Dana Blankenhorn

Subscribe at Substack

This blog is now available at Substack, where you can subscribe to have it delivered to you. 

The Metaverse Party

I once spent a half-year working on a manual for an online shopping service.

Unfortunately, the year was 1984.

The point is that while it’s easy to ridicule the metaverse, the enabling technology already exists. The vision is easy to express.

When Mark Zuckerberg thinks of the metaverse, he first sees the oculus headset and haptic gloves he’s been developing for nearly a decade. The former can deliver an artificial, or partly artificial, set of visual and auditory inputs. The latter can deliver other senses, like touch, taste, and smell, simply by assigning values to them and transmitting the values, while having the necessary client equipment on-hand to translate the values back into experience.

Controlling Data for Good

When we talk about control over data, we start with metadata. These are vast stores of data on what people are searching for online, data about data.

Google and Meta Platforms (Facebook) use metadata to control advertising. Metadata lets advertisers reach specific consumers for the same price as the general network. The aggregation and organization of markets, once done through journalism, no longer pays.

The same techniques, applied to content, led us to Trump. Victims stay within a walled garden of propaganda. Facts can never get in. People don’t just vote based on this. They refuse vaccines, buy guns, and die. He who controls the data makes the rules.

The Creativity Economy

The Creativity Economy is why Trumpism won’t win.

Technology created the Creativity Economy. Creativity is now the gating factor to economic growth. America has more creativity than any other country, thus more growth.

This means more than having talent. Lots of places have talent. But the Creativity Economy has needs that go beyond having talent. Talent must be taught, and it must be free to learn. It must be mentored. Most importantly it must be empowered. Anything, or anyone, who says “no” to a creative person is harming the economy.

Creativity has many dimensions. The Creativity Economy draws from all of them. Whether your talent lies in organizing, in selling, in technology or explaining it, in music or art, the Creativity Economy needs you. Many business leaders don’t have degrees in business. Part of nurturing the Creativity Economy is giving people the freedom to change their path.

The Bresch File

If there’s an identifiable villain in America’s health care cost crisis, it’s Heather Bresch. 

If you have a kid who might die from food allergies, or if it might happen to you, you have an EpiPen. If you have asthma and worry about a sudden attack, you have one. It’s a necessity, an insurance policy against sudden death.

The EpiPen contains epinephrine, more commonly known as adrenaline.  Adrenaline is a hormone that can increase your blood pressure and heart rate. If you’re scared, or highly energized, your body releases adrenaline and performs better. It can stop the shock from food allergies. It can stop an asthma attack. 

During most of the last decade, Bresch was the CEO of Mylan. As CEO, starting in 2011, she pushed huge price increases on EpiPens. She made small changes to the injector to win patent protection. She called epinephrine generic to avoid having to pay Medicaid rebates. Mylan bought the rights to make the EpiPen in 2007 and had a 95% market share in 2016, increasing the size of the market five-fold. By this time, Mylan was selling two-packs of the pens for $608. 

In response to the scandal, Bresch stonewalled Congress. She claimed price increases were the result of research costs. They weren’t. She pretended not to know key details on pricing or the company’s policies on patient assistance. Eventually, market pressure forced Mylan into a merger with Pfizer’s generic drug business, which is now called UpJohn. When the UpJohn deal was done, Bresch “retired.” At age 52.

Any prosecutor who couldn’t make a criminal case out of this isn’t worth their law degree. So far, no one has. Wonder why?