Let’s Fight Big Pharma’s Crusade to Turn Eccentricity Into Illness

  • By Allen Frances
  • 05.17.13
  • 6:30 AM
book excerpt

Saving Normal

by Allen Frances

“

Nature has rolled the dice trillions and trillions of times and has learned to pick diversity as the best long-term bet. It would have been far less complicated to go with one species, but nature has consistently been willing to pay a hefty price to keep its options open. You never know what’s coming down the pike and which genetic potential will be most needed to meet the next challenge.

Saving Normal Book Cover

Editor’s Note: The controversial fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-5 (a.k.a. the manual formerly known as “DSM-V”) was just released – after a 14-year revision process to update its criteria for defining mental disorders. This opinion is from the former taskforce chairman and leader of previous DSM editions.

Nature takes the long view, mankind the short. Nature picks diversity; we pick standardization. We are homogenizing our crops and homogenizing our people. And Big Pharma seems intent on pursuing a parallel attempt to create its own brand of human monoculture.

Turning difference into illness was among the great strokes of marketing genius in our time.

With an assist from an overly ambitious psychiatry, all human difference is being transmuted into chemical imbalance meant to be treated with a handy pill. Turning difference into illness was among the great strokes of marketing genius accomplished in our time.

All the great characters in myths, novels, and plays have endured the test of time precisely because they drift so colorfully away from the mean. Do we really want to put Oedipus on the couch, give Hamlet a quick course of behavior therapy, start Lear on antipsychotics?

I think not. Human diversity has its purposes or it would not have survived the evolutionary rat race. Our ancestors made it because the tribe combined a wide variety of talents and inclinations. There were leaders high on their own narcissism and followers content enough to be dependent on them; people who were paranoid enough to sniff out hidden threats, compulsive enough to get the job done, and exhibitionistic enough to attract mates. Perhaps the healthiest individuals were those who best balanced all these traits somewhere near the golden mean, but the best bet for the group was to have outliers always ready to step up to the plate as the particular occasion demanded.

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How to Prevent the ‘Do Not Track’ Arms Race

  • By Peter Swire
  • 04.24.13
  • 8:00 AM

Human escalation. photo: kalieye / Flickr

A new digital arms race is looming. Users, advertisers, browser companies, and website owners are pitted against one another in a battle over online advertisements and the way individual consumer information is used to deliver targeted ads.

If not defused, escalation around these competing interests will create major problems for both individuals and the businesses that depend on the internet. The issue is coming to a head right now with a major Senate hearing today, new technology developments from browsers and advertisers, and a key meeting in the “Do Not Track” process the week after next.

What’s the big deal? We expect to see ads for baby clothes and diapers when we visit an online maternity store. But some object to the practice known as “behavioral retargeting,” where the same ads follow us and show up on unrelated sites afterwards. Especially since the volume of cookies and other web tracking techniques has climbed sharply in recent years: According to a study last year led by Chris Hoofnagle and Ashkan Soltani, cookies were detected on the top 100 websites. They also found an average of 57 cookies per website and 100 or more cookies on one-fifth of the top websites.

Users should have a choice. Sounds simple enough. But it’s not.

An overwhelming 87 percent of the overall cookies were set by third parties, rather than by the “first parties” users see when they first click or type a URL. Retargeting comes from such third-party advertising, because an advertising network typically places a cookie on our computers and then serves the baby clothes ads at one of the many other websites that participates in its network.

Given this growing online data collection, privacy groups, government regulators, and others have argued that users should have a choice. If people don’t want to be tracked across multiple sites, then they should be able to indicate that choice through their browser settings: “Do Not Track.”

Sounds simple enough.

But it’s not. The devil lies in the details of implementation, for there are many stakeholders besides individual users in the online data collection and advertising ecosystem.

Without effective targeting and tracking, ad revenue could plummet and lead to the shuttering of many popular websites.

Without effective targeting and tracking, advertisers argue, ad revenue could plummet and lead to the shuttering of many popular websites that rely on third party ads as their primary source of revenue. Those who buy and sell behavioral advertising and retargeting point out that advertising revenue supports the diverse array of free content available on the internet. From this perspective, online data collection enables innovative business models, and supports the long tail of smaller websites that get revenue from targeted advertisements.

Meanwhile, leading browsers have been competing against each other to offer stronger privacy protections, citing research that users would want a Do Not Track option if available. Last year, Microsoft decided it would turn the Do Not Track signal on by default. This spring, in a policy similar to one Apple had previously adopted, Mozilla announced that an upcoming version of its browser would block most cookies from third parties.

The advertising industry claims this is a ‘nuclear first strike.’

The advertising industry claims this is a “nuclear first strike” against them. And so begins the arms race, whereby the digital cookies currently used to track user habits are blocked by the browsers — only to have the advertisers respond with even more sophisticated tracking methods like digital fingerprinting. Browsers are gearing up to disable or reduce the effectiveness of such fingerprinting … leading to yet another round of aggressive tracking tools by advertisers followed by blocking tools on the user side. And so on.

This sort of arms race would be bad for online sites and advertisers, as they would have to re-engineer their existing business models and enter an unstable period of measures and counter-measures between tracking and blocking. But it would be worst of all for end users, because existing websites wouldn’t function properly and current tools for managing user privacy through cookies would be broken.

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The Next Internet-Like Platform for Innovation? Airspace (Think Drones)

  • By Eli Dourado
  • 04.23.13
  • 6:30 AM

Illuminated quadrocopters in formation. photo: LIVA, Andreas Röbl Ars Electronica / Flickr

The most important lesson of the internet age is that we can’t anticipate what will happen when we give people — from talented engineers and developers to everyday users — an exciting new platform … along with the freedom to innovate on top of it.

Few could have predicted how profoundly the internet would change our economy. In fact, it was considered “both anti-social and illegal” to use the precursor ARPAnet for commercial activities until 1989. But thanks to the permissionless innovation of an open platform, we now have the internet’s seemingly endless uses — not to mention its economic benefits.

This lesson matters because today, we’re on the cusp of opening up another such platform for innovation: drones. Like the internet, airspace is a platform for commercial and social innovation.

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Nobody Should Make Transgender Kid a ‘Poster Child’ for Anything

Photo: Thomas Hawk/Flickr

There has been a rash of irresponsible decisions by parents and media in forcing public exposure on children who are clearly below an age for any reasonable definition of consent. There was that Time magazine cover last year showing a mom breastfeeding her almost-4-year-old kid in a very unnatural position — with her name on the cover and the kid looking directly into the camera. There was that issue with an article on Jezebel last year on online bullying by shaming racist kids. And then there’s the more recent issue of a transgender child who was named and photographed in a profile by The New York Times.

According to public editor Margaret Sullivan, the decision to name the child was made because “parental approval, along with the child’s own willingness, should rule the day” and since there’s nothing wrong with being transgender, there were no “privacy concerns” to balance in this case. I think this oft-stated argument that exposure is OK when it’s about “something where there’s nothing wrong” is a very dangerous view of privacy. All of us have parts of our lives with which there’s nothing wrong — yet we wouldn’t want to be subjected to public exposure anyway.

Here’s the thing: Privacy is not something to be granted only if we prove we deserve it. On the contrary, there should be a strong reason to violate that privacy at all — especially in the case of minors or any other vulnerable population. The opposite of “secret” or “shameful” is not “public exposure is OK.” Privacy and exposure are not about secrets from everyone but about our integrity as a person and our right to share information about ourselves on our own terms. (Helen Nissenbaum’s Privacy in Context and Daniel J. Solove’s Nothing to Hide are two great primers on this topic.)

Furthermore, privacy is contextual and different levels of exposure are not the same thing. Being a transgendered kid in a school is a significantly different experience than having national media articles about your transgendered experience as a 6-year-old be the defining feature of your online presence.

While consent can be tricky at times, in cases like these, it’s not. A 4-year-old cannot understand the concept of national exposure, let alone consent to it. We can’t override that child’s privacy interests without a very strong reason balanced by that child’s best interests. Parents do not own their children’s consent; they are merely entrusted with it — which means that children’s best interests need to be considered by everyone.

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Kill Your Meeting Room — The Future’s in Walking and Talking

  • By Nilofer Merchant
  • 03.08.13
  • 9:30 AM

Photo: tedeytan / Flickr

“Sitting has become the smoking of our generation.” I argued this in my recent talk at TED2013 and elsewhere while advocating for the concept of “walking meetings” (or as I informally call them, “walkntalks”). Simply put: We spend more time sitting (average 9.3 hours a day) than sleeping (7.7 hours) — and it doesn’t even occur to us that this is not OK. So instead of using a standing desk, doing sitting meetings over coffee, or meeting in some fluorescent-lit conference room, I do one-on-one meetings as walks. It resolves the tradeoff between “taking care of health” and “getting stuff done.”

The solution seems so obvious, yet it raises all sorts of “But…” questions: “How do you take notes?” “How do you collaborate without a whiteboard?” “What about cellphone reception?” “Can we improve mobile meeting technology?” (This last one is a panel theme at SxSW this weekend.)

It’s interesting that we immediately turn to technology here, that all of these obstacles revolve around technology. But technology was meant to facilitate meetings, not drive them. Technology was meant to connect us, yet it more often it disconnects us. And part of the reason I believe we should all do walking meetings is to really connect with the people we’re meeting.

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