Under the Skin Surveillance – COVID-19 series

During a crisis, we have to take immediate action. But sometimes, the short-term fixes themselves become their own long-term problems.

Post 9/11

After 9/11, some things changed. We now have a permanent public security mindset. Everywhere people gather en masse, the threat of terrorism is omnipresent. This means we get our bags checked, walk through metal detectors and face a few other procedures for our collective safety. But the inconvenience hasn’t massively impacted our civil liberties.

Post Corona

Post COVID-19, we’ll see a similar pattern. Except this time, they won’t be checking for weapons we are carrying outside our bodies, but weapons we are carrying inside our bodies – viruses. Biometric testing will become the norm in places where people gather – public transport, stadiums, schools, universities and workplaces. We’ll walk through temperature sensors, breathe into analysers, look into iris scanners and be monitored by any other mass biometric measure device you can imagine. Again – not such a bad thing to keep society healthy.

Under the Skin

The problem with the above method of course, is that a virus has been shown to be capable of spreading far and wide through non-public venues. So, let’s imagine our government comes up with a better method. Every man, woman and child is given an Apple watch. The watch comes with additional sensors whose outputs automatically feed directly into a government database. The sensors constantly measure body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, sleep patterns, where you go and who you’re near. It can even record all your conversations 24/7, which can help locate and then minimise transmissions if you are infected – just in case. Oh, and it’s mandatory for free watch holders to use Apple Pay for all their purchases – which also links to the database.

Like magic, government algorithms could analyse data and find health problems before we know we are sick and stop a potential chain of infection in its tracks. A potential epidemic could be over in mere days.

That would be awesome, right?

Long Lead Thinking

While the benefits of the above idea can clearly be seen, giving legitimacy to this level of surveillance would have a compound effect in other areas of our lives. We’d be opening up our bodies and letting big tech and government get under our skins, literally. How could the data be used in unintended ways? How could minorities be targeted? What if the data were to be hacked? How could it be matched geographically and time-stamped to other online activities? The government can start to know not just what we watch and read, but what we think and our emotional reactions towards it. All of a sudden we could have a surveillance state that literally knows how we personally feel about everything. Happiness, sadness, elation, fear and anger – our most internal and private states of being would all be on file. Forget personality testing, we’d be ranked.

The Power of Inconvenience

We need the wisdom to understand convenience always has a price. And if the price of goods in 7-Eleven has taught us anything, It’s always high.

  • Fast food is quick and convenient – but has had a massive consequence on our health
  • Fossil-fuelled economies grow quickly, but at the cost of endangering the climate
  • Handing over our personal data can produce powerful information for collective gain, but we lose privacy and individual agency.

The consequences of actions today, happen long after the moment has passed. And often, they are beyond anything we can even imagine.

The Economics of Health

There are lots of business and life lessons emerging from the global Coronavirus pandemic. The first is simple, without our health, there is no economy. Health is the ultimate life goal and that needs to be atop of our decision hierarchy.
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Getting Priorities Right: The Australian F1 Grand Prix – This needs to be cancelled immediately.  It is the opposite of what every medical professional is recommending – a large gathering of people. As an economic rationalist, the best long term economic strategy is to be conservative. Let’s listen to health professionals. Let’s over react. The consequences of an under reaction could be catastrophic and cost more lives. The short term economic gain of an event, will certainly result in a longer term economic cost. Economic short term-ism never ends well.

The fact that our government has released an ‘economic stimulus package’ tells the story of their priorities. They’ve got the order of things back to front. They ought be protecting health now, and the economy later. Certainly protect the financially vulnerable in real time, but the best way to do that is focusing on stopping the spread by flattening the infection curve as quickly as possible. See below;

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Practice what you Preach: My advice above is not coming from the cheap seats. My work includes delivering keynote speeches at large public events around the world. The cancellations are coming in thick and fast, and I welcome it. There is a real economic cost to me, but I’d rather we reduce the overall impact sooner, and get back to normal quicker. Health now, business later.

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Respect your Customers: I have contracts with many of my customers. When they call to cancel or postpone work, I ignore the contract and focus on the person, the situation and how we can find a solution together. If there was ever a time to gain loyalty from the people you deal with, then it is in times of rapid change and uncertainty. People remember how you treat them in times of social stress.

At the end of the day, global issues like this effect everyone, but we get to choose how we react.

The most important startup

I am incredibly happy with the following things:

– My relationship with my family (immediate and wider family)

– The state of my health. I fit and well enough to enjoy, people life and exercise.

– Where I live. Yarraville, Melbourne, Australia. In fact so much so that I evangelize it.

– My house. A beautiful little renovated Edwardian, not big but it’s just right for me and my wife.

– The state of my country Australia. It allows us to practice any religion / or not and live a free life with opportunity.

– How I invest my spare time. I like surfing, gym and mountain bike riding.

– The fact that I am continuing a vocation of learning.  Both in life and academically in my areas of interest.

– The work I do. Running rentoid.com teaching at Melbourne University and writing this blog.

If any of these parts of your life aren’t right. If we are not quite happy with them, no less totally unhappy with them. Then this is the most important startup we can focus on. The start required to change it. Start today.

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Quote from Warren Buffett

Here’s a quote for Warren Buffett – who has been consistently among the few richest people in the world for the past 20 years or so.

“To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual insights, or inside information. What’s needed is sound intellectual framework for making decisions and to keep emotions from eroding that framework.”

buffett-cartoon

Firstly let’s define investing as something which we we see as worth putting a consistent effort into to achieve a long term result.

So it is fair to say we invest in many things such as family, health, finances and business ideas. The key interpretation from the above quote is that it’s not about being an intellectual guru, rather our success will be a function of having a robust framework to work towards. That this information is available to everyone, and if we have to the discipline to stick to it our investments will yield results far beyond our expectation.

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The importance of health

Today I can hardly move. I injured my back severely while surfing on the weekend, and pretty much had to crawl out of bed to get myself to a physician.

More than anything I deserve it. I have been neglecting my health recently. Finding  a reason not to go to the gym, putting off exercise and doing that little bit of extra work. Putting ‘that’ above ‘me’ is a bad mistake. It’s an immediate reminder of this: Without your health you have nothing. No amount of money or success can replace it.

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If you want to start anything worth doing, start looking after yourself. Your health should be number 1 on the priority list at all times. Above any goal, any project or any material desire. And that means scheduling in exercise and eating well, regardless of what it must replace. If your job or startup is impacting your health, then you need to to quit and start something which is more complimentary to long term living.

Stay healthy.

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