I Want A New Drug

If you are not familiar with the great, fun song by Huey Lewis and the News, I want a new drug [1]: you should find it and listen. For instance:

I want a new drug,

One that does what it should
One that won’t make me feel too bad
One that won’t make me feel too good

I want a new drug

One with no doubt
One that won’t make me talk too much
Or make my face breakout

One that won’t make me nervous
Wonderin’ what to do

One that makes me feel like I feel when I’m with you

In many ways these song lyrics could be applied to our relationship with the Internet today. Whether viewed as a communication medium or the content we consume, it is hard to say the Internet is not a drug.

Think about it. Increasingly, we ingest it daily like coffee or soda everywhere we go. Sometimes it makes us feel good, sometimes a little jittery, and at other times it makes us outright crazy. In any case, day after day, like addicts, we go back for more — another fix. A habit we cannot break.

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed

When the Internet began we consumed it in fairly small dosages, in part, because the amount of content available on the market was limited. Also, in part, because finding dealers with useful quality content was taxing.

We began upped the dosage when search engines came along. Indeed, for a while, “Surfing the Net” seemed to be the equivalent of “getting high.” The arrival of smartphones and social media was like the end of prohibition. Suddenly everyone everywhere was partying big time — like it was 1999.

Now, a decade later, many have what amounts to a hangover. It turns out that, just like going clubbing in the real world can leave you with a headache, at times navigating around the Internet can be a pain . Some clubs rock, some are cul-de-sacs. Some neighborhoods are good, some bad. Some places and people are infectiously rewarding; others filled with jerks seeking to take advantage of the unsuspecting.

A sobering timeout might be useful in assessing where we are at with this drug and where our addiction is leading us. A brief pause that can help us clear our head so we can reassess what we ultimately want to derive from our Internet habit.

In this respect, there are five major classes of popular consumer Internet drugs to consider: commerce, news, social, entertainment and essentials.

Shake your moneymaker

Commerce — The first widely used online drug was shopping. As a nation of shoppers this was the proverbial gateway drug, with Amazon the unstoppable corner pusher. Now, of course, literally everything and anything is for sale online somewhere.

As if we all needed more stimulants, the key trend is price comparison services (especially useful in showrooming) to instantly find the best price for something. Like a drug cartel. this trend has forced virtually all retail dealers to compete solely on price, which reduces margins, disintermediates suppliers, and eliminates those with insufficient scale. It is a market that is now well developed and highly competitive.

Using algorithms to compare prices was a no-brainer. Unless you were a traditional corner retail dealer, this was a marriage made in heaven. But simple price comparison algorithms were never designed to consider possible side effects. Yet, qualitative side effects (e.g., health considerations, diet, ingredients, chemicals, durability, reliability, etc.) often enter into our decisions about which particular drug to buy.

Improving the marketplace for commerce first requires an algorithmic reformulation. One that connects various dimensions of quality to price. The ultimate formulary, of course, is one that personalizes every individual’s qualitative parameters and then matches those to the best price available for a product.

For instance, some people have food allergies that make price a secondary consideration. In other areas, appliances, for example, maintenance and reliability might be concerns. Suffice it to say the number of variables and permutations are almost endless, but algorithms are perfect for this. They can automatically cross-index personalized concerns and qualitative product attributes with price effectively and virtually eliminate unwanted side effects.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all [2]

News — Alongside the arrival of commerce stimulants was a proliferation of “news” depressants. It now seems like every chemistry student has made a variation of drugs in this category. From aggregators, to blogs, feeds, twitter, online papers and magazines, podcasts, TV broadcasts and de novo journalism the variety, availability and potency of these drugs have exploded everywhere on the planet.

The distributional velocity, currency, frequency and quantity of these drugs, for any real or imagined ailment or affliction, were a pusher’s wet dream. Today, the only way to avoid overdosing is willful blindness, the conscious invoking of some bias or a detoxing intervention. This market is now overly developed and highly competitive.

So what might make consumption of the news drug better?

Like opiates, this is a dangerously addictive drug. Most people consume ever higher dosages without realizing it or are in denial about their addiction.

Like warning labels on most over-the-counter medications, the news drug needs to differentiate between outright falsehoods, intentionally misleading statements, probabilistic speculations and conjectures, and reliable facts. In other words, there is a need for an ongoing factual intervention. Unfortunately, as with most warning labels, few people read or heed them.

Another partial remedy might be to have human curators act like pharmacists and assist an algorithmic calibration of the potency of these drugs and their effects. Ultimately, however, remedying serious abuse of the news drug may require rehabilitating and detoxing institutions. Some type of collective on-demand repository capable of identifying indisputable facts and, for consequential street rumors and speculations with the potential to become viral epidemics, provide some new, instantaneous way to generate consensual efficacious treatments.

I heard it through the grapevine [3]

Social — Simply put, this is a class of psychotropic drugs that often brings widespread changes in mood and consciousness. The sheer quantity and availability of this drug and its self-reinforcing nature easily treads a fine line between reality and hallucinogenic surrealism.

Further, since much of what is consumed is cut with banal and trivial exchanges, or derived from marginal acquaintances, often the experience leads to delirium and or abuse. Thus, depending on the formulation and or dosage, usage leads to experiences ranging from great fun, to illuminating, to excess drama, to embarrassment, to exhaustion, or really bad trips.

Globally, six-degrees of separation have contracted to less than four degrees. Access to everyone’s history, current activities and 24/7 accessibility can be akin to being surveilled on probation or living in a halfway house. The constant, habitual abuse of this drug — whether for family, friends, colleagues, or business through texts, photos or videos to checkup, hookup or meet-up — is ubiquitous, often leading to incoherence and or regrettable insolence.

It is a market that is now exceedingly well-developed and highly competitive. So what would make it better?

While each service offers some control over the formulary and dosage consumed, learning how to quickly and effectively calibrate different formularies in multiple, different venues require time and expertise few possess. So the first step is some universal or standard set of protocols each of us can independently and easily calibrate qualitatively to prioritize who and what we want to consume regardless of the dealer’s formulary or venues.

The next step might be to integrate different formularies and venues into a single production and distribution stream. Then add clearly identified branches for prioritizing, scheduling and filtering who, what, where, and when the drugs are made available for maximum personalized quality and dosage control prior to consumption.

I have become comfortably numb [4]

Entertainment — This is today’s hot club drug. It encompasses games, sports, music, films, TV, movies, books, food, photos, videos and, yes, porn. Throw in some specialized drug paraphernalia (e.g., gaming and e-readers) and streaming to mainline this drug and what you find is addictive consumption spreading at an incredible rate.

Soon, virtual and augmented reality will elevate the current “high” to the psychotropic, hallucinogenic level. While this market is developed and highly competitive, it is just beginning to reach its upward inflection point.

Like psychedelics, qualitatively these drug experiences are highly subjective and contextual. While the universe of possibilities is already vast, the entire class of these drugs is expanding at a mind-numbing rate.

While most of us generally know what make us feel good, the growing quantity and diversity of formulations makes the sheer variety and abundance of these drugs increasingly attractive and tempting. Consequently, the potential for addiction, overindulgence and abuse on an unprecedented scale is profound.

So what might make consumption of these drugs better?

Key issues ahead are those adding production friction and constraining consumption due to distribution silos and the costs associated with acquiring some of the drugs (e.g., subscriptions, paywalls, and advertising overload). Given how vast and lucrative this market is however, it is reasonable to expect the major entertainment drug cartels will soon figure out how to minimize the frictions and accelerate ubiquitous, inexpensive access.

The next step is to go beyond random, serendipitous consumption toward dealers specializing in offering curated experiences. So, there is likely to be a proliferation of dealers aggregating these drug experiences based taste, aesthetics, biases, probabilities, genres, themes, proximity, cost, and so on. But, again, the sheer economic size of the market guarantees a Darwinian process that aggregates curation aggregators.

Help, I need somebody. Help, not just anybody [5]

Essentials — The least developed market is the one for the most widely used, over-the-counter drugs. This is the boring mix of drugs for basic, prophylactic, remedial and emergency situations — effecting medical, mental health, pharmaceutical, financial, legal, caregiving, parenting, education, career counseling, science, disaster and general emergency aid and relief, and so on.

Ironically, the consistent and ubiquitous ongoing need and utility of these drugs is greater and more enduring than that of any other class of drugs. Said differently, ultimately everyone needs many of these drugs.

Of course, like most over-the-counter drugs, most people never think about them until there is some pressing or urgent need. At that point most users lack current familiarity with what might work best with minimal side-effects, and are forced to scramble to find desirable remedies that can deliver the needed relief.

While finding a specific drug for a particular ailment or problem when the need arises can be a challenge, it is increasingly important to know whether the pharmacist is trustworthy and or what is offered is safe and effective. This is a real and growing problem.

Indeed, because this market is so underdeveloped the formulation and quality of drugs available is often uneven, inconsistent or just plain bad. Even drugs from brand names dealers can be old, outdated, expired, mislabeled, or wrongly formulated or prescribed inappropriately. As a result the quality, reliability and efficacy of these drugs often makes consumption problematic and occasionally harmful.

So what would make access to and consumption of these drugs better?

First, realize this is a high-utility class of drugs that inevitably everyone uses repeatedly over their entire life. This means this market is huge.

Second, since these drugs are only consumed episodically in connection with some unexpected ailment or situation, most users are ill-informed, yet are aggressive in seeking reliable relief instantly, on-demand.

Since the universe of the most commonly used drugs is finite, the first step is aggregating and separating the best, most reliable, efficacious and quality drugs from the rest into a single curated database. The next step is to provide a fast, easy way for users to instantly identify the most appropriate and efficacious drugs for their ailment or situation. (Full disclosure, this is what my company provides.)

You’re simply the best, better than all the rest [6]

When thinking about where the Internet is going, the common denominator across all classes of drugs is variation on a basic theme:

• Curate to filter and aggregate the best, safest, most reliable and cost effective drugs with the fewest side-effects in each area of consumption.
• Make it simple to find what is the most efficacious drug that is contextually wanted or needed.
• Deliver the best quality drug with the fewest side effects at the best price instantly, on-demand.

So, in paraphrasing the Huey Lewis song —

I want a new Internet drug

One that does what it should
One that won’t exhaust my patience
One that won’t waste my time

I want a new Internet drug

One with no doubt or pain
One that won’t make pout or be fooled
Or make my life more complicated

One that won’t make me nervous
Wonderin’ what to do.

I want a new Internet drug

One that makes me feel like I feel when I’m with you.

1. Songwriters HAYES, CHRISTOPHER JOHN / LEWIS, HUEY 1984 Huey Lewis and the News
2. Songwriters GRACE WING SLICK Published by Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
3. Songwriters BARRETT STRONG, NORMAN WHITFIELD Published by Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
4. Songwriters: WATERS, ROGER/GILMOUR, DAVID JON Comfortably Numb lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., IMAGEM U.S. LLC
5. Writer(s): Paul McCartney, John Lennon 1965 Copyright: Sony/ATV Tunes LLC
6. Songwriters Mike Chapman; Holly Knight Published by KNIGHTY KNIGHT MUSIC;MIKE CHAPMAN PUBLISHING ENTPRS

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You can learn more about my work at https://medium.com/a-passion-to-evolve or my website http://www.dochuston1.com/ You can also find me on Linked-in.

In any case, may you live long and prosper.