Are my eyes really blue?

The Democratic Leadership Council was formed in the mid-1980s to cope with the problem that the Democrats went 1-4 in Presidential elections from 1968 to 1988. It was Southern in nature – Bill Clinton was its leader for the longest time – and it was focused squarely on what could be considered the New South Governor model. Almost every Southern state had one (except, tellingly, Alabama) – could be from either party, but was always some good-looking young white guy who tried to downplay the racial angles of Southern politics while coming across as broadly pro-business and hammering hard on the importance of education. Writ large, and looked at with 30 years of hindsight, it comes across as “we’re going to take care of you, traditional minorities, but we’re going to do it as quietly as we can so as not to scare the white folks – and when push comes to shove, we’re going to err on the side of not scaring the white folks.”

It was a clear-cut effort to be the lesser of two evils. And at a time when the Democrats still had a significant Southern component (lest we forget, Clinton won Georgia and West Virginia pretty handily in 1992), it was broadly feasible and tactically clever. But it had two major problems. For one, it perpetuated the idea that the “Reagan Democrat” – the working-class and usually Southern white voter – was the most to be desired and somehow counted more than female or black or Yankee voters, maybe because they thought those would always hold their nose and pull the Democratic lever. And for two, it staked everything on capturing a voter base that the Republicans had spent a quarter-century diligently working to pry away from the national level down. Once the Gingrich Revolution completed the capture of the South, the DLC strategy was shot straight to shit.

Flash forward twenty years and here we are.  Things have changed again. In an age of political ennui and indifference and apathy, the biggest risk isn’t defection, it’s that your base will stay home. The GOP has relied on base activation almost exclusively in the 21st century, with tremendous results in mid-term elections every time out save one. The Democrats got incredibly lucky with Obama’s appeal to black and young voters, but at present, those blocs are split between two different primary candidates (and the enthusiastic youth are lining up behind arguably the less electable one). But the demographic component of the New South Governor strategy is of less interest to me than the economic one.

You see, the New South Governors were eager and anxious to create a “good bidness environment,” which meant tax cuts and economic incentives to get your auto plant to go to Smyrna or Spring Hill or Vance instead of Dearborn or Fort Wayne or Sandusky. It meant unbalancing your tax code with the result that somebody got socked with ridiculous income tax or property tax or sales tax to make up for the cuts (which is how a resident of Birmingham could wind up paying 9% sales tax on everything, food and medicine included, and a state income tax that started at $5000). It means, in essence, giving away the game and imitating the GOP so as to get the business angle off the table. And in the rush to be business friendly, the Democrats left a gap in their coverage. A fatal one, as it turns out, because that gap left just enough room for Ralph Nader to get some traction beating his drum. And now that drum has been picked up by Bernie Sanders, and he’s got rhythm, as it turns out.

Because despite the economic recovery, there are still huge gaps in the economy. Nothing has replaced the manufacturing sector as a source of good livelihood for high-school graduates without a college degree. And with the college degree as a necessary but not sufficient criterion for employment, lots of folks are out there on the starting line with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and taking jobs that a) barely service the debt and b) don’t actually need a college degree as anything more than a signifier of what a high school diploma used to stand for: some base level of education to float your resume over the transom. If a degree is so damned important, how do we get swamped with all these stories of people dropping out of school to create their whizzy tech thing?

Which is the other problem: having so many people start their professional life shackled to a debt greatly decreases the flexibility in what you can do. You can’t afford to take jobs that are important and do necessary work but don’t pay enough. (Honestly, I don’t know how the hell anyone becomes a teacher out of college anymore.) Couple people in debt to the new generation of app-enabled contractor service jobs, and you’ve not only invented an entire new class of day labor, you’ve let employers off the hook. Who needs to feel guilty about paying insufficient wages if they can always just go pick up a couple of days a week of driving Uber or doing Instacart deliveries? And then Uber slashes their rates, and Instacart slashes theirs, and you’re back to “well you can just hustle harder and make a living doing this full-time” and next thing you know, you’re on the 80-hours-a-week schedule.

Maybe this was easier in the shadow of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Maybe there was a time when demand was high, unions were strong, and management looked at the money and said “there’s enough to go around” instead of viewing every penny spent on labor as a penny that could have been profit. But we’ve had three substantial recessions since the last time “socialist” meant anything other than “I’m a right-winger in search of some way to slander anyone to the left of Ayn Rand” and no round of downsizing or offshoring or outsourcing has been meaningfully reversed. The clothing comes from Bangladesh instead of Russellville, the electronics are assembled in Shenzen instead of Fremont or Fort Worth, and you have the opportunity and flexibility of free agency instead of actual job security. The net impact of the last thirty years, the productivity revolution and globalization, has been to transform and expand the day labor class in America.

Could we even bring it back? Consider the iPhone in my pocket. Donald Trump thinks he can somehow make Apple make them in the United States, which, okay, let’s just take it as read that we can move an entire supply chain and manufacturing base that hasn’t existed in this country in over a decade. Sure. No problem. Even allowing for that particular impossibility, from how many companies has Apple taken a bite? Consider where I was in, say, 2000: I had a PDA (Palm), cellphone (Nokia), Walkman (Sony), pager (Motorola), camera (Kodak), plus a regular record store (Sam Goody). How many of those companies even exist any more? Everyone but Sony either got axquired or bankrupted, and none of them ever the ability to replace all the others. That’s not even a question of a new company replacing an old, that’s entire categories of consumer goods done away with at all but a superfluous level. Point-and-shoot cameras, cassette players, consumer pagers and PDAs – those are done. They aren’t coming back. It’s not enough that rust-belt heavy manufacturing has decamped elsewhere, the cutting-edge high-tech sector eats its own just as quickly.

And the other problem is that all those broke folk in the red states, whose good solid blue collar livelihoods have been drummed out of existence by the invisible hand of globalization – where do they get the things they need to get by? How about Wal-Mart? And how does Wal-Mart sustain those Everyday Low Prices? By ruthlessly slashing away at supplier contracts until the supplier has to resort to outsourcing and offshoring, and the circle of life continues – because we can’t charge enough for American-made goods to pay American workers a decent wage to make them, and in turn the workers can’t afford to buy American-made goods. Economic death spiral. If you want to blame somebody, miss me with Apple and instead ask what the hell they’ve been thinking in Bentonville these last couple of decades. And be grateful that government and unions still required some measure of made-in-America to keep up what manufacturing we still have in those sectors.

So there you have it. We turned the American Dream into a luxury good, and along the way one side spent years whipping up the oooga-booga at the foreigners and the gays and the MOOslims and such.  And the folks whose world was slowly starting to crumble believed what they were told, and grew to buy into this “you’re entitled to your own facts” mentality. And right on time, here comes a prominent TV figure offering simple solutions, and he’s rich so he must be smart, and you get what we have now. Which is terrifying, but so so utterly predictable.  And now…who knows.

That’s the question I keep asking myself. How much of the state of the world is just me getting older and crankier and how much is actually great heaping quantities of bullshit? Moreover, how much of this has always been there and is just now getting noticed because of social media and technology proliferation?  I saw a line somewhere about “amazing how as soon as everyone got a camera on their phone, police brutality went up and UFO sightings went away” and I think there’s something to that, especially for things like police shootings and stuff that was more easily hushed up in days of local centralized media.  After all, when a major city has four or five TV stations and two newspapers, there aren’t a lot of channels to get the word out.

But I’m less concerned with coverage than things going the other direction. Consider the likes of Donald Trump, or indeed any major right-wing political figure in the 21st century who trades heavily in what can only be described as “racism that took a bath and put on shoes.” Twenty-five years ago, in the age of David Duke, this meant a lot of trafficking in newsletters and flyers, things that you had to go to some effort to connect with. If you wanted somebody to hype you up about immigration and the threat to America, you had to make an effort to connect with some like-minded people. Even into the 1990s, there was plenty of that sort of thing on AM shock radio, but it was considered unsavory at best and was sort of limited in what it could do – it was broadcasting and not particularly effective. Now, Facebook and email forwards are synonymous with the kind of old-white-people racism that had a tough time proliferating beyond personal contact. Or rather, the scope of personal contact has increased beyond reason.

Consider the Clinton Chronicles, that pastiche of fever-dream conspiracy theory hawked by right-wing nutjobs throughout the 90s with all the various anti-Clinton slurs bound up in it: sex, drug trafficking, murder, you name it. It was limited in its distribution by whatever holy rollers were willing to sell you a copy (and risk their tax-exempt status) or whatever radio hosts were willing to flack for it. And while it was out there, it was also limited to this subculture and had trouble leaking out of the sewer (although the willingness of Congressional Republicans to do just that was probably the first sign of the modern conservatism through which we new suffer).

By contrast: how long did it take for the “Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya” thing to proliferate? And how long was it sustained in the complete absence of evidence? And how long as it kept up despite the lack of evidence – and indeed the copious evidence to the contrary not to mention the limits of basic reason? It’s been sustained, and remains sustainable, because technology allows the like-mindeed to keep the fires burning, to keep feeding the madness with minimal effort.

Or consider the ongoing issues with GamerGate harassment or how easy it is to turn social media into an unlimited firehose of abuse. In the past, what would be the opportunity cost for thousands of people to bombard a target – whether it be Brianna Wu or the Nashville Tennessean – with threats and hate speech?  You’ve got to sit down, write something out, put it in an envelope, find an address to send it to, pay for a stamp and get it in the mail – who the hell has time for that?  Now you can just dash off something threatening with a single click, and rally thousands of like-minded people to do the same – when a couple of decades ago, you might have been hard-pressed to locate thousands of like-minded people, let alone connect with them. Now Reddit and Twitter have done it for you.

I keep going back to Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age for this, and the Neo-Victorian society that concluded that the solutions to these technological issues could not be technological: it had to be cultural. Our notional asshole above, in addition to having to find stationery and stamps and everything else, had to contend with the fact that society would frown on what he (almost always he, for some reason) was doing. Now he’s just one angry tweeter in a storm of thousands, with the protection that comes from just being a face in the crowd and (to borrow a line from WWII airpower doctrine) the fact that the bomber will always get through. You can’t block all 10,000 harassing tweeters, not with accuracy and precision. In the end, you either have to just let it happen or retreat and bail out altogether. Neither of which seems to be an acceptable solution, but right now, we don’t have door number three.

I don’t know if it’s manners, or norms, or what it is. It’s just that there used to be some things that were clearly beyond the pale. Some people misused those manners and norms, and so apparently the decision was taken that rather than curb the misuse, we should throw out the idea of manners and norms altogether. And now we’re reaping all the benefits – there are no standards of conduct, and no ways of enforcing the old ones without making trouble. Call out the guy smoking on the train platform beneath the “No Smoking” sign, and you’re the asshole. Writ large, there’s nobody to call you out if you decide to say something completely different one day from what you said 24 hours earlier. Everyone gets their own opinion, everyone gets their own facts, and the results are predictable.

Ian Malcolm’s Jurassic Park warning about dinosaur DNA is even more apt when you consider that we’ve put equal access to the most powerful communication instrument in the world into the hands of everyone, with no rules and no safety catch: “you’ve spent so much time thinking HOW you could do it that you never considered whether you SHOULD.” We’ve put the entire elementary school out to recess with only one teacher supervising, and that teacher just keeled over. And when you decide that whatever you want to do is fine, without any sort of societal framework to contain it, you get everything from people blowing stoplights because it’s inconvenient to Donald Trump as the leading candidate to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

Yes, some things were always this bad, and it’s just now becoming easy for people to see. But we’ve also created entirely new ways to make things worse, eroded the things that helped prevent them getting worse, and we aren’t going to get them back into the bottle. It’s past time to start thinking of how we can make a society that makes it possible to live with what we’ve done to ourselves.

Two companies, two plug-in hybrids, two disappointments.  First came the Chevy Volt, which reminds me of the old Mercury capsules: you don’t get in, you put it on. There’s no damn room in that car. Yes, the plug-in hybrid system is genuinely impressive, especially when you can pull a paddle behind the wheel for regeneration and slow the car almost as fast as braking while getting twice the power back to the battery. But there’s no sunroof, the trunk is not particularly capacious, I don’t know how well I’d be able to fit in the back seat (if at all) and it’s inherently compromised – it feels like it’s smaller on the inside than out, as if all the space afforded by being a large-ish compact gets used in the service of the battery system.

So we drove the Ford Fusion Energi instead, and that was even more compromised. Sure, full size, and sure, there’s a sunroof, but it has two completely separate power systems and two completely separate batteries depending on whether it’s in pure-electric or hybrid mode…and based on that, the trunk space is virtually non-existent. No getting around it. So the Fusion Energi is shot.  At this point, it’s going to have to be a regular electric-first hybrid…and that means back to the Prius.

Except the Prius V – for all the space, for the cavernous backseat, for the flat floorboard that means a legit five adults can sit in it – has no sunroof that opens and has a horrific proprietary entertainment system instead of just implementing CarPlay or Android Auto. And to even get the panoramic roof with retractable shades means the highest trim level and a technology package on top of that. So that’s a special order, can’t just get something off the lot. Which puts us back to square one.

For a moment, square one meant the hybrid Jetta – which inexplicably means a seven-speed automatic transmission and better highway than city mileage, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a hybrid and makes me think it’s a mild hybrid at best, something where the gas will always be running if the car’s moving. Not particularly useful.  And I’m wary of buying any Volkswagen that has more electrical systems than the typical model, never mind a more complicated transmission than the ultimately-disappointing Rabbit.

And then comes word that the ninth-generation Chevrolet Malibu will have a hybrid option based on the electrical system in the Volt.  Not a plug-in, this will be running the gas as often as a Prius, but it does get up to 55 mph before the gas motor has to kick on and will supposedly get an aggregate 47mpg with superior city mileage. And it uses CarPlay. And it has the same regenerator paddle as the Volt. And it has a real sunroof.  

Only problem is, it won’t physically ship for a couple of months at least. But it’s all largely proven technology; it’s not like buying the first iteration of Chevrolet’s electrical system (or even its first cut at a hybrid; there was a mild-hybrid Malibu some years ago). And it’s possible I could buy it at invoice on an employer discount and continue my streak of never having to dicker over the cost of a new automobile. And it would mean not having to install some sort of charger system in the house. And I could still pull through the drive-thru at In N Out with a clear conscience while still getting to Disneyland on one tank of gas.

For now, it’s the leader in the clubhouse. Given that my family once went from 1970 to 1993 without buying any car that wasn’t a Chevy, and that there was always one in the driveway or garage for the last 46 years, it just feels right. We’ll see if that holds up once I’m sat in the driver’s seat.

I went to the otolaryngologist this morning for a consult, to see if taking a Roto-Rooter to my nose won’t fix some of my apnea and breathing issues (spoiler: it almost certainly will, and in an outpatient procedure at that). But one of the things she did was put the scope up my nose (after a generous squirting of Lidocaine first) and do some inspection, which I could follow on the screen overhead.

She stopped and looked at something and said “You had your adenoids out with your tonsillectomy.”  I affirmed I had, and she said “I thought so, you can see the scarring here and here.”

And I looked, and saw for the first time some forty-year-old scars I never knew I had, from an operation performed two thousand miles away in a hospital that was torn down over thirty years ago.

There’s a lot there to unpack.

…the conventional wisdom is already firming up that it’s going to be Hillary vs Trump. And that’s terrifying to me. Not because I have any doubt that HRC would do a fine job as President – at least as fine a job as it’s possible to do in the 21st century with our inherently-broken system – but because Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line, and I am positive that for every Bernie millenial that sighs and punches out of the process there’s a Republican who will forget they tweeted #NeverTrump last week and join the National Review in deciding that no matter how bad The Donald is, he’s still better than allowing the Evil Queen Bitch-Goddess of all Republican demonology for the last 25 years to make her way into the White House.

Memo to all Democrats thinking of crossing the aisle to pull the lever for Trump because he’s more beatable: you better fucking know you’ll be able to beat him.

Last year at this time I wasn’t even blogging to speak of. The year before, when I was reflecting on the year gone by, I noted that things were on a slow steady slide, each year seemingly less hopeful than the last, and I guess that was the case because in 2015 there wasn’t a post at all. So the fact that I’m even typing this out is a good sign.

The wider world hasn’t gotten any better. In fact, it’s probably gotten worse. This year was rife with shitty developments – politics (seriously? Donald Trump? SERIOUSLY??), divorce (both the best man and matron of honor from our wedding in this past year), mechanical (we’re looking at the prospect of having two car payments in 2017 unless we’re willing to roll the dice on only having one car), health (after allergy shots and three kinds of nasal steroids and a CPAP machine, I still can’t sleep through the night)…but one thing did change.  I ran out of patience, I put my resume out, and then I told the management that I was on the market. Lo and behold, they found a new job for me internally, doing exactly what I’d been doing minus the parts I hated doing…and for a 10% raise.

That helped. I’ve noted before, long ago, that work as an adult takes up a good half of your waking life: not just at the office, but shaping when and where you can go for lunch and how you commute there and back and how you have to plan other bits of your life, and anything that’s going to eat up 50% of your conscious life has to be something that at the very least doesn’t make your life actively worse. I think maybe I crested that with this change. It doesn’t make my life substantially better, as I’m still surrounded by everything I hate about Silly Con Valley on a daily basis, but it’s not a constant source of existential despair anymore, so I got that going for me, I guess.

When you go by Stagger Lee, you rather expect 44 and 45 to be good years. It’s right there in the songs, after all. 44 is that hard eight on the craps table that made money at my bachelor party. 44 is Riggo plowing through a 50 Gut pulling-guard block in the days when football was fun, rather than a boundless misery. 44 sounds and feels like somebody set with adulthood and nothing much left to prove, which is what I’ve been trying to prove for over twenty years now without success.  And yet, I’ve always skewed older than I really was. Maybe I’m finally hitting equilibrium. It would be nice.

So we set forth on the goals: don’t give up on fixing the health issues. If it means having to liposuction the inside of my nose to breathe at night, do it. If it means the monthlong moratorium on hard liquor has to be extended, I’ll live with it. If it means that cutting out carbs and soda and eating salad for lunch every day and going to see all manner of exotic specialists will actually produce results, then I’ll have the results.  And I’ll plug in the headphones of a Sunday evening, with a reading lamp and a Kindle with the wireless turned off, and listen to music and sip something out of a fresh jug of oatmeal stout and do the pub thing at home where it’s inexpensive and easy to get up the stairs.

Do the things that make you happy. Stop doing things that don’t. And if you have a chance to book eight days in London, do it.

The GOP establishment and other Presidential candidates assumed Trump would fail. They assumed Trump would flop. They assumed the public support for Trump was all name recognition.  And when he was pulling 20% and everyone else was in the 5-10% range, it made perfect sense to just wait around, hold fire, pick off a few of the weak stragglers, don’t give offense to Trump or his supporters, and then when The Donald manages to blow it and falls out of the race, you’ll be there to scoop the pot and ride to victory.

Except.

Everyone stuck around way too long, because with nobody breaking 10%, everyone was equally viable and there hadn’t been any votes yet to say otherwise. Everybody let Trump go and go and go, assuming he couldn’t stick around long enough to make a difference. And now, it looks like we’re down to only three options: the callow youth that’s the de facto “establishment” choice, who barely passes a Turing test and is in desperate need of an OS upgrade; the loudmouth Texas-Canadian who literally no other elected Republican Senator can stand (Lindsey Graham literally said that if you stabbed Cruz to death on the Senate floor, and the trial was held in the Senate, you would walk); and Donald Trump, who is the final boss of the GOP’s multi-decade game of post-reality politics.

This started a long, long time ago. It started in the late 1960s when Kevin Phillips posited the plan to pry away racist Democrats down South and use them to craft a Republican majority. It moved down the field substantially in 1988, when Lee Atwater built the George H.W. Bush campaign around the Pledge of Allegiance and racist fearmongering around crime. (Sidenote: people now bashing Hillary Clinton for her husband’s 1994 crime bill have no memory of the combined firepower of a War On Drugs coupled with Willie Horton.) And then, when Newt Gingrich finally captured the Congress, the controls were put in the hands of the South. From there, the Southern style of politics prevailed in an increasingly homogeneous party: with no substantive policy differences and Congressional districts increasingly gerrymandered to the point of guaranteed victory, the determining factor in Republican primaries became “who can sling the shit” – and in a political environment increasingly propelled by AM radio and Fox News, the GOP went right along.

And in this bubble, they rapidly approached a post-reality state. Never mind opinions; the conservative mind increasingly felt entitled to its own facts, especially in a strange and changing and scary world. When Bush the Younger luck-boxed into the Oval Office despite receiving half a million fewer votes than his opponent, he managed to spin the sucker-punch of September 11 into “He kept us safe” and used the aftermath to build the “live in fear” climate that has permeated the GOP ever since. There’s always something to be scared of – Mexicans, Muslims, the War on Christmas, all the gays that are going to force you to marry them, death panels to grind you into meatloaf for bilingual millennials, whatever. Nothing had to have the most remote basis in reality, which is why we had to suffer through years of “where’s the birth certificate” and “You lie” and all manner of made-up horseshit.

And there are really two places to lay the blame for this. One is on the much-maligned “mainstream media,” which was content to live neck-deep in the Golden Mean of false equivalence. Opinions differ, both sides do it, look a white girl is missing.  Disgraceful, but not as bad as the rest of the GOP. The Republican party has known for years – YEARS – that they were running campaigns and elections based on talk-radio bullshit and e-mail forwards, and they did nothing. They were content to keep riding the tiger…and now that they’ve slipped and fallen off, that tiger is hungry.

Thing is…Trump is a reality buffoon.  Cruz is a Christo-fascist asshole. Rubio is a shellshocked rookie. Carson is a human Ambien who’s not qualified for elected office above “hospital lounge coffee committee”. Kasich is an afterthought who still can’t break into double-digits in this crowd of insane people.  Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is an avowed Jewish-atheist self-proclaimed socialist in a world where Ronald Reagan in 1988 and the Heritage Foundation in 1994 are too left-wing for the GOP, and Hillary Clinton is the top-of-the-pantheon evil bitch-queen of GOP nightmares for twenty-five years and counting.  In theory and on paper, not one of these candidates – not one – can possibly win an American Presidential election.

I’m too scared to shit.

Right now, there is a truly horrific combination of circumstances unfolding at the University of Tennessee.  Multiple women are suing the university for enabling a culture of tolerance around sexual assault, and it’s being alleged that a football player who came to the defense of a woman was ostracized and ultimately physically attacked by his teammates, that the (current) head football coach referred to him as a “traitor”, and now, in a live press conference, the athletic director is making the argument that “bad things happen if you choose to go out at night.”

This is going to seem like I’m trying to score points at the expense of a rival, and it really isn’t. I don’t think you have to do much to score points in comparison to UT in most anything, save for maybe four hours a year on the football field, but it’s instructive to compare what happened when four Vanderbilt football players – all new to the program within a year – were implicated in a truly ghastly assault. In that instance, they were reported to the police by the university. Less than 48 hours after that, they were kicked off the team, kicked out of school and barred from campus. Their case went into criminal prosecution, not any kind of administrative internal process, and when a fifth player – whose character and conduct in all other regards was above reproach – was sent an incriminating message by one of the four, and told him to “delete that shit,” that fifth player was kicked off the team as well and referred for criminal prosecution, whereupon he took a plea deal and gave evidence against the four.

I say all that not to laud Vanderbilt, because that’s what ought to happen. You don’t get a cookie for doing the shit you’re supposed to do. Somebody does wrong, you prosecute them, you expel them, you don’t bury things or hush them up or slide it under the rug with some vague student-judiciary kangaroo court. And yet, while that’s what Vanderbilt does, it doesn’t seem to be what anyone else does.  Consider Tennessee, consider Florida State and the Jameis Winston horseshit, consider the allegations around Treon Harris at Florida, consider any number of things. Throw a dart, you’ll hit a football program with a rape problem somewhere.

This is what you have to compete against. You can try to play clean, you can try to do the right thing, you can do everything in your power to abide by the law and get your players to do the same – and then they have to go out and go up against other programs where the standard is “we’ll hush things up and get you off the hook.” Programs where all manner of misconduct – academic, criminal, whatever – is quietly buried for the sake of maximizing the win total.  And how the fuck are you meant to compete in a league and a sport that says “anything goes” without burying yourself in the muck?

I’ve said for years that Vanderbilt shouldn’t be in the SEC. I believe it, and I stand by it. It’s just that now I’m starting to wonder whether maybe we just shouldn’t be in the college football business at all.

What the FBI wants Apple to do isn’t so much opening the back door as it is deactivating the alarm and taking the deadbolt and burglar bars off the front door.  They are asking to disable the functions that wipe the phone after 10 bad tries with a password, and make it possible to enter the PIN via electronic means (currently you can only enter the PIN via the touchscreen, not via any sort of external keyboard or other device). Basically they want to make it easier to brute-force the phone, which – if the suspect used any sort of complex password rather than a 4- or 6-digit numeric PIN – may or may not even let them in anytime soon. 

More to the point, despite the FBI’s disavowal of any interest beyond this one phone, other law enforcement agencies in the US are lining up to have Apple do that voodoo to phones they have. And so we go sledding down the slippery slope. You don’t want to know how many demands like this China or Russia are likely to make. And even so, a bare majority of the American public is siding with the FBI, because A TERRISS. It’s the same reasons that Fast Eddie Snowden’s revelations made no impact outside of the EFF offices – the public takes for granted that technology companies can do whatever they want and cares about privacy not at all, especially so long as law enforcement jumps up and down yelling LOOK A TERRISS.

Apple’s going to take this to the rack – they have the money, they can hire the best and bloodthirstiest lawyers (and have already retained master criminal now trying to get into heaven Ted Olsen), they can pay contempt fines and legal fees with what Tim Cook found in the couch cushions at lunch – but ultimately it may not matter, because Uncle Sam has got the hydrogen bomb and nobody’s going to privilege privacy and personal security over O GOD A TERRISS, not in this administration or any one to come – simply because Republicans don’t believe in it and Democrats are terrified of what would happen if another 9/11 happened on their watch (not that having violated the privacy of a million people would buy them an inch of slack with the GOP, but so it goes). 

And of course Donald Trump is now advising people to boycott Apple – even as he continues tweeting from an iPhone. Personally, this makes me want to run out and buy the notional so-called iPhone 5SE the day it ships, whether I need it or not. But that’s for another time.

The last couple of posts have led me to think about a few things.  For one, just how godawful the current crop of tech bros are – I haven’t decided yet whether this generation is godawful or whether social media has made it easier to see how godawful they are, but you can check out this quiz and see for yourself how it’s been lately.  Note especially that this is all more or less since 2013, which is about the time I started to feel like there was something very wrong with this place (actually that was more toward summer-fall 2012, but anyway).

Now consider my oft-repeated remark about how the smartphone crossed the finish line in 2013 with the original Moto X and the 64-bit, TouchID-equipped iPhone 5S. I hadn’t really thought about it, but how many of the tech things I rely on in my normal life have come along since then? Stuff like MarsEdit and WordPress for this very blog. Or Twitter and Instagram, the principal tools of my social media. Or Facebook and Tumblr, equally important to other people. Or iTunes, or the iTunes Music Store, or podcasting, or podcasting apps, or RSS (which has arguably gone backward, no thanks to Google, of which yadda yadda), or DVRs, or WatchESPN and HBOGo, or tools like Evernote or Foursquare or the like. In fact, I would argue that the only truly new thing in the last three years that I rely on, on a daily basis, is Slack.

What are we waiting on? The Apple Watch and its Android-based counterparts exist, yes, but even after six months I could certainly get by without it on my arm. Handy? Sure. Useful? Sometimes. Necessary? Not at all, and it’s one more thing to worry about charging. Wearable technology topped out with the Fitbit and hasn’t budged that much. Internet of Things? Not happening yet, for obvious reasons – who needs a thermostat or home security camera that keeps calling back in to Shenzen? If I had to guess, the biggest innovation to come down the pipeline in the last couple of years is that the United States has finally separated hardware from service in mobile telephony (largely because the phone part is ancillary and the “cell companies” are now mobile data companies).

But Apple is largely doing incremental stuff.  Google is doing even less – all the money is going on pie-in-the-sky moonshots whose principal purpose is to clog traffic around El Camino Real and Shoreline. Facebook has only become more annoying, Twitter has only become more like Facebook, a new social media app washes up on shore and out to sea again in a single afternoon. Uber has blown up – as you would expect of any company that gets literally billions of dollars shot out of a cannon without showing a profit or going public – but still exists in regulatory and legal limbo that could decapitate it before it even has to mark its valuation to market (and no, I don’t think Uber is more valuable than General Motors), while a million other companies try to be “Uber but for X” and hope against hope that they too can scoop pots of Y Combinator-flavored subsidy capital via regulatory arbitrage.

Maybe that’s why this current crop of tech bros makes me see purple with rage and want to walk up and down Market breaking teeth with a ball bat. Steve Jobs succeeded despite being a dick. Larry Ellison became a billionaire in spite of a defective personality. Tony Stark is a fictional character. None of those guys put a dent in the universe because they were assholes, they did it even though they were assholes. These assholes are making a post hoc ergo propter hoc error, and never mind a dent – most of them can’t make a scratch.