battle between Google and Facebook.

Barack Obama won because of Google. After holding a highly-publicized meetup with employees in 2007, the Obama campaign was created in Google’s image. It built giant voter databases, donor databases, volunteer databases. Based on those databases, it activated people through email to call on neighbors. It scaled the intimacy of the 2004 Dean campaign, which ran a popular blog but refused to build the database. It worked.

Donald Trump won because of Facebook. His team hacked the system. They used Facebook’s algorithm to gin up anger, to turn the social medium to their side. Anyone who clicked on a pro-Trump story was run down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. They became immune to anything outside the conspiracy. It worked.

Trump ran an identical campaign in 2020. It didn’t work. In 2020 he was the incumbent. In 2020, America was going to hell in a hand cart. Reality triumphed over conspiracy.

Stacey Abrams, who lost Georgia narrowly in 2018 to a Trump-like opponent, drove much of what happened last year. Hers was an inside-outside effort. Inside, her FairFightAction learned how the rules worked and fought to keep them as they were. Outside her databases identified Democrats and activated them.

Open Source Explains It All

Back in 2005 I was asked to take over a new “open source” beat for ZDNet.

It turns out to have been the most important story of my life. And yours.

Open source is software based on the radical idea that the more eyes you get on code, the better it will be. Without getting too deep into the weeds here, it works.

The benefits of open source, however, flow mainly to its users. In the old proprietary model, they flowed to developers. Microsoft and (especially) Oracle fought it so fiercely. They saw the “little guys” as ganging up to steal their competitive advantage. Microsoft finally surrendered, building a network of cloud data centers that has made it the second most-valuable company in the world. Oracle is worth barely one-tenth as much.

All of America’s biggest companies are now built on the open source idea. Apple built its cloud on open source. So did Google, and Amazon, and Facebook. Facebook extended this into hardware with its Open Compute Project. Netflix extended it into networking with Open Connect.

But open source relates to more than software, hardware, or technology.

Eternal White Majority

When my Irish ancestors came to America, this is how they were portrayed.

The whole point of the Scorsese movie Gangs of New York was to illustrate the contempt with which the Anglo-American majority treated Irish immigrants. They saw them as black.

The same thing happened later, with the Italians. Then with the Russians. But today you wouldn’t see Bruce Springsteen or Jerry Seinfeld portrayed as anything but white. Like Alec Baldwin. Like me.

When people write that America will soon be “majority non-white” this is what they’re ignoring. People can easily be made “white” when it’s convenient. By being made “white,” these same people can then look down upon other people, darker people.

Xi is in Trouble

Here’s something no one will tell you today.

Xi Jinping is in trouble.

There is an assumption in the West that, because China is run as an authoritarian state, and Xi Jinping is the President of that state, that he can do anything he wants.

I don’t buy it. The country is too big and too complicated for that to be the case.

Xi has been messing with China’s economy for a year now. Everything he does seems to make things worse. Going after the country’s Cloud Emperors – Alibaba, TenCent, and Baidu – made political sense. Most actions are in line with what western trustbusters would like to do with our Cloud Czars – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. But investors have been losing money.

Westerners don’t understand how much power the Cloud Emperors have. They dominate the entire economy, not just the cloud. Young Chinese are, if anything, more addicted to their phones than we are. They’re overworked, their homes are tiny, many are still living with their parents. The consumerism pushed by the economy, through the Cloud Emperors, has gotten pushback from millions who resent the “996” lifestyle pushed by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma. The 996 lifestyle means working from 9 to 9, 6 days a week. This is a 72 hour workweek, not counting the time spent commuting or preparing for work. And for what, they ask?

Xi has reacted to this by attacking the phone-based playstyle that makes all this tolerable. Telling China’s kids that they can only be on their phones for an hour each day is what American parents were doing in the 1960s, attacking rock and roll. It’s out of touch.

It’s 1969 All Over Again

One advantage to aging is you get to see patterns in the history before you.

1968, for instance. It was a terrible year. I was there. There were riots, and assassinations, and a whole lot of young men who’d been drafted died in Vietnam. Then came the crisis election and we got Nixon.

Beginning in 1968, politics turned slowly to the right and continued to march that way until the vast majority of those alive in 1968 were dead.

Then came 2020. It was a terrible year. I was there. There were demonstrations, and environmental destruction. A whole lot of people died of COVID. Then came a crisis election and we got Biden.

Bin Laden Won

Twenty years ago, the fall of the American Empire began with the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Osama Bin Laden gambled that Americans would overreact, be driven crazy by the attack. He was right.

As a direct result America began a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan that cost over $2 trillion. As a direct result we invaded and overran Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attack.

Even after most Americans recognized the overreaction, electing Barack Obama in 2008, half the country remained consumed by fear. It was easy for the resource billionaires funding the Republican Party to transfer that hate onto Obama, then onto his party, then onto its individual members, just as 60 years earlier fear of Communism morphed into McCarthyism.

Thus came Trump. Thus came Trumpism.

Thanks to Trumpism’s excesses, almost half of us remain so tied to hate that we’d rather than die than take a vaccine. Most Americans, even most Texans, are against snitching on neighbors who miscarry. Most of us even believe in democracy. But enough of us stand against progress, and enough of those people are powerful, that as I write this the future of the American experiment remains uncertain.

Thanks to 9/11 and thanks to Trump, America no longer has any moral authority. China can get away with Xinjiang, and with seizing Hong Kong, because we look no better to the rest of the world.

Thanks to Trumpism, authoritarians are on the march and democracy is in retreat around the world. Putin can interfere in our elections, can use trolls to spin lies that tear at the heart of our system and prosperity. But we do nothing in response. Dictators simply close off the Internet from the outside, impose their own censorship on their people, and force feed propaganda to them. There’s an economic cost to all this. America’s technology dominates the world to an even greater degree in 2021 than in 2001. But that doesn’t matter.

Atlanta Density Done Right

If you want housing density, make neighborhoods more attractive.

That means adding small parks and amenities people can enjoy within an easy walk before you add housing. If the area doesn’t have them, build commercial-office structures with apartments on top. If you do this backwards, you’re building a slum.

Cities are changing. So is transportation. If I can get most of what I need within a mile, I can use an electric bike unless I need Costco. Maybe I won’t even need Costco. Then rent a van for vacations, use something like Uber for nights out, and we’re good.

Lots of urban people already live this way. The idea of maintaining a car when you’re only using it an hour per day (or less) is wasteful.

But this only works if your area is walkable. This only works if you can get coffee and essentials around the corner, if your lawyer or accountant is nearby, if you can walk your dog and find a park in 10 minutes, with trees and benches to sit on.

Atlanta knows this.

It’s All Biden’s Fault

I have a friend who is mad as hell at Joe Biden right now.

There’s a job waiting for him overseas. He’s fully vaccinated. But he can’t prove it to his new employer’s satisfaction. Even if the host country lets him in, he’ll have to be in quarantine for 2 weeks, at great expense, before he can start work.

How can this be, he asks? Why hasn’t the President mandated vaccine passports?

We all overestimate what a President can do. The media treats him as magic, the final authority, the one person responsible for everything.

But the President’s powers are severely circumscribed. Especially in this case.

There is no national medical database. There’s no federal control over health insurance. Under the McCarran-Ferguson Act , passed in 1945, health insurance is a state function. Even the decision upholding the Affordable Care Act held that states didn’t have to take its Medicaid expansion. Many still don’t.

Atlanta Politics: Still All About Race

For the first time since I moved here 40 years ago Atlanta finally succeeded over the last four years.

It attracted a huge Microsoft development. It built parks. Its population grew.

The reaction by the city’s leaders has been panic.

The reason? Developers moved in near the coming Microsoft offices and built housing for upper-income people who might work there. The white gentrification of the west side, starting at Georgia Tech, has accelerated. Until recently this was the heart of the ghetto, and of the Atlanta machine’s political strength.

The response has been two-fold. First, Atlanta isn’t really fighting Republicans’ efforts to extract Buckhead, with 20% of the city’s population and 40% of its tax base, from the city. Buckhead is nearly all-white. They will complain, but they will let it go.