Alchemical Musings

As I’ve claimed previously, Big Pharma’s crimes and cover-ups will soon make Big Tobacco’s scandals look like jaywalking.

AstraZeneca’s Seroquel trial began last week, and the industry’s criminal antics surrounding anti-psychotics are coming into better focus.  Documents introduced as evidence are confirming that, like Eli Lilly with Zyprexa(Kills), AstraZeneca knowingly downplayed the fatal side-effects of their toxic pills. They covered up the fact that Seroquel causes diabetes and massive weight gain, and have been gaming the drug approval process to expand the diagnostic reach of their drugs.

In a move which hits new lows, even for Pharma, documents introduced into evidence reveal sex scandals and conflicts of interest in the approval of Seroquel for treating depression, the burying of unfavourable studies, and deeper insight into the pathological cognitive dissonance underlying Pharma’s logic. Get ’em while they’re hot!

43_Exhibit 15.pdf

There may be a rationale to explain why acutely psychotic patients may gain weight in the short term, following effective therapy. The relief of negative symptoms, apathy, etc, disorganized thinking, may result in return to normal activities like having regular meals.

I see. Blame the weight gain on the crazy people. Gotta love it. I am reminded of the current economic situation, where corporations privatize the profits and socialize the risks/loses. All the good is caused by the drugs, the patients/victims take all responsibility and blame for the bad.

Meanwhile, this week yielded a few more alternate hypotheses on behavioural issues in children:

Are Bad Sleeping Habbits Driving us Mad?

The 3 R’s? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: Recess

adding to the growing list (nutritional issues, boredom, and increased stress) of plausible explanations for children’s irritability, restlessness, and erratic behaviour.

I thought the scientific method was supposed to be about systematically exploring causal possibility spaces, and iteratively refining our narrative understanding based on critical observation. Pharma’s scientists have seriously lost their way. They have betrayed the sceptical stance at the foundation of scientific knowledge production.

That’s some abstract, theoretical jargon, but the threat here is quite concrete and real.  Just ask these horrifically abused elderly patients. People who have never manifested psychotic symptoms are no longer safe!

That future of psychiatry is quite disturbed. They might actually beat
omniscient surveillance to the punch on absolute control over the populace. But heaven help us if/when Big Brother forges an alliance with Big Pharma.

Filed by jonah at 11:04 pm under dangerousgifts,epistemology,ethics,fire
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Economies, not cars.

Last night I saw Larry Lessig present “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy” as a part of Evan Korth’s amazing Computers and Society speaker series.  The talk was an improved iteration on the talk I saw him present at Wikimania ’06, but it was much tighter – concentrated, but not too dense. He included a few new examples and anecdotes, collapsed earlier presentations into compact sub-segments, and has incorporated Benkler’s hybrid economies (articulated in The Wealth of Networks) into the Read-Only->Read/Write->Hybrid progression.

It really is a pleasure listening to a world-class orator (he has argued cases in front of the supreme court) deliver an argument, and I was trying to pay attention to his rhetorical style, and the ways he has honed the structure of his argument over time.

First, a small bone – For a while, Lessig has been making a bold and provocative assertion that text has become the Latin of our time, and audio and video are the vulgar. Arguments over the correctness of tense aside, I sure wish he would start using the word ‘vernacular’ instead of ‘vulgar’.  ‘Vulgar’ makes the argument sound, well, a bit elitist to me, and when I repeat this claim, I remix it to ‘vernacular’.

More important than quibbling over this choice of words I was a little thrown off by the direction that Lessig wants to take IP reform. Last night he spent a bit of time outlining a scheme that hinges on the analytic distinction between professionals and amateurs. I think he may have been trying to appeal to an intuitive sense of fairness, or perhaps pragmatics, over how professional creators work might be protected by IP while amateurs should be free to create w/out regulation or restriction.

I thought it was downright odd that in one breath he was persuading us that we live in a hybrid world, and in the next trying to maintain the line between amateurs and professionals.  The line between professionals and amateurs is clearly blurring, as the difficulties in applying shield laws to journalists attests. Nowadays, who exactly is The Press, whose freedoms may never be abridged according to the First Amendment? I am really unclear about the definition of a creative professional in a hybrid economy. Would we need to introduce licenses to certify creative professionals? Even in the example of the baby video with Prince music playing in the background, would the situation change if the mother was making money off of google ad-words aside the video?

To me, if you take Benkler’s argument to heart, in a networked world many everyday interactions will be commodified, and favors will turn into transactions. We’ll all become some hybrid of amateur and professional. This doesn’t sound all good to me, as I am not sure I want to live in a world where everything has an exchange value… This paper by Nigel Thrift, Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification, paints a grimmer picture than Benkler does about the sophisticated ways that knowledge workers are being exploited in the hybrid world we are hurtling towards.

Filed by jonah at 1:50 am under aesthetics,air,ethics,fire,freeculture
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By now you may have heard of the innovative citizen-driven election monitoring system, Twitter Voter Report (they are getting great press cycles, with purportedly more to come).  I actually wrote up and submitted the post that appears on infosthetics.com, a wonderful blog that tracks innovations in data visualization.

This projects represents a really innovative use of Twitter as a “just-add-water” (gratis, but not truly free) infrastructure for distributed structured-data collection. It reminded me of a free platform a group at  UNICEF is building to collect distributed structured-data in the third world (for places w/out easy access to the internet, but with cellular connectivity) –  RapidSMS.

Imagine how many millions of dollars the government would have spent to build a cell-phone enabled election monitoring system (that likely wouldn’t work). Instead, a group of volunteer activists, weaned on the open-source, do-it-yourself culture of code jams, shared repositories, and issue trackers, decided less than a month ago that they could build this themselves on a shoestring.

This is definitely a big deal, and relates closely to a new tier of participatory media which I began to describe at my talk at CCNMTL’s New Media in Education conference this month. It also has everything in the world to do with the TagMaps tool I wrote about last November in my post Crowded Wisdom. Systems are coming online which are helping us synthesize vast volumes of tiny fragments of information into meaningful knowledge.

Twitter Vote Report allows anyone to report voter suppression, and problems with specific voting machines, but it support tracking wait times, which will be aggregated and mapped on the website.

Previously, when a voter had a complaint, he had to go through election officials who might have little incentive to admit a mistake – what tech executive Logan calls “a fox guarding the chickens” scenario.

“What this technology does,” he says, “is give the chickens a microphone.” [Baltimore Sun]

Finally, while we are on the topic, this was a great letter to the next president on what he can/should do with technology. How will President Obama utilize the historically unprecedented social networks he mobilized during his campaign?

Dear Mr. Tech President

For more information on Twitter Vote Report see their press page.

Filed by jonah at 12:09 am under epistemology,ethics,fire,water
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This Fall I am taking a great class on Transparency & Democracy (syllabus) taught by Prof. Michael Schudson. We are talking about the history of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and trying to puzzle out what sorts of cultural forces accounted for an indisputable rise in transparency and openness in American society. We are taking a fascinating journey through the history of social movements in the 60s and 70s and reading about the Free Speech movement, SDS, the feminist movement, the gay liberation movement, and tabloid talk shows.

This summer I had also heard a great presentation by Phil Lapsley at the Last HOPE conference on The Hackers View of FOIA. I learned a great deal of practical information about how to properly file a FOIA request, a few fun FOIA hacks (hint: an agency’s FOIA logs are FOIA’able), and about www.getmyfbifile.com (the NSA has their own easy to use FOIA form).  The main value of Get My FBI file are the office addresses it contains. Although requesting your intelligence files may put an end to any of your delusions that you were important enough to have a file about you, I decided to take the plunge. In my case, I imagined I might not have the security clearance to see my own file – I’m one of those “disposable spooks” whose very existence will always be fervently denied.

As it turned out, my ego didn’t even get brushed, never mind bruised. The NSA has now officially responded that they can “neither confirm nor deny” any intelligence records. In fact, I think I received a boilerplate response letter, which sure makes it sound like the NSA is engaged in widespread domestic spying. So, judge for yourselves and get involved and support the EFF! The spirit of FOIA wants information to be free – Does the NSA answer to anyone for any of its activities anymore?

You may aware that the NSA/CSS targets unspecified persons or entities involved in terrorism as part of the nation’s efforts to prevent and protect against terrorist attacks. However, because of the classified nature of the National Security Agency’s efforts, we can neither confirm nor deny whether intelligence records relating to you exist, or whether any specific technique method or activity is employed in those efforts.

[1][2]

Filed by jonah at 12:04 am under ethics,fire
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To: Sandy Walsh <sandy.walsh@fda.hhs.gov>
Cc: World
Subject: Establishing the Validity of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder

Dear Miss Walsh,

I am a professional educator, software architect, and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. I am outraged that the FDA is abusing its power and violating the public trust by supporting the corporate interests of the pharmaceutical lobby. The drug companies are shamefully maneuvering to expand the market for the multi-billion dollar a year anti-psychotic industry by extending the diagnostic criteria of the purported mental illnesses their toxic pills are prescribed to treat.

The FDA has recently taken the unprecedented action of effectively legislating the existence of a disease, a disease whose existence is denied by many experts on both mind and body. The diagnosis of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder does not exist in the DSM IV, is not recognized by public or private insurance companies, and is the subject of intense debate between psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and therapists. When did the FDA become authorized to construct/validate new diagnoses or decide who is mentally ill?

I have been closely following the heated controversy surrounding the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder in children since the tragic death of Rebecca Riley. Rebecca was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder at 2 years old, and was killed when she was 4 by an overdose of anti-psychotics. This past year, Frontline aired The Medicated Child, a provocative investigation of the widespread experiment being conducted on the innocent children of America. I beg you to watch this documentary before making any more decisions about the existence of this alleged disorder. The piece demonstrates how our children are being chemically swaddled, and how these drugs are being systematically deployed as instruments of discipline and control.

The public has a right to full disclosure on this important matter of public health! I am shocked that you have still not issued a statement explaining your position on Pediatric Bipolar Disorder – What behavioural symptoms constitute this alleged disease, and how were these criteria arrived at? What is the progression of this illness and what are the mechanisms are involved in its treatment? Who was consulted in the validation of this disease, and have their research findings been vetted by a disinterested scientific community?

The FDA’s complicit involvement in a mass experiment on an entire generation of American children demands transparent accounting. It is absolutely imperative that the FDA shine some light on its backroom dealings with the Big Pharma.

Sincerely,
Jonah Bossewitch

Filed by jonah at 11:18 pm under dangerousgifts,ethics,fire
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I’ve got a wonderful summer backlog of posts piling up, but I really want to try to keep these posts short(er) and sweet, so I’ll try to compose staccato.

My explorations into virtual worlds have taken a turn for the surreal lately, as I have made a few new close friends who have been graciously teaching me how they play. I feel like I might be coming ridiculously late to the conversation (I don’t often play video games), but my experiences have given me new pause about the raging debate over the potential influence of sex and violence in games/media on people (not just youth).

I have learned first-hand how Second Life encourages people to articulate their fantasies in intricate detail – trying on new fashions, tattoos, piercings, behaviours, and lifestyles. From a few conversations, I am also pretty sure that much of this identity-play sometimes sticks, and often crosses back over into real life.

The whole process is spookily reminiscent of the “manifesting principle,” described in magickal/mystical systems like Chaos Magick (e.g. Carol’s Liber Kaos) and even Kabballah (The Three Abrahamic Covenants and The Car Passing Trick):

1. Know what you want. Clearly and precisely understand what you want by doing the intellectual work needed to really know what you want and how much it costs (or how impossible it is.)
2. Sacrifice your(ego)self to the task. Put your heart and soul into your endeavour. Do real work in the physical world towards your goal. Care deeply about the work you are doing. Work (and pray) well beyond your normal point of giving up. Do the work and show your caring anyway, even if it seems that [God] is not listening.
3. Return your personal will to [God]. Give up, be infinitely patient, and pay attention.

The manifesting principle only works when a person has made a real sacrifice and has continued to work even while they have let go of their expectations of the outcome they desire. When a person short-circuits the full process, nothing happens. When there has been no sacrifice, there is nothing for [God] to respond to. (Stan Tenen, The Purpose of Prayer).

So, while Halo or even Grand Theft Auto might not cross some yet unknown threshold, I am mildly concerned about the World of Warcraft players. Sure, many of them are just playing, but some might be inflicting real emotional harm on other real people. Something to ponder.

I haven’t really worked this out in detail yet, but I also wonder if Geertz’s notion of “deep play” (introduced in Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cock Fight) might be useful and relevant here. The deep play he describes shares many characteristics with these mystical formulas and the magical substrate that Second Life has clearly become for some people. Something the Stanford lab is trying to systematically measure and observe, though I don’t think they have floating this particular hypothesis yet 😉

In many ways my conversations and immersion in the wonderful Play as Being project and community have helped me think about these relationships (especially ‘letting go’, the final step in manifesting), but I will save some of the direct connections for a future post.

Filed by jonah at 10:06 pm under air,ethics,fire,metaphysics,playasbeing
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Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired published a provocative essay last week that really caught me off-guard:

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

I have been writing lately about the effects that technology is having on epistemology, namely, what is knowable and how we go about knowing.

But, I’ve arrived at very different conclusions than Anderson. I think that our methods for gathering evidence to support a hypothesis is changing – radically – but I certainly do not think that the scientific method (or attitude or stance, as Piet Hut sometimes puts it) is obsolete. Evolving, for sure, but I hope not in the direction that Anderson claims. Intriguingly, Kevin Kelly – who originally launched Wired, wrote an essay on the future of science that I think is much more thoughtful and prescient.

A cursory examination of the comments posted on his essay make me wonder if he hasn’t floated a straw man argument, just to be provocative. But after a few conversations with friends and colleges this week, I believe there is something important and scary in his perspective.

My thinking here is greatly informed by a book I am reading this summer by Bruno Latour – The Politics of Nature. In this book, Latour struggles to reconcile the perennial tensions between nature and democracy, science and politics, facts and values, and ultimately, objectivity and subjectivity. He critiques the veneration of facts as the penultimate authority – reminding us to always consider who gathered those facts and why. His argument is far more nuanced and complex, but I really see its re-enactment in the veneration of data Anderson naively concedes.

We must acknowledge that data itself is nothing more than a mediation with reality – and we shouldn’t confuse data with reality itself.  There are many good rebuttals appearing in the comments, but none that I have read point out that Anderson’s characterization denies the politics of instrumentation and data collection – the concepts and constructs that underlie the data, never mind the importance of stories and explanations in our politics and justifications.

This understanding is basic to the psychology of perception as well as the philosophy of science – there is no observation without pre-existing concepts and constructs – the buckets of data we are collecting (and, at least for now, some data is not being collected) are being stored according to organizational schemes – schemes created by humans.

Data isn’t sacred, and its folly to regard it as such. We need our models and the explicit self-awareness that we created them within a particular historical context and theoretical paradigm.

In the wise words of my mentor/advisor, Frank Moretti:

The problem with statistical analysis in the hands of many is that they expect the statiistics to yeild the truth and this leads into the mistake “reporting their findings” in a theory-deprived context. Whenever you are dealing with the human sciences, whether the information is statistical, visual or otherwise, you still have to build a meaningful narrative that requires that you have a point of view that has either overt or covert theoretical assumptions. Without that you are in danger of reporting your views in what Marcuse calls opreational language, a language derived from the tools of discovery rather a serious point of view.

Filed by jonah at 12:50 am under epistemology,fire
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Last week I paid tribute to Albert Hoffman at an event hosted by Reality Sandwich. I have been following the site for a while, and really enjoyed the screenings and the conversation (led by John Perry Barlow and Daniel Pinchbeck).

I was a bit startled to encounter a perspective that I hadn’t thought about for a while. There were psychedelic enthusiasts who faithfully imagined the world being a better place if we all took a little trip (slight caricature, but bear with me). After a few years working on the Icarus Project and immersed in academia I found this attitude slightly jarring. Talk about technological determinism – our salvation in the form of an external molecule?

I happen to think that a bit of psychedelic experimentation might certainly help make the world a better place, but for one thing, if society were truly tolerant of freaks and drugs, we wouldn’t need them so badly in first place. For another, psychedelics are arguably more available now than ever before, and they haven’t (yet) catalysed the transformation imagined.

But what really bugged me is how this counter-cultural rhetoric would play directly into the hands of Big Pharma. Their message for years is that happiness can be found at the bottom of a pill bottle. Try to vividly imagine what these drugs would look like in their hands – the clinical administration of extracted active ingredients, outside of the usual cultural sacred context. This wouldn’t accelerate the evolution of consciousness, just the flow of capital into Pharma’s coffers. I also found it interesting to trace the genealogy of LSD back to psychiatry.

To be completely fair, Reality Sandwich’s message isn’t so simple, but I do feel its important to imagine how these messages might be appropriated.

I’ll leave you with one of the shorts from Post Modern Times: Consciousness is the Key

Filed by jonah at 12:19 am under dangerousgifts,ethics,fire
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I’ve been drafting this post on Frontline’s provocative investigative piece The Medicated Child since it aired, and the longer I put off finishing this the more connections pile up.

Since this has aired, we have learned that anti-depressants are no more effective than placebos (although more expensive placebos bring more relief than the generics ;-), there really is prozac in the drinking water, and the $15.9 billion ’07 market for anti-psychotics is expected to grow to $17.8 billion by ’11.

But the Frontline doc is a must watch for lots of reasons. The piece profiles three children who have been mis-diagnosed as bipolar. While the plausibility of a bipolar diagnosis in children is still being hotly debated, diagnoses are up 4000% between ’98-’03. In this piece we meet the lazy, obese, depressed parents who impose their sick worlds on their unsuspecting children who show glimmers of imagination and life, even as they are being chemically swaddled.

In one scene we watch a mother feeding her son corndogs, gatorade, goldfish, and cookies, and wondering why his behaviour becomes hyperactive sometimes. In another, a young girl is setup and goaded by her psychiatrist to share her violent fantasies, which she likely learned from here father, an Iraqi war veteran. In another, a mother is told by the psychiatrist that drugs are the only therapeutic option, and she leaves the office with an additional prescription for Xanax for her son’s first day-of-school anxiety. And the images of the poor boy who developed a neck tick on Risperidol were so disturbing I almost couldn’t bring myself to write this post.

The extent of the systemic corruption that these profiles reveal is mind boggling. Not only must we be concerned with conspiracies within the pharmaceutical industry, but now Big Food is getting in on the action. So, get out your tin-foil hat and lets start constructing a few narratives to help our feeble minds comprehend this complex, emergent phenomenon. The high-fructose corn syrup in our nations food supply, is modifying our children’s behaviour so they are diagnosed with a condition that is treated with a drug which makes them insatiably hungry! These drugs also cause obesity and diabetes, but that’s OK, because Big Pharma is investing heavily in diabetes treatments as well.

I don’t actually believe that the world has been overrun by super-villains. But these narratives do beg the question (which I have written about here before) – are conspiracy theories ever a useful heuristic for teasing out the emergent correlations from complex systems. Are these causal? Who would you charge with the crime? With corruption this systemic, the responsibility is distributed, accountability nil, and momentum virtually unstoppable.

An entirely alternative perspective which skirts the ideologically loaded value judgement of designating these behaviors “illnesses” is suggested by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness
(watch his 18 minute TED talk here). Perhaps the conditions that the pharma funded psychiatric establishment brands as illnesses are actually the normal responses of our psychological immune systems. The world is currently a very traumatic environment, and I think we need to seriously reconsider ways we can, in the words of The Icarus Project “inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world.”

I recently learned about ridiculously simple casual game called mind habbits, which seems rather superficial at first blush, but indicates just how malleable and programmable the 3lb lump of neurons on our shoulders can be. The researches behind the game began with the question “Can we purposefully design a game that helps people feel good about themselves?” Their initial amazing results suggest alternate approaches to scaling up talking therapy, other than miracle pills.

So, learn more about psych-pharmacological harm reduction, ignore those frowns, and think good thoughts – positivity takes practice.

Filed by jonah at 11:42 pm under dangerousgifts,ethics,fire,metaphysics
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Last Thursday I participated in a panel at an event entitled “The Future of Digital Media: Predictions for 2008.” The event was recorded and will soon be posted, but in the meantime here is a page about the event with more details and some pictures.

The even was hosted by Ember Media, held at The Armory and featured their CEO Clayton Banks keynoting some predictions for the coming year.

The predictions didn’t contain too many shockers (though I have blogged 1.5 years ago here about where I think the set-top box is headed – hint: straight into your pocket, and Clayton’s legislative prediction about a minimum, symmetrical bandwidth goal is something I find hard to imagine in a country where we can’t get network neutrality, municipal wi-fi, or even rural connectivity right). After the keynote, Clayton asked myself and my fellow panellists – Kay Madati, VP of Community Connect, and Alan Stern, Editor CenterNetworks – a series of smart questions.

It’s been a little while since I’ve hung out with this many entrepreneurs and it was refreshing. I definitely appreciated the opportunities to discuss privacy, the politics of bandwidth, and economics of sharing and test the theoretical chops I have been sharpening in grad school.

Reflecting on the evening, I was a bit frustrated at what seemed like a get-rich-quick entitlement that some of the questions implied. At one point I wanted to shout – 9 out of 10 restaurants in NYC fail – why do you think your digital media company deserves anything different? Micropayments?!? I remember hearing that elusive siren song back in ’99 at MaMaMedia… and smarter folks than I agree that free is a stable strategy… in fact, when copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Try concentrating on creating real value in the world, and trust me, the wealth will follow. But, I suppose not all of us have incorporated alchemical wisdom into our daily lives.

Thanks to everyone who was involved in organizing this event – it was a great success!

Filed by jonah at 12:53 am under aesthetics,earth,fire,freeculture
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