Amusing Ourselves to Death: November 26, 2017 Snippets
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This week’s theme: how information networks combine the platform power of railroads and the value proposition of drug companies. Plus mPharma raises their Series A to transform African pharmacy management.
Welcome back to our current Snippets series, where we’re exploring the power dynamics between modern tech companies and the government, and the question of “how on Earth does this get regulated?” We started the series with a look at Facebook and Twitter’s hearing in front of the US Senate, and we’ll end back there as well. In the meantime, we’re taking a detour through history to look at other kinds of technology companies, see what made them powerful, and understand how that power measured up against the power of the state. We learned about the railroads, and how they accumulated “platform power” as their heavy infrastructure could support lighter-weight applications and communities as we settled the west. Then last week we talked about drug companies, particularly back when they sold recreational drugs directly to customers, as the purest example of a “consumer company” where regulation meant preventing customers from getting what they wanted. How does the state regulate businesses with powers like these? It’s tricky.
Today, we’re going to talk about information networks — from telegraph companies a century and a half ago, to radio, television and now internet platforms — and how their power is similar to both the railroads on one hand and the drug makers on another. One of the best books to read on the state of media and our collective discourse today is Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, which was written in 1985 and rings stunningly true today. This book should be required reading for Snippets subscribers, and we’ll try to summarize it here:
When information was scarce, the value of information came from its ability to influence action. But when information is lightweight and abundant, we inevitably act on less and less of it. As the ratio of resulting action per incoming information falls to zero, the new value of information becomes its immediate pleasure. Hence, as information becomes abundant, it becomes increasingly indistinguishable from entertainment. Postman challenges us with the following question: think about the last time you watched the news on TV (or online); how much of the content you consumed actually impacted your actions over the rest of the day in any meaningful sense? Some, perhaps: news about the weather, the stock market, or local events might actually influence your actions. But the increasing majority of what we consume does no such thing; it’s advertised raison d’être is to inform us and direct our actions, but its real role is entertainment.
Wrapping a few strands from the past few weeks together, we can see how news networks make information abundant by acting as the “heavy” infrastructure on which “light” information can travel, just like the railroads. The resulting “light” news, as it becomes increasingly abundant and indistinguishable from entertainment, becomes a true consumer product in the same vein as the drug and tobacco companies we talked about last week: their value proposition is feelings, and we love it. Whether it’s dressed up as news, explicitly labeled as entertainment, or intermittent advertising, information comes and goes in brief flashes on a TV screen or across a news feed, often segued with the familiar cable news refrain, “Now… This.” Postman calls it the “Peek-a-Boo” effect: one minute it’s there, the next minute it’s not; we’ve moved on to something else, equally absent of context, going straight for the laugh and accompanying dopamine release. The lighter-weight it gets, the more it resembles a recreational drug.
Amusing Ourselves to Death astutely predicted many aspects of the 21st century and the online world, but it’s missing one important thing. Postman describes so well the idea that Huxley’s Brave New World, rather than Orwell’s 1984, is the dystopian future we should be worried about; it’s certainly true that information and entertainment overload describes our Western present day than does Orwell’s vision of mass state censorship. But Huxley and Postman both foresaw a future where we participated entirely as passive consumers; this has turned out to be quite untrue in the age of Facebook, YouTube and 4chan.
What happened was that the many-to-many model of social media on the internet turned out to be quite different from the one-to-many model of radio, television and the information networks that predated the internet. On the internet, everybody could now directly reach out and team up with other likeminded people, form new tribes, and remake existing ones. (As comedian Kumail Nanjiani put it pithily in a tweet: “Hope: Internet will allow people from different backgrounds to communicate and understand one another. Reality: All the racists found each other!”) We clearly see that the internet has unleashed tribalism in a powerful way, and now we can further understand that the internet is the perfect platform for tribalism as entertainment. Tribalism, which used to be a heavy, serious kind of commitment that required real skin in the game, has been made lightweight, abundant — and worst of all, even fun — on top of infrastructure like Facebook.
Tribalism as entertainment isn’t a new concept, of course: that’s what pro sports are. Today, everything is sports, especially on the internet. Blur the topics, and CNN plus politics Twitter becomes indistinguishable from ESPN plus sports Twitter. Everything is tribal entertainment: our side versus their side; both have great storylines and great fans. Looking back at the “transition” from the old TV discourse of Postman’s era to the current era of tribalism as entertainment, one of the best examples I can think of for a turning point from old to new is Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. The original Daily Show hosted by Craig Kilborn was essentially the old kind of TV that Postman understood well: it was amusing, and it didn’t mean very much. But Jon Stewart helped transform late night laughs into a new beast: it weaponized news stories into a potent form of tribal comedy, where the way to get the laugh was by setting up and then knocking down “the other side”, laughing over how dumb our tribal enemies were, and rehashing them as memes and gifs the next morning. Haha! Feels good! Right? That’s tribalism as entertainment; just like sports, and just like what our collective discourse on the internet is trending towards.
So where are we heading with all this? Well, when Facebook and Twitter appeared before the US Senate a month ago, we had to face some unfortunate possibilities: could it be that in this new world of tribalism as entertainment, others are simply better at this game than we are? Second, what specifically can companies like Twitter and Facebook actually do about it, given the platform power they’ve accumulated? And third, what can the government actually do about it, given how popular these platforms are with consumers? Next week we’ll see what another important book — Tim Wu’s The Master Switch — has to say about the problem.
Elsewhere in the world:
China has a new Super-App: Meituan | Yunan Zhang, The Information
Mahindra and Uber tie up to run electric cabs in Delhi, Hyderabad | Arushi Kotecha, Live Mint
And in outer space:
Armed with new heat-resistant chips, NASA is ready to return to Venus | Paul Voosen, Science
Cassini image mosaic: a farewell to Saturn | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The FCC moves to end net neutrality, people are mad, and allegations are flying:
Americans from both political parties overwhelmingly support net neutrality | Mozilla Foundation
FCC explains why public support for net neutrality won’t stop repeal | Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica
An open letter to the FCC | Eric Schneiderman, Attorney General of New York State
An interesting back-and-forth argument between Nathan J Robinson and Scott Alexander on Public Options and competition in education and now food:
It’s not enough to declare that vouchers and charters are bad | Nathan J Robinson, Current Affairs
Contra Robinson on schooling | Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex
A public option for food | Nathan J Robinson, Current Affairs
Contra Robinson on food | Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex
Other reading from around the Internet:
Building a business in the shadow of a giant | Chris Savage, Noteworthy
The price of insulin increased again for Americans in 2017 | Lydia Ramsey, Business Insider
A big little idea called Legibility | Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm
A tour through some of the most studied genes in biology yields some surprises | Elie Dolgin, Nature
Last week in our news and notes section from the Social Capital family, we touched on two important companies doing work in the pharmacy and prescription drugs space: Propeller Health’s new deal with Express Scripts, and MeMed’s continued fight to combat antibiotic resistance. This week, we’ve got another one to share with you. mPharma, led by CEO Gregory Rockson, has announced their Series A fundraising as they build a next-generation retail pharmacy supply chain for Africa, and then for the entire world:
mPharma raises $6.6 million in Series A funding | Gregory Rockson
So what does mPharma do, exactly? They perform a similar role to Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) in the United States, but with several distinctly African elements. mPharma’s proprietary supply chain software helps independent health care providers, vendors and pharmacies manage their inventory much better than they can currently. They’ve built several software tools to help: Thea, a CRM tool that helps facilities submit and manage insurance claims, SyncDB, which helps facilities sync their local medication databases with mPharma, a full suite of APIs that allow health care providers to interface with mPharma over ordinary web connections, and a dispensation spreadsheet tool to help with day to day drug administration. mPharma integrates and orchestrates all of these activities for African pharmacists, and their tight integration gives them leverage over pricing, distribution and reimbursement that they can pass on to centers and patients. As CEO Gregory Rockson calls it, “if CVS Health, QuitilesIMS and McKesson had a baby, it would be called mPharma.”
Over the last year, mPharma has expanded their reach into four countries: Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe, serving over 70 centers and 20,000 patients a month. Unlike in North America, where most pharmacies are giant chains we know like CVS, in Africa they are overwhelmingly mom-and-pop operations with tiny footprints and big hearts. mPharma’s tools are built especially with these small operators in mind, and as Africa’s health care industry evolves throughout the 21st century, we’re optimistic that mPharma and its peer organizations will play an important role that’s quite different from how things look in the United States.
All in all, we’re delighted to continue with mPharma on their journey to transform African pharmacies and health care, and welcome two new board members onto the mPharma team. One of them in particular will be familiar to many Snippets readers: Jim Breyer, who is joining mPharma’s board as an observer, adding to his already impressive collection of board seats at institutions like Blackstone, 21st Century Fox, and Harvard. If you know of anyone looking for careers in Nigeria, Zambia or Ghana and wants to work with a world-class team like the mPharma family, please send them over to mPharma’s careers page, or have them reach out directly at careers (at) mpharma.com.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
