Yes, But It’s not COBOL

Articles like these point to a multi-decade old language when something fails. Sometimes they don’t even wait for the post-mortem. There’s COBOL involved, so it must be COBOL. It’s old, right? First, let’s get one thing out of the way, and that’s the implication that the language is 60+ years old, so the computer it’s running on is old, right? No, it’s likely running on a modern IBM mainframe with modern tools. IBM makes the promise that if you write a mainframe program today, you can run it on future mainframes, without modification. That’s great for business customers because re-writing working software is expensive and time-consuming. These are highly reliable machines that are intended to run with down-time measured in seconds per year.

But the software failed, right? Because it’s old. That is complete balderdash. If you write a correct program today, it will continue to be a correct program 100 or 1,000, or 10,000 years from now. If you have an interest rate, and an amount, and compound that over a period of years, that answer won’t change. Because the program itself is applied math and logic. The rules of logic and math don’t change over time. Time itself isn’t the issue. What is the issue?

The issue comes back to maintenance. If I write a program that works today, it may not be completely correct. There may be bugs. Those need to be fixed and the effort I put toward fixing the bug impacts the long-term stability of the program. If fixing a bug is done under the gun, or on the cheap, it might cause what’s called “code entropy.” Code entropy is the de-evolution of a well written program into crap. Sometimes the bug fix must be rushed through, as customers are losing money by the minute. After that, we should go back and do a broader fix to the software. That may mean making changes to the underlying logic or other parts of the program. In doing so, we minimize the code entropy problem. But that maintenance cost money.

The next reason for maintenance is a change in requirements. This is especially true for systems that change every time there’s a change in the law. In some cases these changes are retro-active. This creates a lot of churn on short time-lines, and like bug fixes, and also results in code-entropy. The quick fix is rarely followed by the work to refactor the existing code, accordingly. The software entropy increases and the code becomes even harder to fix with the next change. Re-architecture of the old code costs money. Most places just indefinitely defer the maintenance on their old COBOL code.

Many commercial, private sector, companies rely on COBOL for high-volume transaction processing. It has many features more modern languages lack, like it’s English-like structure is legible to non-programming auditors. And modern features have been added to it, even if they have not been adopted by organizations using COBOL (especially the ones likely to skimp on maintenance). But it is not a truly modern language like Rust or Go, or even a middle-aged language like Java. And it exists in a specific computing environment (the mainframe) which is kept artificially expensive thanks to its monopoly supplier and small customer base. Getting trained on mainframe operations isn’t cheap and many companies don’t want to pay for it, as their newly trained people will leave for better offers.

Many of the problems people associate with COBOL are going to re-appear (and have re-appeared) when companies move to platforms like Java. I have been at many sites were Java programs on old, unsupported versions of Java are being poorly maintained. Or running on old, out of support application servers (programs that run Java code on servers). Databases that are so old and out of date that either the vendor has gone out of business or there is no longer a way to upgrade their database to the current versions. When out of date, poorly written Java code crashes, it just becomes a generic, bland, IT failure and mismanagement. But, because it doesn’t involve COBOL, it doesn’t get the headlines that are cheap and easy to score with an old language.

The biggest counter-example of “because COBOL” is the number of banks, brokerages, exchanges, payment processors, and insurance companies that quietly process about 80% of the worlds financial transactions on a daily basis. They have an incentive to perform routine maintenance. They have also quietly off-shored their software maintenance over the last few decades to places where a COBOL coding jobs is a good job. Offer most US software engineers a COBOL job and they will turn their nose up and assume you were joking. But in India, the Philippines, and China, COBOL is not the scarlet A that it is in the West.

I want to address something specific about the article posted above. It stated that because COBOL is by its nature defective or tool old, it cost the US 40 billion in GDP. That sounds like a lot, but in an economy generating trillions of activity, it is a rounding error. Second, re-writing that code has its own costs. That could be even more billions spent getting exactly to the same level of service provided today. There probably isn’t enough money in the world to re-write the existing, mission critical COBOL code into something else. That will take away from other budgets and, if not maintained, will result in the same problem just 10, 20, or 30 years in the future. And where will publications like FT get cheap headlines in the future, if COBOL goes away?

There’s a Bad Smell

If you don’t think something is very wrong, you’re not looking very hard. Recently, the cost of the average new car in the US topped $50,000. The median household income in the US (meaning the half way point, if you arrange all peoples’ incomes from lowest to highest) was about $83,000. The mean was about $66,000, suggesting a lot of skew from a bunch of very high incomes at the top end of the data set. So the “average,” under some definition of average, American household would pay about 70% to 80% of their income for the average new car.

If we go back 30 years, to the mid 1980s, median income was about 24,000 in 1985. (Not adjusted for inflation). If you adjust it for inflation, we have to face the ugly fact that 40 years has only taken us from $64,000 of 1985 median household income in today’s dollars to $83,000. Meaning that with all the advancements we’ve seen, and all the gains in productivity, our earning power grew just 35% or so. That’s less than a 1% improvement per year. But in the 1980s, a nice Buick or Dodge set you back less than $10,000. You could get economy cars for $5,000 – $7,500 price range. The average new car set a family back less than 50% of its income. Less than a third, if the bought an economy car. Even if you adjust for inflation, the average new car should be in the $25,000 to $30,000 range. To get to that that “less than 50%” range in today’s actual prices., you need an income of at least $100,000, if not slightly more.

This is the difference between purchasing power, wealth, and income. Partly it’s inflation, and partly it’s not inflation (to the degree inflation measurements aren’t arbitrary). The price of an “average” new car has risen faster than inflation. So has housing. So has medical care. So has education. If you could easily afford an average car in 1985, but struggle to buy an average car in 2025, you are poorer as far as cars are concerned. If you could afford to go to the doctor’s office in 1985 but not 2025, you are poorer along that axis. However, an IBM PC computer or original Macintosh cost maybe 10% of your 1985 median household income. Today, that (relatively) high-end computer is in the 3-4% category. We’re much richer on that axis. The necessary stuff is more expensive, but escapism is cheap.

I would argue that the things that matter, like food, housing, and transportation are why we feel poorer today. Setting aside the paltry growth in inflation adjusted median household income (while upper incomes have grown much faster than inflation), having to put yourself in deep debt to do “normal” things hurts.

The fact we are drowning in televisions, computers, and other gadgets doesn’t compensate for not being able to afford college. If I were to ask most people struggling to buy a house, would you rather have: more expensive TVs and computers or cheaper houses? They would opt for the house. If I asked the person trying to get one more year out of the ride that gets them to their job, if they wanted cheaper cell phones or cheaper cars, they’d opt for cheaper cars. Or a public transportation system that didn’t feel punitive in its cost and inefficiency.

You need transportation, you need a house, you need to go to the doctor and the dentist. Those seem more and more like luxury items. That’s what feels so wrong about today. I caught a passing notice about Paul Krugman saying China has passed the US in purchasing power parity. They may have. I haven’t read it. I’m a little tired of Krugman, who lost credibility with me as an economist, for focusing on too many nakedly partisan issues. But we all feel it. If you make more money next year, it doesn’t really feel like you got ahead. In fact, it feels like you’re falling further and further behind.

So you tell me, after 40 years of progress, with companies worth trillions of dollars, and with two people in a race to be the first trillionaire, does it feel like we’ve advanced? Do you feel wealthier? Does that seem like a system that’s working for the benefit of most people? Do numbers like GDP and a soaring stock market paint a rosy picture, so we we learn to ignore what our lying eyes are trying to tell us?

Social Media Is Not the Printing Press

If I read one more op/ed or article where social media is compared to the printing press, I’m going to barf. The latest one is in the NYT, and quotes a number of published important people about the inevitability of all of this. That it’s a fundamental technological change, like the printing press. And who would want the printing press stopped? Sure, it helped fuel hundreds of years of brutal religious wars, but look at where we are today. Mark Zuckerberg is on par with Johannes Gutenberg. We just have to accept the misinformation (also spread by the printing press), libelous material (also spread by the printing press), and the hundreds of years of brutal, bloody, and barbaric religious wars between illiberal regimes to get to something good.

First, let’s get some of the printing press mythology out of the way. Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press. There were presses before Gutenberg, but they were based on techniques such as carving into wood to create images. To publish anything more than pictures with that technology was hard and expensive. Gutenberg’s innovation was to create type from cheap lead and make that type movable (settable) on the page. It was too expensive to make the lettering out of bronze or brass. Lead is plentiful, cheap, and easy to work. If the letters wear down, you melt the lead and stamp more letters using the bronze or brass stamps. It made publishing a book, using a press instead of monks and quills, a commercially viable project.

The internet itself may be the more correct printing press analog. But social media is not. Social media, unlike the invention of movable type, is a creation of law. Prior to the passage of section 230 in 1996, a site like X would have been effectively impossible. Why? Because X would have been held liable for the content of the posts, regardless of the author. Thanks to section 230, X can promote social media posts that libel, slander, threaten, defame, intimidate, or harass individuals with little or no legal exposure. If you want to go after the perpetrator, you have to go after an army of dimwits, hidden behind a degree of anonymity that makes prosecution difficult, if not practically impossible.

Yet many intelligent people confuse this legal loop-hole as a change in fundamental technology. What if the New York Times suddenly started printing non-factual, slanderous content? They would be sued. What if the Washington Post just printed screen shots from the Wall Street Journal as news? They would be sued. What if People magazine suddenly started telling teens that no one likes them and that suicide was a good thing? They would rightfully get sued and maybe criminally investigated. We dealt with this problem long ago with print publishers. It’s not insane to think a place publishing a piece of content or information is liable for that content or information.

But isn’t social media just the stuff regular people post? No, you ignorant fool, it is not. If you believe that lie, you are willfully ignorant of the reality around you. It is a mere fraction of what the rubes and the simpletons post. A large portion is the product of professionals who use features of the platforms to promote ideas. These range from intelligence agencies creating chaos to people trying to sell cosmetics. What you see as the product of ‘just regular folks,’ is a highly curated feed. Imagine a print publication that took submissions from anyone. Then those people vote on the submissions and the print publication goes forward with the issue. Their goal is to aggregate content that gets folks to pick up a copy and look at the ads. They don’t really care what’s in their published material. And the headline is something like ‘Donald Trump has Butt Baby with Satan.’ They would be sued. Because it’s print. If you print it on paper, you are a publisher.

But if you do it on social media, it’s not a problem. X or Facebook can run the exact same headlines. They can promote those same stories for the exact same reason, to push ads (and collect data to better target you in the future). Yet they have a pass. Intelligent people are confused by this, as if there is something inherent in some technology that makes X or Facebook incapable of being stopped. That whatever we do today, we would just wind up with new companies tomorrow. The internet would allow for the passage of information, but it’s the legal structures that have allowed for the creation of these massive, multi-trillion dollar companies that are poisoning democracy with the goal of shoving one more ad in front of your face.

If you took the stance that Facebook is acting as a publisher, with its algorithm to select and promote content, the same way the New York Times acts as a publisher, Facebook would cease. If they could get sued because your grandma re-posted a libelous story, they would not let your Nana do that. And if your rejoinder is that it’s not employees of Facebook that generate the content, well, not all the content in the NYT is a product of its employees. They may pay for Op/Ed pieces, where the person is not a staff writer. Okay, if you don’t pay for it, then it’s user contributed? Social media companies do compensate their “creatives” or “content providers.” X and YouTube, for example, have allowed people to build influence businesses by (in part) direct payments. So the social media companies are paying people for content, selecting which content to show, and collecting money through ad impressions. I really fail to see the legal difference between the NYT and Facebook from a liability perspective, except for the invented shield of section 230.

But revoking section 230 would throw a lot of baby out with the bathwater. What about a small, mom-and-pop site in the American Heartland just hosting Bible verses and some miscreant missuses it for nefarious purposes. You would shut them down? That’s the false choice we are presented. Either continue forward as is, or create legal quagmires on every main street between San Diego and Portland, Maine. We could amend section 230 to put the legal responsibility back on to what are essentially publishers. Or maybe we should amend other laws so genuine mistakes or oversights are not criminalized. We already don’t arrest UPS drivers and executives because they deliver illegal material or contraband. Nor do we throw the bank branch manager in jail because the money in their bank was used for criminal purposes (although they sometimes know – and in that case we do and should).

We act like we can’t possibly learn from the past with a new situation in the present. That we just have to repeat the same problems, over and over again, every time there’s a new change. This is a kind of powerlessness brought on by ignorance. It’s on a computer and it’s done by young, clever people who use words most people don’t understand. And it’s kind of magical, if the typewriter is the last writing instrument whose innards you still understood. Because it’s magic, and the magicians who benefit from it say it has to be this way, then it just has to be this way. Francis Fukuyama may be a genius in his area of expertise, but he bows to technology much the same way your grandma does.

There are other arguments, such as we wouldn’t have such a broad dissemination of information about the sciences, or social, or political events. But we do And with organizations that are subject to standard laws and norms for publishers. The internet drives down the cost of publishing and so opens the ability for smaller publishers to come forward. But they are still publishers. If Scientific American online publishes an article on their site threatening the city manager of Watkins, Illinois, they can be sued. It doesn’t matter if they paid for the article, or it was written by their staff, or it was freely handed to them. They are a publisher and chose to publish it. The same threat on X might go unnoticed as it may not even be in the top 10% of threats against people that day, promoted by the algorithm on X. If I set up a news outlet on the internet, and “publish,” I will be sued for the butt-baby thing. But if I’m “just a platform,” taking submissions from users, then I’m actively shielded. Even if it’s the same butt-babies, poorly veiled death threats, anti-vaccine fabrications and all else.

This collective delusion can’t continue in the context of a vibrant democracy. The more we delude ourselves into believing we are incapable of correcting our own creation, that the things the mind of man hath wrought are as unshakable as the strong nuclear force, and that it is as inevitable as the sun rising, the more we will seem like complete morons to future generations.

I often feel like the one guy point at the naked emperor, parading down the street, and wondering why no one else sees this for what it is. I think other people do. I think they’re afraid that if they do anything about the current situation, then their side gets hurt more. If we take away section 230’s protections, it will be the other side that runs amok. Or it will just be big publishers that squeeze out the little publishers. (As if we don’t already have a handful of social and traditional media companies, all owned by politically minded billionaires). But what if there’s a problem and we need to get our base out to protests? What if the other side comes to rule the information landscape?

So that’s where we are. Ignorance about the thing we created and fear its absence will leave our side worse off. And we have many, many instances in our history where fear and ignorance have ruled us, and maybe that’s the example from which we fail to learn.

Would You Do It for $20?

That’s a game you play with your friends. You know something makes your friend’s skin crawl. You ask them how much money would it take for them to participate in that skin crawling activity. The answers vary from “just no”, to “maybe I’ll do it for $1,000,” to “I’d do it for $5”. Then there’s the friend that cements their reputation as a nut, or shows off their nutty side, by just doing it. We got a glimpse of that recently with the Saudi comedy festival.

I don’t put comedians on a pedestal. I don’t think Bill Burr has any special insight into economics, politics, or society. But sometimes the best comedy is pointing out the world as it actually is. And you get a reminder that something we all tiptoe around as oversized, dangerous, and deep is actually small, harmless, and stupid. Even if media, culture, celebrities, and politicians are telling you it’s a great idea, or it’s a sacred cow, or it’s “dangerous,” for a minute you see it’s stupid and we were silly for thinking otherwise. I don’t mean in the “do your own research,” vaccine denying, tin-foil hat way. I mean in the way that we have sacred cows we tacitly or explicitly refuse to question, but should.

Three comedians walk into a racist, brutal, autocratic, fundamentalist regime that doesn’t respect human rights: Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, and Pete Davidson. Pete Davidson is the easiest one to analyze. I don’t really think there’s a huge moral compass there. He seems like the kind of guy who just picks up on the vibe around him. He’s the friend that says “$20 – okay,” because he wants the $20 bucks. He has plenty of cash, but $20 more would be better. Do I care he went to Riyadh? Not really. It just cements my opinion of him as the gross kid.

Whitney Cummings is the queen of bad decisions. She can say, after the fact, that everyone around her made it seem like such a good idea, and the money was amazing, and that she made another bad decision. It’s one of a long line of bad decisions. It would make me wonder if she’d gained any insight about making bad decisions, or avoiding bad decisions, but it would track. She’d have a good five minutes in her next show about what a bad decision she made, and how bad she felt, as she enjoyed the really nice car she bought from said paycheck.

Bill Burr is the tough one. Because Bill Burr really doesn’t need the money. If it were revealed that Pete Davidson was declaring bankruptcy – that would track. Bill Burr is a smart guy. If not smart, insightful at the very least. He’s called out greed, evil, and hypocrisy on many occasions. Every once and a while an excerpt from his pod-cast pops up and he calls folks out for being the worst people. I think he’s also aware that condemning rape victims to be punished, or beating women for not wearing head-dresses, or treating foreign workers like slaves is bad. Pete and Whitney might not think about the fancy hotel they’re in as the product of slave labor. I’m not saying Bill wouldn’t stay there. I’m just saying I imagine his conscience would at least twitch.

And despite the assurances from people like Bill, that the Saudis are just funny people (as if we have no understanding of Saudis), and he could say what he thought, it doesn’t track. This isn’t like going to the Soviet Union and playing a show for a repressive regime, because it’s a closed society with little cultural exchange. Plenty of Saudis travel and live outside Saudi Arabia and plenty of Americans have lived in Saudi Arabia. It’s impossible to say he was ‘freer to speak his mind there,’ because the contract stipulations leaked and included specific topics there were off-limits. Other comics had their invitations rescinded for jokes. We know they were censored. I’m hoping Bill Burr pulled back because he was being censored. Otherwise, that would mean…

But this is where we are. Top, head-line comics, with plenty of money, will gladly play for a few dollars more to legitimize a country that is the embodiment of the backward stupidity they would otherwise ridicule. Or maybe it was always just a bit, like Michael Jackson using a falsetto when out in public, to make us think there was something there. Maybe they didn’t care what they said, or who they said it to, as long as the checks keep coming. If it means making fun of racists, bigots, and (Christian) fundamentalists, that’s fine. If tomorrow making fun of people of color, punching down on gays, Muslims, Jews, or free-thinking people makes more money, well, they can do those bits, too.

And to a larger degree we see companies, especially media companies, caving to pressure because already absurdly wealthy people could make more money “settling” with Donal Trump. We see colleges willing to give up intellectual freedom to preserve their jobs and money. These are institutions that should have a very real, necessary, and strong allergy to authoritarians. Media companies need that allergy because they need creative independence. Universities because they need freedom to think and explore ideas. Have they had to compromise in the past? Yes, and almost always those two industries have regretted it. It’s always a shameful part of their history they never hope to repeat again.

But that’s the beauty of Trump’s America and, in a smaller way, the Riyadh comedy festival. It lays bare the fact that the moral compass of people with money bends towards more money. Movie studios, TV networks, and publishers were always businesses first. But they couldn’t stop the editorial message coming from the creative people they needed to have a product to sell. Universities always needed to bend to their alumni, donors, and grantors, but couldn’t serve their purpose without giving academics broad liberty of opinion. And comedians have always had to put food on the table, pay the rent, and make a buck.

But the institutions, people, and companies with the greatest ability to do the right thing, to fight the right fight, and to stay on the right side of history, have shown they would rather just have the money. Even at the expense of what makes them valuable, hoping that it will all blow over as something else happens. And the next time Bill Burr is making fun of Donald Trump being an autocratic bigot you’ll forget he helped legitimize the kind of autocracy Donald wishes he had.

Maybe Whitney or Bill will do Trump’s next birthday gig, if the money’s right, and they’ll be free to speak their truth in any way that’s not prohibited in the contract.

Kreskin Not Needed

We don’t need a great fortune teller to explain what’s going to happen. We have been letting high income people and large companies avoid paying their share of taxes. Do they pay taxes? Yes. But it’s not unusual for a high income earner to pay at a 15 to 20% rate. Their employees might be paying at the 25-35% rate.

We recently had an anti-trust ruling on Google that, while they were a monopolist who caused a lot of market damage, stifled competition, and hurt their customers, nothing will happen to them. The same “nothing’ happened to Microsoft decades earlier. Nothing happened to Wall Street executives after the mortgage markets imploded due to their fraud. Nothing is likely to happen to Apple in its anti-trust case. Meta’s AI chat bots have lewd conversation with children, while admitting to basically stealing their training data from authors. Nothing will happen to them. Unusual options trades on thinly traded companies just before major announcements feel like they’re happening on an almost daily basis. No one is being picked up for insider trading.

What happens at the end of this, when we let major companies and the rich skirt on their tax burden, when we’ve destroyed the competitive business landscape to help make them a little more money, when we’ve gone into debt over and over again, in administration after administration, to cut their taxes or drive away burdensome regulations? What’s going to happen is that the people in the bottom 95% will be left to bear the burden of cleaning up after a party that they didn’t attend. They will own nothing, because anything worth owning will be held by the rich, who have super-charged the rate they accumulate wealth. They will use those piles of cash to buy anything worth having, from housing, to farm land, to water rights, to pristine wilderness.

The wealth gap between the top 1% and the bottom of the top 10% is becoming stupidly large. Never mind the middle 50% of Americans. And this is happening all over the world. A little faster in some countries, and a little slower in others. But at the end of the day, the super-rich will walk away just fine, but it will be rank and file citizens that will have to pay back the debt. At some point the acceleration of debt will be so unsustainable that either brutal austerity or massive inflation will follow.

And who owns that debt? Who do we need to pay back? It is the super-rich, the large investors, and the large corporations.

Why Everything Feels Broken

Once upon a time, if you wanted to watch television (a football game, a show, or whatever) you pushed a button and twisted a nob. That was the entirety of the user interface. The channels were clearly marked and number 2 through 13 and ‘U’. If you twisted the top knob to ‘U’, you had the choice of a whole slew of channels on a lower knob, marked UHF. These tended to be local, low-budget, smaller stations and public broadcasters. They were the kind of station that had a ‘Creature Feature’ movie night where the station owner’s nephew pretended to be Dracula. The whole interface was an on-off button, and a pair of knobs (or a keypad on a remote to select 00-99). When our family went to cable in the 1990s, it was at most 3 buttons pushes to select a channel. (And if you hit ‘4’ and just waited instead of typing in ‘004’ – chances are it would turn on channel ‘4’).

At my parents’ house, they now turn on the TV and are presented with the Roku welcome screen. Then they need to select their TV provider, Hulu, by navigating to that icon and selecting it. They are then taken to a list of users, for ‘personalized’ content. The just have the one. Then they need to hit the left arrow to switch to the left side of the navigation and the down arrow to select ‘live’. From there they can use the right arrow to make the current screen the focus. Using the ‘down’ array (for some reason) allows them to select a channel. But it doesn’t show them all the channels. Just the channels they traversed recently (although I think Hulu’s logic on ‘recent’ is a little screwy). For all the channels, they need to return to the left side navigation again, select what subset of channels they might want, and then scroll around until they find that channel.

Dozens of button clicks, four or five menus (depending on what you count), and having to navigate from Roku to Hulu, all to do something that once required nothing more than twisting a knob. And that’s if you do everything correctly.

For elderly people like my parents, this is a nightmare. For them the TV is clearly broken. They sometimes hit the wrong key. They sometimes get confused as to why they are prompted for new information. They forget if their show is on Hulu or Netflix. Depending on when you bought the Roku, the four buttons to take you directly to a service may or may not include any of the services you use. The interface is intentionally confusing to guide you to Roku’s or Hulu’s content or sponsored content or partners. And god forbid they have to log in to Hulu again for some reason, or there’s a new privacy policy to agree to, or there’s some promotional message. I’m often around as I help take care of them, so they hand me the remote in frustration and I put on the local news. But that’s old people, right? They don’t really count. (Have I got some news about what the future has in store for you, as well…)

Why does a lack of well designed products for the end user indicate a systemic problem in our society? From our perspective these things are broken. Products are now designed for the benefit of the provider and the third parties harvesting data. From their perspective, this is great. We have scroll through content we don’t want to watch or have to dig twice as hard to find something we need. We might get tricked and watch their ads. This is a feature for them. The TV manufacturer, Roku, and Hulu have no incentive to take my parents directly to a local channel to watch news at 6 pm. They have every incentive to drag them through all sorts of other content because it makes a little more money.

At no point, during my childhood and early adult-hood, did I have to agree to a EULA or privacy policy to watch television. Not because the executives at the TV manufacturer were better human beings, but because they had no way of collecting that data. But if they had a means of collecting that data, people would have blown a gasket. Keeping track of the books I read, the shows I watched, or where I went, was dystopian and Orwellian. Something we try no to think about, as the services and products we use capture that information and much more. And it’s easy to forget about the data market-places were this data can be aggregated from multiple sources and sold (without warrant) to the government. After a couple of decades of technological progress and slow incursions on our privacy, we are now the frogs looking at the boiling water and wondering ‘how did this happen?’

When you buy a smart TV, the makers argue sponsored content and information harvesting deals lower the cost to the consumer. You are told it’s good for you. Why would someone help subsidize your TV for some data and to push their content? So you buy things you don’t need. Can’t afford it? No problem – do it in four easy payments. (Including groceries – ugh!) The advertisers and content pushers want you to think you’re smarter than they are and somehow immune to their efforts. (Which is obviously true because you drink the beer of smart people everywhere, right?) How much does your data and attention ‘lower the price’ of the television? We have no idea. It could be $5 or it could be half the cost. But if it is half the cost, think how much the advertisers are getting out of that deal!

Data predation is coupled with a lack of options. It’s good for the consumer to have one search engine. It’s good for the consumer to have one operating system. It’s good for the consumer to have one choice, right? If it lowers prices, it’s got to be good for the consumer, right? That is the monopolist’s new trick. Just (promise to) keep the sticker price down. Unfortunately we can’t run the world with two different set of policies. When an anti-trust case is litigated, we can’t both break the monopolist and not break the monopolist to see which option results in a better world, ten years hence. We just have a mob of economists come through with their “objective” estimates of how much prices will go up or down. I can assure you that every monopolist has convincingly argued the world is a better place if they are allowed to integrate and lower costs to consumers.

But price isn’t the only lever a monopolist has. For example, they can be paid to push content you don’t want. Are you a business using Windows 11 Enterprise Edition? Why are some games pre-installed on your enterprise desktops and laptops? Would you be surprised to know that’s sponsored content? Look at the clickbait feed when you open Microsoft Edge or the start menu. Should that be on a work computer? What about a laptop you buy at the store, only to find you can’t uninstall some of the software? You could buy a premium product, like an Apple Mac. Or maybe you can’t buy a Mac, because your kid’s school, your work, or maybe just games you like are only on Windows. Microsoft can do this because they know you don’t have a choice. As a business you have few options, none of them exceptionally palatable.

Leena Khan tried to do something about it. She was hated by both the right and left (well, the donor part of the right and left). Ms. Khan always seemed in danger of being asked to step down. She was probably not the world’s greatest manager. She was willing to go after big tech, the woke companies the Republicans wanted to hurt, so even JD Vance once sang her praises. Flawed, and sometimes awkward, she did push back.

This is part of the fall. You are hung on a hook like a fattened pig and butchered to become a vendible commodity. Even if you don’t have an intellectual grasp of your exploitation, you feel it. It’s not that people in power have no incentive to fix it. They have the exact opposite incentive. The wealthy profit from this machine. And neither side is immune. You might find more sympathy among Democrats – but not necessarily more effort. Even if I sometimes thought her choices were peculiar, Ms. Khan was a rare moment when something was actually tried. So was the CFPB, which I’ll link through Wikipedia because I don’t know how much longer they will be around. The interests are aligned toward further extraction of your value, further monetization of your attention, and further driving you into debt.

Where is it taking us? At some point the exploitation is not compatible with a good life. One of two things can happen. We could have a genuine rebellion. We rise up and smash the machine. This sounds romantic, but as someone who has read a little history, I can tell you that revolutions can go very bad. The ballot box is less bloody and more predictable than the barricades. Whether it’s the terror following the French revolution, the rise of the authoritarian bolsheviks after the Russian revolution, or countless smaller coups and insurrections that lead to psychotically brutal regimes, a revolution can quickly turn autocratic. Some of which might be playing out in the current administration.

The second option is to meander forward. The temperature is managed well enough so the frog never knows it’s being boiled. Each year life gets shorter and more miserable. In this period, everyone is out for themselves. Everyone is cynical. The country descends into kleptocracy. We’ve already seen many of our leaders go from modest means to fantastic wealth on their government salaries. If you have sufficiently low morals and good connections, you live well during this future. Otherwise the good things slowly become memories. Remember when you just went to a doctor because your job provided health insurance? Or you could afford to buy a house? Or children weren’t a luxury good? Or teeth weren’t just rich people bones? Or you could just pay for a Big Mac meal once and not in four easy installments?

I would argue we are taking the second option. And that’s why it all feels broken. Because it is breaking, from our perspective. But it’s not a sudden, catastrophic event. It is getting slowly worse as we are mined for attention and data so we can be sold increasingly needless and expensive products. Our leaders are wielding power for the benefit of the wealthy, and the wealthy are rebuilding the world in their favor. The few protections our leaders once put in place to foster competition or prevent companies from predatory practices are being lifted, as the wealthy rewrite the rules. To do that they must break our world. We continue to elect leaders that are there because of the generous support of the monied interests that want to exploit us, rather than rejecting those leaders outright. At some point we should be asking why the predators at the door are so eager for us to support their candidates.

And that local UHF TV station? That’s been consolidated in the The Sinclair Group. The station owner’s nephew doesn’t do ‘Creature Feature’ any more. He peddles right wing talking points.

Meditations On Infrastructure

I wonder what Charles, son of Pepin the Short, king of the Franks and Lombards, thought as he made his way through Rome to be crowned by Pope Leo. Once a city of over a million souls, Rome had dwindled to between 50,000 and 100,000. Still, Rome was twice as populated as Paris and larger than the (by comparison) hamlets in the Carolingian empire. Most of Rome’s elites and maybe 1 in 7 ancient Romans overall were literate. In Charlemagne’s retinue, only a handful were literate. Almost certainly none of his rank and file soldiers. The great city in the year 800, Constantinople, was roughly half the size Rome was at its peak.

People no longer care for the term “Dark Ages” for the period between the fall of Rome and the more orderly middle to late Medieval period. But it was a step backward. Art, literacy, trade, and culture became smaller, more rare, and simpler. When Rome was briefly re-invaded by the Eastern Roman armies, reestablishing Roman control, it might have seemed that things were on the mend. During those centuries there were good years and bad years. From the summit to the nadir, it would be surprising if people saw the fall of Rome for what it was. I imagine many could not spot the rot from within, and of those who did, some exploited it for their gain, others refused to believe it, and the rest failed to act.

What does this have to do with technology?

Everything.

An empire provides two benefits. The first is trade and the second is communication. Trade allows for greater well-being. You can sell your stuff in more places and you can buy stuff from other places. Your quality of life, including your diet, are much better as goods flow freely through trade networks. Second, is the flow of ideas. You have access to many more thoughts and ways of thinking. Your progress is no longer limited to the smartest person in your village. You have access to the thoughts of the smartest people as far as technological reach allows.

The modern micro-processor the product of vast trade and communication networks. Designers from California, fabricators in Asia, sand from North Carolina, machines from Europe, and tens of thousands of companies. Hundreds of thousands of individuals are necessary to provide you with one modern CPU. Millions more provide the support chips, mother boards, assemblies, designs, and software to make the chip do something useful. The collaboration is possible because of safe networks (ASML can ship a machine to Taiwan without worrying India will steal it on the way), and intellectual goods (you can speed the design of a chip by licensing parts of it from other vendors).

But wait, didn’t the United States make its own chips? Yes, it did. But it wasn’t necessarily cost-effective. When the micro-processor had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even a few million transistors, they were fabricated in Texas, Washington, or California. But modern CPUs are at the very edge of physics, along with the much larger demand. Complexity and demand have made chip fabrication a highly refined and specialized industry. TSMC amortizes the insane costs of making a modern chip over many customers. Intel cannot amortize the cost of producing Intel chips just over Intel customers. Running a fab profitably means running it near capacity. Intel understands it’s competition is TSMC, not AMD. It is unlikely to succeed.

The modern world that produces an EPYC processor with 128 cores for a reasonable number of thousands (or hundreds) dollars may already be collapsing. We won’t know until we have the benefit of a few hundred years of hind-sight. The United States has been the guarantor of safe trade in goods. The US is stepping back from that role, focusing on a more narrow problem of one island in the Pacific. The Island that fabricates most processors. At the same time, the US has erected trade barriers and tariffs, slowing international trade. For the first time in a long time, there is a prospect the free flow of commerce may become less certain. It won’t be sudden. Like the fall of Rome, it will take decades. For example, the start may be increased insurance, or no insurance. But slowly routes will close.

The current administration is also attacking the free flow of information. This includes an assault on the statistics and information provided by the government itself. Data considered “DEI” related has been scrubbed, and the researchers and teams providing that information fired. We see an attempt to control Universities, which are parts of the flow of information. We even have the prospect that government statisticians will be fired if they announce unwelcome information. Information and research provides our modern life (electronics, medicine, arts, and culture), and freely disseminating that information makes us richer. Along with an attack on research, through lawsuits against news outlets, we are seeing private sector organizations self-edit if not self-censor. Over time, quality information will be more rare and more expensive.

But the current administration won’t live forever, right? Even if repudiated in the next series of elections (and putting aside the slim but credible notion of a coup to stay in power), the population supporting that administration is still there. They are cheering as the existing system is ripped apart. The breakdown of foreign trade and stifling information is a feature. For some it is because parochial, xenophobic, or tribal loyalty is more important than even their own well being. For some it is because the current chaos is hurting the parts of society they don’t like. For some, it will because they profit from the chaos. In that chaos they are free to pursue policies that make themselves richer.

After this administration the people who made it possible are not going away. Charlemagne rode into a long-defeated city not because the invading barbarians were superior to Rome in technology, society, economy, or government. Rome rotted from within. Because the rot was too profitable for some, or the cost of fixing the rot to great for others, or they preferred the rot for other reasons. Once it sets in, the rot may be ultimately irreversible. Nothing else I say will make sense unless these ideas are understood: that the fall is largely invisible to those falling; the fall results in a smaller, sicker, more parochial, less developed world; and that some are incentivized to participate in the fall. I’m not altogether sure any more than a handful (if any) of Charlemagne’s subjects understood how much poorer and smaller their world had become. Or that it would be hundreds of years more before real progress returns to Western Europe.