Market Alchemy and Illuminated “Wellbeing” – Synthetic Pretenders Part 8

This is the eighth installment in the Synthetic Pretenders series examining the proposed CaliforniaTrust Framework within the context of synthetic biology, eugenics, and the Spanish mission system. 

Part One: Scientific Management, Robo-Bees, and Digital Babies

Part Two: Apocalypse, Mind Files, and Interplanetary Promises

Part Three: The “Magic” of Radio-Eugenics and Holographic Twins

Part Four: Ritual Gaming and Berggruen’s Transformation of the Human

(Follow-Up Interview with Leo Saraceno, Silicon Icarus’ 53 Degree Podcast)

Part Five: Elite Views on Automated Law and Vending Machine Democracy

Part Six: Reject Scientific Management, Celebrate Weeds

Part Seven: Computational Life and Industrial Design Erode the Boundaries of Our Being

Featured image from Omidyar Network’s “Portals to Beautiful Futures.”

Following up on the emergent bio-economy, this post examines how digital identity interfaces with health-tech implementation designed to deliver the data that will be needed to fulfill pay for success deals in monitored “wellness” behaviors. As people are displaced from jobs and housing by the planned economic disruption of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, large populations will be made dependent on the state, which will in turn outsource its responsibility, through the vehicle of public-private partnerships, to social entrepreneurs and allied NGOs. Individuals and families will lose their economic independence as Universal Basic Income is implemented. Compliance to behaviorist conditions embedded in “supportive housing” and “workforce training” programs will be the cost everyone must pay to survive. While framed as “charitable,” such models are paternalistic and demeaning, the legacy of reservations and further back the California missions.

Name choices are significant. When I was creating my relationship map for the California Trust Framework legislation, the health company Lumedic stood out to me, because it incorporated the concept of lumen that seemed to highlight emerging technologies relating to light, optical and photonic computing.

Chris Ingrao, co-founder of Lumedic, got his start in the mid 1990s working in the semiconductor industry at Micron in Idaho then came to Seattle where he was employed by companies doing business in the domain name registration, asset tracking, smart cities, IoT, AI, natural language processing, and machine learning sectors. In 2018, Ingrao helped found Lumedic. In 2019 he joined the blockchain task force for HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), which is a partner in the Stewards of Change / National Interoperability Collaborative’s effort to create the massive interoperable system of health and human service data needed to streamline social finance prediction markets and collection of impact data. That year he also joined the steering committee of Trust Over IP, the Linux Foundation-hosted enterprise for digital identity in Web 3.0.

His partner at Lumedic is Michael Nash, who had been at Radius / Luxoft at the same time Ingrao was. Again we have “lux / light.” That firm is based in Zug, Switzerland, the crypto valley, and has been acquiring firms in IoT (Radius), health-tech, automotive, and finance since 2000. In a 2018 blog post, Nash lays out an origin story for Lumedic that revolves around a misunderstanding involving insurance coverage and billing for a dermatological procedure. This blockchain, machine-learning patient management software isn’t about building out a robust health-data bio-economy to run impact markets in IoT-managed human capital. No, we’re supposed to play along and nod our heads to vapid assertions that products like Lumedic’s are about empowering consumers of insurance products – eye roll.

If you’re not familiar with my work around social impact finance and digital healthcare nudging, the following links provide useful context: here, here, here, and here.

Source: Chris Ingrao LinkedIn

Jim St. Clair of the Linux Foundation, which is closely involved with so-called self-sovereign identity development, is also working with verifiable health credentials on a project affiliated with the Blockchain Advocacy Coalition. This group is one of the leaders pushing for the passage of the California Trust Framework. Jim was hired in January 2021 as the Chief Trust Officer for Lumedic.

Source: California Trust Framework Map, Lumedic

Source: Jim St. Clair LinkedIn

Providence Health, a Catholic healthcare system headquartered in Renton, WA and providing services to California, acquired Lumedic in February of 2019 to help with “revenue cycle management.” The Catholic Church has been deeply entangled in the social impact space since its first global conference on the topic co-hosted with Notre Dame’s Mendoza Business School in 2014. Sir Ronald Cohen of Social Finance and Matthew Bannick of Omidyar Network have been stalwart attendees. Last year due to the pandemic drama they mixed it up and swapped impact investing for soulful “innovative” health. See “Unite to Prevent” below.

Source: Vatican Unite to Prevent Conference May 2021

Health is United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Three, and many health system behemoths are wading into new territory, because they need to create new vehicles to circulate their immense reserves. It’s not just about capital flows and profit, however; equally important is the use of impact data to build a mirrored universe of digital agents available 24/7 to train artificial intelligence. There is an imperative to transform healthcare delivery using big data for profit AND twinning. Telecom infrastructure and social impact narratives are central to the coerced adoption of immersive surveillance tech around the world. Increasingly, that option is looking like “smart” supportive housing (Housing First) with data-driven wrap-around services that will tokenize the needy as impact commodities. See this feature on the church’s foray into pay for success housing with digital surveillance leaderboards to manage the poor.

Source: Littlesis United Nations Broadband for Sustainable Development

Providence, which maintains a $12-billion reserve, was criticized after taking over $500 million in federal Covid bailout money. The system operates in seven western states and manages 51 hospitals, plus hundreds of non-acute facilities that deliver supportive services. It is that type program that has been set up to be mined for social impact finance profit in “pay for success” preventative care and mental health management.

The health system has invested significant resources in data analytics, aligning itself with the new value-based payment model. Oregon, one of the states in which Providence operates, is a leader in adoption of this new compensation framework. In 2019, legislation was introduced to set up a Sustainable Health Care Cost Growth Target Implementation Committee, and in 2021 a Value-Based Payment Compact was adopted with 47 signatories. Providence Health was also a stakeholder in the development of a HUD-sponsored pay-for-success supportive housing study for the city of Anchorage, AK in 2018.

Social impact finance deals run on data, and Providence’s source for data analytics is Seattle-based Tableau software. Tableau, founded in 2003 with over 4,000 employees, was acquired by Salesforce in the summer of 2019 for whopping $15.7 billion. A year later with record earnings, Benioff announced layoffs of 1,000 people, including some Tableau staff. The rationale was repositioning Salesforce, which has used its philanthropic and venture capital divisions to carve out the nascent human capital finance sector.

Source: Tableau Feature Providence Health System Data-Driven Cost Savings

Salesforce Ventures joined with Lumina Foundation and Robin Hood Foundation in 2018 to create a workforce development fund that will leverage creative debt products to profitably groom the digital gig workers of tomorrow. See this post on Salesforce and toxic philanthropy from 2018. Tableau’s dashboards are used to track key performance indicators systemwide. Dr. Ari Robicsek, the Chief Medical Data Analytics Officer for Providence, said of the system they developed, “What my team set out to do was to build a kind of ‘one ring to rule them all,’ the one central dashboard that included all the KPIs that were important to all of our hospitals.” The intent was optimization of patient data with “care metrics” to identify wasteful practices. According to their website staff compensation is now based, in part, on the data in the Tableau dashboards.

Providence extended the reach of its data collection well beyond its facilities during Covid, sending patients home to be monitored remotely. Vital statistics were harvested through apps and low-cost technologies like thermometers and pulse oximeters. Pandemic was the goose that laid the golden egg for the bio-data-economy.

The first Covid case in the United States is said to have been admitted to the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Snohomish County, WA in January of 2020. Twistle and Xhealth were brought onboard to assist Providence in scaling the infrastructure for tracking patients, which at points had one nurse monitoring 85 to 100 patients per shift through texts, video chats, and surveys. Data was integrated into each patient’s electronic health record. The companies said compliance rates, responses to texts for vital signs, was around 70-80%. Reliance on technology continues to ramp up. This year the company  announced a new clinical innovation fellowship in partnership with Microsoft advancing interdisciplinary health-tech innovation.

Source: The First US Case, the First Death, the First Outbreak in a Nursing Home

In 2016, the health system set aside $100 million in seed funding for a new initiative,”The Wellbeing Trust,” which is affiliated with “The Wellbeing Economy Alliance.” The latter is a global enterprise with over 300 members promoting an “equitable” and “sustainable” future of circular economies and creative place-making. Let me translate – they’re pouring out social-impact-financed NGO green-washing to obscure the true horror of bio-digital convergence and full spectrum domination of natural life. The primary funder of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance is Partners for a New Economy whose catalytic capital is provided by the Rockefeller Foundation and Omidyar Network.

The Well Being Trust is affiliated with the California Children’s Trust and the Northern California Grantmakers’ Association. It will set up infrastructure for data-driven social prescribing. Tyler Norris, Executive Director and Board Chair of Naropa University, served on a foresight planning process in 2020 led by RAND for the Morristown, NJ Based Rippel Foundation, “Rethink Health: Amplifying Stewardship Characteristics and Trends Stewards Consider When Expanding Equitable Well Being.”  Other advisors on the effort, which was coordinated with the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, included Beth Rabbit, the Learning Accelerator (hybrid online learning); Mateus Baptista, Panasonic (Internet of Bodies); Amit Bouri, Global Impact Investment Network (social impact investing); as well as staff from the Project for Public Spaces (creative place-making), parks, and regional planning commissions. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation backed MyPass, the Austin program to blockchain unhoused people to create biometric health records; supported the Center for Digital Health; and Data Across Sectors for Health. The foundation is linked to smart cities, impact investing, and data interoperability through Stewards of Change. The branding makes it all appear so pleasant. It makes you wonder if these experts really don’t understand that militarized mixed-reality tech embedded in community “improvements” is a terrible idea.

Source: Wellbeing Trust Littlesis

Source: Providence Health

Rick Brush, CEO of Esther Dyson’s NGO Wellville, consulted for Rippel Foundation on Rethink Health. Before that, he launched Collective Health to pave the way for health impact bonds that can be used to finance disease prevention linked to social determinants of health. Wellville is the brainchild of Esther Dyson, a technology angel investor who led ICANN, the entity that assigns IP addresses, and is the daughter of space-theorist and physicist Freeman Dyson.

Dyson was also an advisor to Perot Systems and long-time owner of EdVentures, an education technology firm. All these connections make it clear to me that the intention behind these “wellness” protocols is to harness people to digital ledgers where, through social prescribing and compliance data, they can be turned into profitable commodities for the social impact economy.

Note the logo at the bottom of the Rethink Health cover – both the hexagons (graphene, hive mind, tessellation, blockchain) and the rainbow coloration (IRIS impact metric data and spectroscopy).

Source: Rethink Health

Source: Wellville

This clip from a conversation with blockchain expert Leo Saraceno, a contributor at Silicon Icarus, touches on the potential for blockchained human assets to be used as “stake” in “regenerative finance” deal structures. As an asset class, human capital will need to be assessed in real time, calibrating individual and collective compliance to established protocols of “wellness,” among other behavioral standards that can be tracked across cyber-physical environments. In this way even the most impoverished can be remade through the alchemy of tokenization into profit centers for social entrepreneurs, affiliated philanthropies, and sponsored NGOs.

Source: Silicon Icarus, Human Capital Prediction Markets

It’s no surprise that this health system, with its spin-off “Wellbeing Trust,” has been working closely with Microsoft on a “healthcare” chat bot on Azure. Following Cuomo’s pronouncement – sure we have to do this for COVID, but that doesn’t mean that we’re just going to forget about it – these AI apps are designed to be our minders, nudging us and building out the data sets to create our compliant (or not) digital twins.

Providence Health’s roots go back to the mid nineteenth century in Quebec. Sisters of  Providence emigrated to the west coast in 1912 where they did social work in indigenous and settler communities. My continued assertion is that the proper context for bio-colonization and the surveillance data economy are the California missions that informed the brutal control practices refined across the United States’ network of reservations.

General Richard Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian School, the model upon which the genocidal residential school system was based, once expressed the imperative to kill the Indian to “save” the man. It is this twisted mentality that could very well walk us down the road where we endeavor to kill natural life in order to preserve a well-managed, synthetic substitute. Conditional care will be tied to compliance and data-harvest. The future of work being planned is the performance of “wellness” behaviors while logging verifiable credentials, proof of impact for outcomes-based contract pay outs and machine learning. The “wellbeing” that is being served is that of artificial intelligence, not of the world’s children, the poor, or our sibling beings of the Earth.

Source: US Army to Return Remains of Native American Boys Killed in Reform School in 1880s