In Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash, an incredibly prescient take on the Internet when it was still in its infancy, there is the following throw-away scene:
Another man duck-walks across the flight deck.... He's about sixty, with a dirigible of white hair that was not ruffled in any way by the downdraft.
"Hello, everyone," he says cheerfully.
"Who are you?" Tony says.
The new guy looks crestfallen. "Greg Ritchie," he says.
Hold that thought.
Our President (God, how I hate to admit it) is, in popular legend, a real estate tycoonand a consummate artist of the deal. In reality, he is a con-man, a self-promoter of the highest order, an ignoramus, a buffoon, but look where that has got him? To the pinnacle of the political hierarchy. There is no way to deny it. That’s the truth. Donald S. Trump, the titular head of the free world.
But who does he really he represent? The theory is that he won election because of all those forgotten rural voters, the non-college educated white folk who have been left behind as all the factory jobs went to China and India. And the coal miners of course. The few that are left.
I know a little about coal mining. I live in a town called Coalmont, TN, in Grundy County, which has the distinction of being the poorest county in TN. Yes, the coal mining jobs are all gone. There is a coal miner’s museum a couple of towns over. You can go there and you will see references to people named Meeks, or Nunley, or Caulfeldt, all still common names among my neighbors.
The jobs left in the 1980s. After that, Tracy City, the largest town in the county, became known as the place that cars went to die, after they were stolen and stripped. Across the canyon from where I live, there are several examples of cars or trucks that were stripped and pushed to roll until they encountered a tree large enough to stop them.
By the time that I moved here, the meth epidemic was just ending, and the prescription pill boom just beginning. The latter is a little more controlled. The pushers have white coats and M.D.s.
But the coal jobs are not coming back. In Coalmont, it was just too expensive to extract the remaining coal. That has been exacerbated worldwide by the explosion of natural gas production. You don’t have to send men deep into the Earth. You just push a drill into the Earth and up it comes. Natural gas, from a carbon pollution standpoint, is a 50% improvement over coal, but it is still more carbon going into the atmosphere.
So no, Trump doesn’t really represent the coal miners. He will do nothing for them. There’s nothing he can do. And he doesn’t represent those other poor white people either. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be doing his best to strip them of their healthcare via Trumpcare, aka Wealthcare.
But he’s all for the natural gas producers. And the oil producers. His Secretary of State, after all, is the former head of Exxon, and of course, a big buddy of Vladimir Putin. Russia’s major export is oil, basically the only way they obtain hard currency, other than hacking services.
The Republican Party was sold—lock, stock and oil barrel—to the oil companies during the lamentable reign of George Bush, the lesser. Bush, himself, ran an unsuccessful oil exploration company prior to his political career. Vice President Dick Cheney was previously CEO of Halliburton, an oil services company, and he profited mightily from that company’s no-bid contracts during the Iraq war,
The oil business has been a staple of this countries wealth-making machinery since the late nineteenth century. My own family has been involved for generations. I am a direct descendant of Hiram Everest, who started the Vacuum Oil Company in 1866. He later sold it to his good buddy John D. Rockefeller, and it was merged into Standard Oil.
The oil business has always been a little rough-and-tumble. Hiram and his son Arthur did some jail time for a plot to blow up a rival’s facilities, a little fact that was never mentioned at my grandmother’s dining room table.
Coal is used mainly for heating, and to make electricity, except for met coal, which is still the go-to product to make steel. Oil can also be used, in theory, for all those purposes, but is really only economic as a transportation fuel: gasoline, diesel, jet fuel. An important, but much smaller portion, goes to the making of plastics and organic fibers.
Unfortunately, for the oil companies, cars can run on electricity.
Enter Elon Musk.
No matter what you think of him, Musk is a genius. He taught himself to code, in South Africa no less, and at age 12 sold his first video game. As a nerd, he had it rough in Pretoria. He was once pushed down a flight of stairs and hospitalized after being beaten unconscious by the neighborhood hoodlums.
He moved to Canada at age 18. He started a software company while still a Ph.D. student and received $22 million dollars for it four years later when it was sold. That same year, 1999, he founded an online payments firm which was later merged with PayPal. In 2002, Musk received $165 million when PayPal was bought by Ebay (It has since been split off).
What do you do as a thirty-one year old multimillionaire? You decide to go to Mars. In 2001, Musk started SpaceX in 2002 for expressly that purpose. Musk today is known primarily for his electric car company Tesla and its (now) subsidiary Solar City. But SpaceX is where it starts. It is my theory that everything Musk does is secondary to his desire to colonize Mars. He has famously expressed his desire to die there.
Mars is (as far as we are able to determine) a dead planet. Since there is no life, there was no Carbonaceous period during which the precursors to today’s oil and gas were buried. So how do you travel on Mars? Electricity maybe. But how do you produce electricity? Oil and natural gas are out. So too is hydro-power. So solar power is an answer (wind-power might also work).
In order to terraform Mars, which he can’t yet get to, Elon decides to first terraform Earth. He will devise a new planet. First, he starts Tesla, to demonstrate the potential of electric power. And since he will need electric power when he gets to Mars, he starts Solar City to perfect solar panels.
The serious difficulty with either wind or solar power is that it doesn’t solve the peak demand problem. The sun shines only during the daytime, and its efficiency depends on cloud cover. Wind is variable, depending on weather. Electricity is hard to transport; the farther you go, the more you lose on high power lines. It is hard to store. In theory, you could use solar power to pump water uphill during the day, when you had an excess, and get hydropower through a turbine at night. In practice, there is so much lost to inefficiencies that it doesn’t work well.
But electric vehicles run on batteries. The more electric vehicles you produce, the more you can drive down the cost on batteries. Batteries are a tech item and subject to something like Moore’s law. Over time you can get better efficiency at a lower price. And the same batteries you build for vechicles you can use to store electricity during peak periods, to release that electricity during slack periods. Elon has already pitched a solution to South Australia to solve their peak demand problem using Tesla batteries.
However, when Elon finally gets to Mars, he has another very serious problem. The surface of Mars is blasted by radiation due to the anemic atmosphere and what passes for soil there is a mess of free radicals. No living thing (except for maybe a lichen) could live on the planet’s surface as currently constituted. Plus, as Elton John has warned us, it’s cold as hell. So, in order to live on Mars, people will have to first live underground.
Hence, The Boring Company, Elon’s latest and still private company. He is already trying to bore freeway channels under L.A. and Chicago.
Now Elon received a lot of flack from his supporters and employees and virtually everybody in Silicon Valley when he answered the summons from Trump to join the corporate councils. But he did it anyway. He wanted a voice in whatever was going to happen. But when Trump pulled out of the Paris accords, that was it for Elon. He withdrew his own advise and consent.
Elon’s terraformed Earth is fundamentally at odds with that of Trump and the Oil Industry.
Compared to Elon Musk, who lives his life in the open, Jeff Bezos is more of a mystery. While he has a hearty laugh and seems like a sociable being, he seems to make his will known through intermediaries.
Bezos was born to a teen-age mother in Albequerque. His mother’s first marriage lasted about a year. The name Bezos comes from his step-father, a Cuban immigrant who came to this country alone at age 15 and worked his way into an engineering degree.
After graduating from Princeton, Bezos worked at Wall Street firms before founding Amazon in 1994, Those of you of my age will remember that Amazon was started as an online bookstore. It expanded quickly into music CDs and movies, and then morphed into the retailer of everything. If you have no physical presence, what does it matter?
Well, it does matter, because for most consumer items, shipping is a substantial fraction of the cost. So Amazon went whole-hog and developed distribution centers all over the world. And then, because their business was so extended and diverse, they developed web services to keep track of it all. So Amazon entered web services as an afterthought. So now, Amazon’s retailing business is still (amazingly) growing at about 20% per annum, but its Amazon Web Services are growing about 50% per annum.
But to keep the retailing business growing, Amazon needs to find new stuff to sell you. They tried the Firephone, which fizzled, and they briefly tried selling autos. But they seem to have settled on food. Everybody needs it. So now they are buying out Whole Foods.
Of course, Amazon will also provide you with entertainment. Amazon prime membership will get you access to a huge selection of video you can look at for free (after the $100 per annum fee). That fee also gets you free delivery on a huge bunch of items.
Amazon is also big into artificial intelligence. Amazon’s Alexa (one of which I have in my house) is a helpful AI agent who will play your favorite song, tell you what the weather is going to be, help you practice your Spanish, etc. But everything she does is reported back to a server in Amazon’s cloud. So Big Brother is here, sort of. But he has a non-threatening, somewhat sexy, female accent.
What is Bezos’ goal? He doesn’t say, but on inspection, he wants to sell you everything. Once he’s got Whole Foods working the way he wants, the speculation is that he will buy out the nearly bankrupt Sears, which brings him Kmart in the bargain. Probably he uses some of the stores as new distribution centers.
Then maybe he goes back to cars, or starts selling real estate. He just wants a piece of everything you buy or sell during your lifetime. And not just here, but he wants to do it all across the globe.
Oddly, Bezos and Elon Musk share a passion. Bezos sells about a billion dollars worth of his stock in Amazon every year and uses it to fund a private company called Blue Origin, which hopes to help humans inhabit the solar system. His first focus seems to be on space tourism.
Neither Amazon nor Tesla are the biggest American company by market cap. That honor goes to Apple with its I-phones, computers and music services. But several market analysts have offered the opinion that Amazon will be the first company with a trillion dollar market cap, based on the growth of its retail and web services. Tesla is no where near that big, but it is close to the market cap of General Motors, despite selling far fewer cars currently.
Market cap is not revenue. Right now, Wal-Mart is the company with the largest revenue. In fact, if Wal-Mart was a country, it would be the tenth largest by revenue, according to Global Justice Now. Exxon Mobil would be 21st and Apple 25th. Amazon and Tesla are not yet on the list. But they will be.
What does it mean when companies are larger than countries? It means they have inordinate power.
How will they use it?
I don’t know. But corporations, especially those like Amazon and Tesla, which are founder-driven, are far from democracies. They do what their founders want.
The good news, I guess, is that at least for Bezos and Musk, their vision of the future seems to be far different from that of Herr Drumpf or Secretary of State Tillerson. But I am not sure that either Musk or Bezos will consult with us while they radically alter the way we live. Democracy is effectively dead.
But to take us back to the beginning:
Another man duck-walks across the flight deck.... He's about sixty, with a dirigible of white hair that was not ruffled in any way by the downdraft.
"Hello, everyone," he says cheerfully.
"Who are you?" Tony says.
The new guy looks crestfallen. "Greg Ritchie," he says.
Then, when no one seems to react, he jogs their memory. "President of the United States."
"Oh! Sorry. Nice to meet you, Mr. President," Tony says, extending his hand....
"Frank Frost," Frank says, extending his hand and looking bored.
Like it or not, I think that is our future. The politicians, having proved themselves to be incapable of governing the advancing world, will simply be irrelevant.