Tech goes to the Principal’s Office: November 5, 2017 Snippets
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This week’s theme: the influential power of technology versus the compulsive power of the state.
Consider, for a minute, the following scenario.
Three of the popular students in an eighth grade class get summoned to the principal’s office. Although they’ve been warned about it several times in the preceding weeks, none of them really offer any sign that they know why they’re being summoned, or what the consequences might be. So the attitude that they have projected prior to the meeting is some combination of “not a big deal” and “not our fault.”
When they arrive that afternoon, they’re greeted by several of their teachers as well as the principal herself. The principal gets right down to business: she’s called the meeting because of an escalating series of troubling incidents among the students over the last several months. There’s been a remarkable rise in bad behavior, disrespect and hurt feelings among members of the class, and the formerly respectful classroom environment has deteriorated into a toxic state. The three students summoned are the most popular kids, and hold real influence over the social dynamics of the classroom. The principal tells them point blank: “We need you to cooperate with us. You are a part of this problem and you need to take this seriously. If you do not, you’re going to face serious disciplinary action.”
Let’s think about the power dynamics at work here. On the one hand, the teachers don’t actually have any direct power over the thing they want to change, which is classroom behavior. The three popular students do, to some extent. They have influence over their peers, and might be willing to use it so long as it doesn’t conflict with their enduring popularity and social standing. On the other hand, the students — even though they are at the top of the social ladder and used to being in charge — exist in an environment with rules, where the principal is ultimately the boss. She and her administration have the power to impose detention or even suspend them from school, if it comes to that, despite whatever backlash would follow. But she can’t directly induce the change that she wants: her best hope may be to convince the popular kids to cooperate with her, whether by asking nicely or by threat of punishment. The power dynamics aren’t straightforward, but it’s very clear that there are two very different kinds of power at work and that they are at odds with one another.
Although the stakes are certainly higher and the players more sophisticated, you can’t help but notice a whiff of the same social dynamic in Washington this week, as Google, Facebook and Twitter appeared before the United States Senate in their investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. (Although the representatives sent by these companies were certainly forthcoming and respectful, the fact that General Counsels were answering questions and not their CEOs did not go unnoticed.) Appearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Select Intelligence Committee, representatives from the three companies found themselves backed into a corner, having simultaneously: 1) insisted that they took the problem seriously and were committed to solving it, 2) argued that as technology platforms, and emphatically not media companies, they could not police or even detect everything that’s taking place on their network, and 3) admitted to the fact that the nature of their data, networks and social graphs gives them an influence over information broadcast and consumption that the world has never truly seen before. Or in other words, “Yes, we have power. But not the kind you’re asking us to use.”
Tech goes to Washington | Ben Thompson, Stratechery
The upcoming struggle between Big Tech and Washington is inevitably going to come down to the same basic problem as our classroom story: what does “power” actually mean, and how is it actually being used, with respect to what ordinary people are see and share on social media? In our make-believe example, the principal and teachers can surely understand that even though the three popular kids have great influence among their peer group, they can’t actually control classroom behavior, at least not for very long. They have influential power, but they do not have compulsive power. The government has the opposite strengths: their ability to influence is limited, but their ability to coerce is real and very much in play. Senator Dianne Feinstein certainly suggested as much with her ominous comments at the Senate hearing:
“We are not going to go away, gentlemen. And this is a very big deal. I went home last night with profound disappointment. I asked specific questions, I got vague answers. And that just won’t do. You have a huge problem on your hands. And the US is going to be the first of the countries to bring it to your attention, and other countries are going to follow I’m sure. Because you bear this responsibility. You created these platforms … and now they’re being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it — or we will.”
In Snippets over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at some other times in recent history where private companies’ power to influence and the state’s power to compel have come into conflict with one another. The government has always been a major blind spot in Silicon Valley and in the broader tech industry, and for the most part the tech giants of today have grown up in a coercion-free environment. But that may be coming to end, and we’ll explore how it might look in coming issues.
The strange, sad fall of Sears, a once mighty American icon:
Inside the decline of Sears, the Amazon of the 20th century | Suzanne Kapner, WSJ
Sears was retail’s cutting edge for a century, until it wasn’t | Christopher Matthews, Axios
The long, hard, unprecedented fall of Sears | Kim Bhasin & Lance Lambert, Bloomberg
Delivery to our doorstep:
How Domino’s became the Pizza for the people | Allison Davis, The Ringer
Midlife crises:
The fracking boom’s midlife crisis | Alex Nussbaum & David Wethe, Bloomberg New Energy Finance
Software matters in the world: we need to fix a bigger and more important set of bugs | Anil Dash
Bitcoin futures: good idea, or terrible idea?
The Bitcoin Future: ripples from the CNE’s announcement | Points and Figures
This is why Bitcoin Futures should not be approved | Themis Trading
Electrifying India:
Energy Access Outlook 2017 | International Energy Agency
Superstars in training (and the rest of us):
Pay for US postdoctoral fellows varies wildly by institution | Chris Woolston, Nature
Other reading from around the Internet:
The angel’s in the details: make a big deal about the little things | Andy Dunn
Gene therapy’s new hope: a neuron-targeting virus is saving infant lives | Jocelyn Kaiser, Science
Crowdsourcing data on Earth’s microbial diversity | Luke R Thompson et al., Nature
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, we’re going to check in on a team that’s doing more than building a business: they’re saving lives. That would be Syapse, whose precision medicine platform and shared oncology data network are turning into important and fundamental building blocks for the future of cancer care.
Since joining Syapse as CEO eight months ago, Ken Tarkoff has been hard at work on Syapse’s three big opportunities in cancer care: scale up Syapse’s precision medicine capabilities that help target treatments for individual patients, integrate with the EMRs and other supporting technology that precision medicine requires, and then incorporate this new approach into our existing health systems that we rely on for our care. Since then, health systems around the country are embracing this new approach. Over 70% of leading health systems are either currently implementing or have already implemented a precision medicine program:
Precision medicine is rapidly becoming a top priority | Ken Tarkoff, Syapse
Precision medicine at leading health systems: a quantitative survey | The Health Management Academy
“Precision medicine” can be a bit of a fuzzy concept to wrap your mind around: when and why do patients need individually targeted approaches based on their personal genetics and profile? In cancer care, much of the challenge in understanding a patient’s specific pathology falls to molecular tumor boards: groups of experts who advise the physician and help inform treatment plans based on the specific genes and clinical course of an individual patient’s cancer progression. Since everyone is unique and no two cancer cases are exactly the same, the number of distinct pathologies — and therefore, the number of possible treatment approaches that we might take — is enormous. This is hard for oncologists to cope with: human experts aren’t good at coping with exponentially increasing treatment permutations available. That’s a job we need software and shared data resources to deal with, and that’s why we have Syapse.
To really get a picture for what’s happening on the front lines of cancer care, we have to talk to Syapse’s partners and customers: the physicians and health care providers who treat patients every day. Dr. Steven Kalkanis, medical director of the Henry Ford Cancer Institute, had this to say recently about precision medicine in cancer care and how Syapse is helping save lives:
“Oncologists need to be able to conveniently access the full scope of patient data, quickly identify treatment or trial options for patients, and seek expert input from a molecular tumor board, or a team of molecular genetic experts who inform providers’ standard treatments.
Technology today automates that entire process and removes those barriers. We partnered with the technology company Syapse to enable our physicians to have all of their patients’ clinical, molecular, treatment, and outcomes data integrated into the clinical electronic medical record system they already use. The technology provides that information to our oncologists at the point of care, in a standard format they understand. This allows our oncologists to focus on delivering clinical care, rather than time-consuming administrative tasks.
At our first molecular tumor board earlier this year, we analyzed a rare genetic mutation in a patient with recurrent brain cancer who had failed second-line therapy. As a result of the discovery of this unique, clinically relevant and validated mutation, the molecular tumor board enrolled this patient in a clinical trial for a drug designed for an entirely different purpose — but which shared the same target mutation — as an attempt to try every last option to preserve life. Several months later, this patient has so far beaten all odds and is responding to this genetically-driven targeted treatment, all because we had access to the crowd-sourced, real-time bioinformatics analysis for this particular mutation.”
Syapse is actively hiring for a number of roles in San Francisco and Philadelphia, including in cloud ops, customer ops, engineering and product development, and product management. If you know anyone who is looking and would be a good fit, please send them Syapse’s way: you know they’ll be working on a very worthy cause.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
