computers and politics
Computers and Politics - I am happy to say that the Enron story has, for the moment, put the hyperbolic stories about Microsoft on the backburner at many news outlets. Just a few days ago I saw Steve Forbes make a very interesting connection between the tech industry and Enron, though. He pointed out that, while everyone is desperately trying to find evidence of political payoffs in the Enron multi-billion dollar implosion; nobody has bothered to look for political influence-peddling in the multi-trillion dollar Internet bubble implosion.
This comment resonated with me, since I just finished reading the book “How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley”. The book is not actually meant to be a criticism, but is more like a smug, bragging account of how smart these people were; sort of like, “look at how smart we geeks are; we figured out how to invent a new economy and we took over a political party.” It was written mostly during the time when many people still believed that there was such a thing as a “new economy” where the rules didn’t apply anymore. So in this context, the brazen political influence peddling by people who had zero revenues and bragged about “burn rate” did not seem so ominous. After all, these people had just succeeded in creating “the single largest creation of wealth in human history”, so jumping into politics was just the next personal challenge for these veritable supermen, right? Now that we have seen that the bubble was actually just “the single largest con-game in human history”, it’s clear that these people should have spent more time rising to the challenge of running their businesses before deciding that they needed additional challenges. But as long as they thought they were successful businessmen, at least their motives for the political shenanigans are beyond reproach. I mean, after all, it was only people like Alan Greenspan and Warren Buffet who were pointing out the fundamental instability of these businesses during the height of the bubble. It’s not like these people had any real warnings, like the Sherron Watkin’s memo to Enron. In the case of the dot-com bubble, it was only people like Buffet and Greenspan playing contrarian, so these folks can be forgiven for not realizing what a house of cards their power-drunken manipulations were based on.
Now, I want to be clear that I don’t see this as a Democrat and Republican thing. Obviously, the general perception is that Enron was pro-Republican and anti-Democrat, but the facts have (big surprise) proven this generalization to be completely wrong. By the same token, “How to Hack a Party Line” supports the common perception that the Democrats are thralls of the anti-Microsoft Silicon Valley gangstas. But just like Enron, this is an inaccurate generalization. In both cases, the political payoffs were sprinkled liberally across both parties. And I think Steve Forbes is correct to see another common thread — in both cases, while it is certain that some of the money was of the traditional PAC kind meant to further certain issues, there was a component to the political giving that goes beyond “normal” largesse. If you are swindling a large amount of people, it is never a bad idea to make the law enforcement a part of the swindle so that they have something to gain by your success, and (more importantly) they are less likely to prosecute for fear of getting implicated in scandal when you implode. Blackmailing politicians (this is sort of “soft blackmail”, like “soft money”) to minimize exposure for yourself is completely different from issue-based PAC advocacy, and is a party-blind activity.