Dana Blankenhorn

The First AI Crash

No technology trend goes straight up. There are always crashes along the way, as subsets of the trend fall behind, while others prove their worth.

This was true with the Internet. Search engine companies were falling even before Google was created. It’s why Wall Street wanted Yahoo to become a “portal.” (Wall Street knows nothing.)

This will be true for A.I. as well. It’s starting right now.

The “consumer side” will crash first. Things like ChatGPT were fun for a while, but the mass market is deciding it’s more like Pokemon Go than “the Google.”

For any technology to gain legs, it must prove its utility. It must create productivity. It must not only do things that weren’t available before, but it must make money doing it, and make doing other things easier.

Open Source is the Tortoise, Not the Hare

One reason reporters are slow to see the threat ActivityPub offers to Threads and Twitter is the nature of open source.

It moves slowly. It’s reactive.

Open source isn’t innovative, in the classic sense. You can have innovations in open source, but they’re in addition to something meant to emulate something else.

Given time, however, open source always wins.

My son and I still laugh over the 2009 CompuTex show in Taiwan, where I set out after “desktop Linux.” Finally found a few booths outside the main hall, and even met Jim Zemlin, head of the Linux Foundation, as he finished a speech to attendees.

Fall of Babel

The slow-motion collapse of Twitter leaves us all with a question.

Where do we go now?

Twitter was the Internet’s Tower of Babel. It was where everyone came to discuss everything. It wasn’t all about politics. There was finance Twitter, celebrity Twitter, and (perhaps my favorite) soccer Twitter. Companies no longer had to issue press releases. They’d just Tweet, and it would be heard by all those who wanted to listen.

Elon Musk didn’t destroy Twitter. Donald Trump did. As with everything in his life he trivialized it, made it all about him. He used it as a weapon, first against his own party, later against democracy.

Musk completed the process by engaging his own self-destructive tendencies. He has done tremendous damage to his own brand in the process but doesn’t care because his fortune has risen. This is thanks to Tesla, which is fulfilling the ambitions of its most bullish investors by scaling production of electric batteries and cars that use them.

Open Source in an AI World

The history of generative AI begins with a betrayal. 

OpenAI, meant to give developers a high and rising model for AI development, went closed source and got into bed with Microsoft. Now Microsoft is leading the charge to regulate AI, raising costs for competitors and creating closed source lock-in. The company wants licensing for all AI, bureaucratic delays before anyone or anything can compete with its proprietary offerings.

The current listing for the Google AI page claims it offers an “ecosystem of open-source tools, datasets, APIs and more.” But open source is never mentioned on the page itself. Google, like Microsoft, now thinks AI is too dangerous to be put into the community’s hands.  

If it’s that dangerous, guys, then ban it. Forbid machine learning, forbid progress. If code exists, someone will try to misuse it. That’s part of the law of code. The only answer is for code not to exist.

The Lesson of Buzzfeed

I have been out of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism for 45 years now, and the chief lesson I was taught there should still apply.

It came in my magazine business course. It was the only one I aced.

The lesson was simple. Know your reader.

Journalism is about organizing and advocating a place, an industry, or a lifestyle. You need to know who your target market is, organize that market, and represent its interests. That’s why newspaper publishers would go to chamber of commerce meetings. It’s why industry magazines organized trade shows. It’s why a publication’s mailing list was its key asset. Its why publishers exist, to sell, and why they stand above even editors on the masthead.

I Have a Dream for Netiquette

In the mid-1980s I joined a group called the Electronic Networking Association.

The ENA believed, naively, that if people could communicate across their differences, they might understand each other better.

Few people used the Internet then. We were all elites, intellectually at least. We were thoughtful and we shared a First World viewpoint, even if we lived in Japan, Europe or Africa. We shared values, sort of like the Quakers. 

What we believed in was Netiquette. These are simple rules for civilized behavior. Assume goodwill. Don’t yell. In short, be nice. When in doubt, apologize and resolve to do better.  

The punishment for a violation of Netiquette was a stern talking to, for both sides of the argument. The punishment for repeated outbursts was to be shunned by the group, dismissed, cast off.

Fixing Twitter on Mastodon

Twitter is broken beyond repair.

But it can be fixed. On Mastodon. If users learn something I learned back in 1988.

I’m @[email protected] on Mastodon. Journa.host is run by Adam Davidson, formerly of The New Yorker. It’s one of thousands of servers supporting Mastodon on the Internet.

Users can block users on Twitter. But on Mastodon servers can also block servers. Users can also move between servers. This means people choose whatever server conforms to their standards on what should be blocked and what allowed. You can have alt-right servers, alt-left servers, and alt-bicycling servers.

A lot of people, looking at Mastodon over the last few weeks, have looked askance at this. People are isolating behind their server walls, they complain. Or they might.

But that was always true for Twitter. It was designed to be. The problem is that many people didn’t use their block commands aggressively enough. Journalists amplified extreme views by retweeting them. Hate was amplified by user outrage.

A Community Model for Web Publishing

Even before the Web was spun, I was arguing against the standard publishing model for the Internet. (Picture from Wikipedia.)

That model was built on advertising. You aggregated people based on their location, industry, or lifestyle, by covering their interests and advocating for them. You then sold billboards alongside that content and, if charging for the paper, only get back its distribution costs.

What I argued for instead, as early as the mid-1990s, was for a marketplace model. You’re still collecting readers, but your content leads them down a sales funnel, and you’re seeking commissions on those sales from your business partners based on your credibility.

One of my favorite memories is of the 1995 Christmas party of the Atlanta Press Club, where James Cox Kennedy, then the local paper’s publisher, claimed he could repurpose content online by putting different URLs in front of it, like yall.com. I laughed so hard I cried. I nearly doubled over.

By the time publishers expressed interest in the marketplace model, of course, it had become useless. This was thanks to Doubleclick, which was founded in Atlanta and later bought by Google. Google made it possible for anyone to aggregate their own audience and buy it at a run-of-network rate. The fact that you’d need 10 times more impressions to get the same impact was seen as a feature, not a bug. And the price of those ads continued falling, thanks to the Web’s unlimited inventory.

Is the Volcker Precedent Wrong?

Fed chairman Jerome Powell is basing his anti-inflation fight on the success of Paul Volcker from 1979-1984.

The myth is Volcker sent interest rates higher than that era’s inflation, but the resulting recession set the stage for decades of growth to come.

What if it’s wrong?

I had already begun my reporting career in 1979. Volcker’s policy did cause pain. But interest rates didn’t start falling until the 1980s, and the Fed wasn’t the only cause.

The other cause was the State Department. In 1981 the Reagan Administration quietly negotiated an alliance with the Saud family based on a simple premise. They would sell oil in dollars and pump a lot of it. We would extend to them our military protection, specifically against Iran.

That alliance has held firm from that day to this. It held firm through the Gulf War. It held through 9/11, even though the attack was committed mainly by Saudi nationals and inspired by the son of a Saudi billionaire. It held through the disaster of Iraq.

It was this alliance that sent inflation down in the early 1980s, not Volcker’s Fed. Oil went from over $125/barrel to $80 in Reagan’s first term. Texas’ economy was crushed, but everyone else prospered. It was morning in America.

Our present inflation is also based on resources. Oil costs spiked from $80/barrel last September to over $115 in May. They’ve since fallen back to $80. The fall came about because we’re no longer in an economic era defined by resources.

One Medium, Extra Large

When I was at Northwestern’s Medill School, 45 years ago, I was pursued by a singular idea. That was, all the media we studied would eventually become one.

At the time there were three majors at Medill (four if you count advertising). You could major in newspapers, in magazines, or in TV. It was easy to tell us apart. The TV majors dressed well while the print majors looked like the students we were.

While I haven’t made a fortune since, my idea has been fulfilled, even if the media industry still doesn’t know it.

There is only one medium now. This medium, the Internet.

There is no newspaper business, no magazine business. There is no TV business, no newsletter business. These are all just means to the same end, which is communication. The problem is we don’t know what the new industry is about.