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I have a friend who works in the field of healthcare, and we were talking about corruption in the medical and pharmaceutical industries – the kind that leads to patients getting misdiagnosed and mistreated. I had shared something I had written with him, and as he is also a renowned author, I asked for his opinion on the piece… which was in particular also quite critical of healthcare providers in his particular niche (though it was not critical of him personally).
He remarked that it was very well written and convincing. I wondered and asked whether he also felt that my criticism of his professional colleagues was warranted. He noted that his profession could hardly be criticised, and agreed that this bad situation is rather the result of a corrupt system. Then he asked me what I intend to do about it.
I was somewhat taken aback, because I feel I am already doing quite a lot. I quite oftenly speak publicly on this and related topics, I probably write even more on them, and then I am also working to correct what I consider to be one of the primary root causes of these very significant, very fundamental problems in the healthcare industry.
In order to explain what I mean, I need to backtrack… more than a decade. Another one of my friends has done a lot of medical research, has quite advanced academic degrees and is also the director of a hospital. (I have many friends who work in healthcare, in part because I spent a large portion of my adult life living very close to a quite well-known medical school) Once in a discussion with many of his colleagues – plus me – I heard him say that the vast majority (perhaps something like 80%) of medical conditions are a matter of psychology, or at least that they are so strongly influenced by the patient’s psychological state, that it is essentially a matter of psychology. This statement strongly influenced my thinking then, and since then I have also not heard of anything that might contradict the hypothesis. Nonetheless, I don’t know to what degree it is an accepted medical theory.
On the contrary, my close affiliations with the healthcare industry – whether as a patient or as a support group leader or even simply many close connections to people affected by a wide variety of conditions – strengthen my belief in this very insightful observation. Another „academic“ friend of mine has quite often mentioned Rudolf Virchow in this vein, maintaining that it was Virchow who first recognized that many illnesses are … something like: socially constructed.
This is no wonder to me. For years now, I have increasingly become aware that perhaps one of the greatest plagues humanity suffers is the way some humans behave with respect to their fellow humans – to put it succintly, many (if not even most) behave abominably. One example of how such abominable behavior plays out „in real life“ is what is often referred to as „bullying“ (or a similar phenomenon known in Europe as „mobbing“). My gut feeling is that whereas bullying refers to demeaning a person in general, mobbing is more about a concerted „social“ effort to „be negative“ towards a person. What I find particularly odd is how the healthcare industry appears to have no problem whatsoever with portraying the victims of such behavior as the people who are ill, sick, who apparently need to swallow pills or whatever. The same holds for many other illnesses considered to be psychological in nature, such as depression, post traumatic stress disorder, etc.
Now let me get back to my discussion I had the other day – and my answer to the question: „what am I going to do about it?“ After being taken aback, something clicked in my head and I replied: The problem is, really, that we measure the value of people using only one statistic: money (see also „the vast majority of people have been drilled with truisms such as the notion that money is a reliable metric of value“). Today, if you have a lot of money, then you are usually considered successful. Likewise, if you have little or no money, you are usually considered a failure. What is more: The validity of many statements (e.g., what is written on the front page of the New York Times) is often considered to be supported by the money „leading“ companies contribute (i.e. as advertisements) in order to show up in support of such headlines (cf. also the definition of „retard media“). The meaninglessness of brand names is very closely related to the anonymity of money as a unit of value, as a technology for transferring value without the friction of any sentiments whatsoever. Ideally, you can easily use „cold hard cash“ to pay for a product or service without leaving even the slighest trace of your name, your identity, or your affilation with anyone or anything on Earth. Your cash bills may contribute to slavery, exploitation, global warming or any other issue on a long laundry list of social diseases… without leaving any fingerprint, footprint, or whatever. Money enables you to be so careless that you are basically free to have no cares at all.
This care-free power of money is probably why many people consider it to be the ultimate measure of success. I, on the other hand, see in money nothing but anonymous power – like that of a king with no face. Money is actually no more capable of transmitting what you care about than a robot is capable of feeling what you feel.
If you want to feel – no, if you want to be attached to something you care about, in other words if you want to engage in a relationship with that thing or person, then you shouldn’t use money to do that. Money leaves no trace. You want to create a bond. You need to sign, your signature needs to be part and parcel of your care, your values, your engagement, your actions and you yourself. You must use an „alternative currency“.
The currency you use must be meaningful, the antithesis of a meaningless brand name. Meaning is also socially constructed. You can heal just as well as you can hurt. What are you going to do?
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If you are “old school“, you might type in thenewyorktimes.com to visit “The New York Times”. It wouldn’t matter much, because that domain name also belongs to the company that publishes “The New York Times” — and so does newyorktimes.com, nyt.com, and many others, too. All of these strings are probably “protected” by trademarks the company “owns” (see also what I said about ownership in my previous post). If you have acquired a little more literacy skills than utter newbies, then you might know that the domain name the company actually uses (to publish their “newspaper articles”) is nytimes.com (note that the company uses different domain names to publish corporate / company information). Companies often register many trademarks and domain names — The New York Times Company apparently has also registered “mytimes.com” (these are often referred to as “typos”, but one might wonder whether a newspaper publisher in Myanmar might think The New York Times Company might be infringing on their trademark). There are many legal battles about such strings every day, and there is still very much and widespread confusion regarding the topic.
Generally people have a deep gut feeling that companies should not “own” the natural language people speak “naturally“, but tell that to the “owners” of soap.com — which they acquired for somewhat more than a song (and by the way, the same owners have also acquired song — “dot song“). ICANN’s “new generic top level domain” (ngtld) rollout has been very controversial, and there will probably continue to be very much and widespread confusion regarding domain names for many years to come.
Few people are aware of the ownership relationships in the media they use on a daily basis. My guess is that significantly less than 1% are aware that when they visit nytimes.com “Alphabet” — the company that used to be known as “Google” — is informed which computer has connected to which article, and that information is probably used to inform Google’s algorithms about which ads to show. In that sense, Google sort of “owns” the New York Times, even though this ownership relationship is nowhere transparent on any document or piece of paper.
Most Fortune 500 corporations have huge portfolios of domain names. Google is itself very much in the domain name business. When people say that domain names don’t work, they apparently overlook the simple fact that the Internet’s most successful companies realize that they do work. Extremely well. So well that they will bet the farm on them. They understand that the domain name is the medium.
Try to imagine an Internet where that were not the case. Oh, wait — actually that appears to be quite easy: Just look at your so-called “smartphone”. I bet they called it smart not because smart people use it, but rather because smart companies make them to spy on dummies! 
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One point about rational media that deserves particular attention is that they do not require only one standard type of rationality. I will save this point for a future date.
Today, I would like to entertain another issue: Alternatives.
This particular point is not about alternative rationalities, but rather the more general freedom of choice from a variety of alternatives. Whether or not a person is rational of type A (e.g. rationalising their point of view with A1, A2, A3, etc.) or rational type B (instead rationalising according to B1, B2, B3, etc.). they may both appreciate the freedom to choose from a diverse palette of products, services, etc. For example, people generally appreciate the freedom to chose among brands – for example they may have a favorite brand of beer, a favorite bicycle brand or a particular style of shoes from a particular brand name shoe designer.
Likewise, pupils in schools may very well be encouraged to analyse arguments from different points of view. In free and democratic societies, people are encouraged to vote for candidates from a wide range of choices across the political spectrum.
What about when we turn to search for information? Do we choose among a plethora of search engines? In the past week, how many different search engines do you remember using?
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When I first wrote about the Wisdom of the Language almost a decade ago, I realized that many people would probably think the idea was odd, and perhaps even revolutionary. I think perhaps I was also too much involved with rather “technical” details — and therefore many people didn’t seem to “get it” right off the bat. It’s really a very simple idea: A site named “X” is about “X”.
I named the concept the Wisdom of the Language in order to contrast it with the Wisdom of the Crowds, a book that was very popular at the time (and which is sort of the basis for algorithmic search methods like those employed by Google). As I wrote back then, crowds are a sign of significance (and perhaps also something like credibility), but they are not a measure of relevance.
Although this technology is quite simple and straightforward, language is also a very complex phenomenon. People who are not well-versed in how language works may not see the forest for the trees — and therefore they may easily get lost. This is especially the case for people who do not have much experience in comparing and evaluating a plethora of media and information sources. Many people have rather limited media literacy skills, and really do need the guidance of a trained information specialist (which had for over a century been the role of professional librarians).
Starting about a decade ago, people began to think they no longer needed trained professionals to help and guide them. Now they felt ready, willing and able to discover facts by themselves — or rather with the help of an algorithm that would spit out objective “results”. Some people still to this day think the results this program returns are objective facts. They naively believe Google much like earlier generations blindly followed a Pope or presented their questions to some oracle or other magical power. They still do not realize that the primary purpose of Google is for the company to maximize its profits.
Now as most people use Google to type in the name of the website they want to visit (for example: Amazon), there is a common and also a reasonable misconception that the name of a site can be used as a way to “optimize” it for search engines (such that when someone types in “hotels” or “weather”, the top results in a search engine might very well be a site like hotels.com or weather.com).
While that may be true, that is actually not the main reason why the Wisdom of the Language works better than the Wisdom of the Crowds. Using the Wisdom of the Language, a brand-name website like Google will actually ultimately become superfluous. As people become aware of the fact that weather.com has reliable information about weather, and that hotels.com has reliable information about hotels, they will no longer need to search for “weather” or “hotels” at the Google website. Instead, they can skip that detour and go directly to the information source.
Most people still do not have the media literacy skills to be able to reliably evaluate the quality of information different websites provide — but it is getting better, slowly but surely (and many Wisdom of the Language websites are helping to pave the way).
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