Dana Blankenhorn

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 @danablankenhorn@journa.host 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.

Break From Google

Once news distribution became free, almost 30 years ago, publishers forgot what made the business go and they all went for scale.

What makes journalism go is knowing your audience. You don’t write for everyone, but for specific readers. You monetize the credibility you earn based on who you do business with.

The Internet opened the whole market to every publisher. It also opened the whole market to every advertiser. What Google and later Facebook did was let businesses reach just the people they wanted for a “run of network” rate, which kept declining as Web content expanded.

This broke the connection between writers and the audience. We stopped trying to write for specific sub-segments of the population and went for the mass market. Advertisers took the job of targeting in-house, using the Web only for branding and spot sales.

I said from the beginning that was a mistake. This is obvious now. Along the way we have raised a generation of publishers on the mass market model, and as they’ve come to power, they’ve lost the plot.

Worthless, Worth Less, or Bargain?

There are three types of tech stocks today.

Companies that aren’t doing anything real are worthless. I’m talking about crypto and NFTs, I’m talking about all the metaverse stocks without a business model. For these companies it’s 2000, it’s Gotterdammerung. Just as was the case then, there’s a lot of stuff that was valued based on the assumption of no limits.

It was easy to find the moment it all came crashing down last time. It was January of 2000, when Time Warner “bought” AOL in a deal that gave AOL shareholders more than half the resulting stock. This put an upper limit on the value of Internet stuff. It was all downhill from there.

The big moment this time was the Crypto SuperBowl. Matt Damon read a ridiculous script that equated buying cryptocrap with going to Mars. It was at that moment, during a game played in SoFi Stadium (another name due to crash) that we realized how artificial it all was. Smart people got out.

Why Democracy Works

Democracy works because people are stupid.

I’m stupid. You’re stupid. The smartest are stupid in some ways. Everyone is stupid (except Dolly Parton).

But in a democracy the stupid balances itself out. The collective stupid of every citizen yields enough intelligence that we get by. Even when stupid wins, as in 2016, the beauty of democracy is getting a chance to correct it.

I’ve seen on Twitter that most people think other people are stupid. They’re right. But so are the people making the accusation. We all have our blind spots, our prejudices, our absolutes. They’re different. In the end they balance out and we muddle through.

What’s most dangerous to democracy is the assumption, on the part of all elites, that everyone else is stupid. They are. But you are, too. It’s when elites achieve authority that they can be deluded about this. I don’t care if you’re in the media elite, the intellectual elite, the scientific elite, the business elite, or (God forbid) the political elite. Once you assume authority your stupidity will be laid bare.

Buy Tech Today

You now have the best opportunity in 13 years to buy technology stocks.

Amazon is now selling for just over three times its annual sales. Paypal is in the toilet. Nvidia is priced below where it was after it split 4:1. Chinese stocks are down for the count.

Now is the time to get in. Here’s why.

The reason tech fell is inflation. Rising prices lead to rising interest rates. Money costs money. That means growth and even earnings are discounted.

But tech can whip inflation now. Tech has been whipping inflation for over 40 years. Wall Street thinks Paul Volcker did it by raising interest rates in the late 1970s.

It was tech.

Bottom Up

The relationship between the Washington press corps and its readers has become as abusive as anything Donald Trump ever drew up. The same is true for the relationship between “Lefty Twitter” and the left.

As usual, it’s a question of business models. You make money by getting clicks. You get clicks by energizing people, by making them angry or scared, preferably both. Straight news doesn’t pay.

That’s why The New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill, Politico, even CNN and MSNBC, have become trolls. If Politico writes a story saying the economy is improving, with numbers attached, no one is going to read it. But if they throw in a “but,” leading with a counter-example – a place where it’s not growing, people who are being left behind – that draws readers. Talk seriously about vaccines and you hear crickets. Write up some anti-vaxxer and its happy days. You’re getting clicks.