Re: <nettime> Should use mobile phone data to monitor public health

[Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au>]

The term 'public health' has never quite gone away, even when privatised medicine pretended that private health could be purchased.
The Spanish flu of 1919 is often cited; more apposite perhaps were the great cholera epidemics of the latrer 19th century. The proximity of the underclass to the rulers, notably in Central London, is what drove the equivalent of hausmannisation - the destruction of the old slums ('rookeries') described by Dickens, extraordinary efforts to rehouse the poor (and to build aristocratic enclaves like Bloomsbury) to ensure a *public* hygiene.
The proximity of the homeless to the billionaire class in any major city today could lead to mass incarceration; but it just might lead to providing decent health and housing for those ejected by the existing system.Here the liberal quandary Brian notes is at its deepest. It is inhumane to sacrifice the public good to the survival of the private good; but to as with the economy, it has been clear since 2007/8 that the market is incapable of providing even for its own survival. And that the state has an essential role.
At the height of the potato famine Nassau Snr, a powerful politician, opined that there had not been nearly enough deaths, and that Ireland's population needed to decline far more. Radical ecologists and BoJo seem to agree on that perspective.

But there is only public health. And the best way to secure it, if deaths are required, would be the removal of that miniscule proportion of the population that has accrued all the money.

yours till the broadband gives out

sean

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