on transparency: i was surprised to find that in many commentaries on the whole theranos thing holmes is repeatedly vilified and labeled as a "master manipulator" as if she has some sort of magic powers.

closed systems break because they are opaque, not because of magic.

i haven't read "bad blood" and probably never will but the reviews leave me more than a little irritated. from bill gates to roxane gay the reading of the story is surprisingly consistent: "insane! omg! how?!"

how is everyone surprised by this?

in a world where you can build a 10 billion dollar company without any scientific (science works, guys... remember?) evidence due to a market's utter lack of expectations surrounding transparency, *of course* a theranos will happen.

and it will happen again.

when the market requires zero transparency it has zero accountability. for some of us, the idea that corporations require any "secrets" to survive at all is baffling, but the idea that theranos was somehow a "scam" is giving the rest of the market too much credit.

opaque bodies (corporate, non-profit, or government) are pretty much guaranteed to fail in a similar way, right? eventually each one will succumb to the most destructive pathology of the most survival-hardened of its members. it's a pretty weird way to organize our species.

we need to remember that corporations and the market are creations of our imaginations. they don't really exist nor do they exist in isolation. these are not natural phenomena. the way we arrange corporations in the marketplace and the liberties we afford them? those are choices.

yes, it's hard to make collective choices as a species. there's some coordination involved. but that seems like a worthwhile skill when we're doing an r.c.a. on a symptom (theranos) of a much larger disease.

or, say, to fight a global pandemic.