Digital health

Greek philosophers had lengthy discussions about justice and the virtues of men. Many of their thoughts are the founding framework of today’s democracies. Discussing about the value of justice and morality, Plato’s brother Glaucon tells the following story: A shepherd watches over his sheep when a big storm comes up. Lightening strikes right in front of him and causes a deep abyss into the earth. Bewildered about the crack in front of him, he goes down the abyss and finds a hollow horse with a tiny opening. Glancing through the opening, he saw a human corpse lying inside the horse and wearing nothing but a golden ring.

He promptly took off the ring and brought it back with him on the surface. When the shepherds had their monthly gathering to report to the king, he was wearing his golden ring. While he was sitting among the other men and playing with his ring, he turned the ring’s stone inside his palm and realized that he became invisible, hearing the other shepherds talking about him as if he was not present. Surprised about it, he turned the stone back on the hand and became visible again.

After this discovery, he tried the trick several times and quickly understood that as soon as he turns the ring’s stone into his palm, he immediately became invisible. Leveraging on his new super power, he managed to become one of the king’s messenger to get closer to the throne. He seduced the king’s wife to adultery, revolted with her against the king, killed him and took on power.

If we had two of such rings, Glaucon argued, and give one to a perfectly just man and the other to an unjust man, neither of them would have the unrestricted virtue of resisting the temptation of being able to do anything without being caught or discovered. On the contrary, the perfectly just man who would resist the temptation would be laughed at by others if they would learn that he had the power to do anything and did not take advantage of it. This tale, known as the ring of Gyges, was used by Glaucon to prove that justice is not a good that we strive to achieve but merely a compromise that we accept because we do not have the power to be unjust without getting caught. It took all of Socrates philosophic wisdom to prove that justice is not a social construct but an individual virtue upon which inner peace and happiness depend. Whoever abuses of the ring of Gyges enslaves himself in his own wrongdoing.

Skip forward 2000 years, replace the shepherd with Mark Zuckerberg and the ring of Gyges with Facebook’s invisible mountain of personal data from 2 billion individuals. In takes less than 70 “likes” for Zuckerberg to accurately figure out our color of skin, our sexual orientation, alcohol and drug consumption and political affiliation, among others. Playing around with his own ring of Gyges in form of pattern analyzing algorithms, Zuckerberg can predict our behavior (consumption patterns, stability of relationships, development of political opinion etc.) better than our closest fiends, our parents and, scarily, better than ourselves. Selling such insights to advertisers while manipulating his users to keep them hooked in front of the screens is how Zuckerberg became a billionaire.

Expecting him to restrain himself from using his unprecedented power of predicting and shaping the behavior of millions of Facebook users is bluntly naïve for several reasons. On one hand Facebook Inc. is a stock quoted company expected to maximize quarterly revenues for its shareholders rather than pursuing the (profit diminishing) virtue of social justice. On the other hand, there simply is no such thing as an algorithm police or an international data mining auditing body with the necessary intelligence and infrastructure to prevent abuse of data on a global scale. And of course, the data itself is hedged in Facebook’s proprietary pipelines and data centres around the world.

It was about time that Zuckerberg gets beaten through his own weapons by Russian trolls simply to enable the long needed public awareness around the phenomenal political power that Facebook has. It is a unique chance for Zuckerberg to step up and start assuming responsibility and live up to the virtue called justice.

Marketing is the bridge between offer and demand. It has originally been invented when offer outperformed demand due to newly invented mass production. By selling promises (ex. Redbull gives you Wings) and focusing on the brand, new needs were created. Keeping promises though involves expenses. Subway’s promise to “eat fresh” means throwing away tons of perfectly eatable food that does not look fresh. Meticulous loyalty to one’s brand promise therefore comes at significant cost. This is probably why Subways twelve inch sandwich is in fact 11 inches long. What I call the marketer’s dilemma hence consist of creating value by selling promises, creating trust by keeping promises while focusing on maximizing the gap between the former and the later to boost profits. Arguably the most elegant way of maximizing profits and avoiding the delivery of the brands promise altogether is by positioning the brand’s promise fulfillment into our after-life period. The world renown brand promise “Respect the 10 commandments and escape from hell to heaven ” has been generating billions of dollars throughout the last 2000 years. While the brand experience of this global brand is mostly generated only by social interaction of other brand ambassadors (i.e. crowd-sourced), it offers stunning venues that are usually situated within prime real estate zones of city centers featuring wall art on high ceilings, towers with bells and the iconic logo on the top. Hard to beat.