Show notes
You Don't Have to Touch the Candle
On prevention, invisible harm, and the beep we stopped hearing
Confession first: I recorded this conversation a while ago, and it waited in line far longer than it deserved. Too many conversations, one analog brain. It's a big part of why I mostly record on my own these days. Apologies to my guest, and thanks for the patience.
This writing is inspired by my conversation with Barry Davis on An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — watch the episode. His book: The Preventioneers: Diseases, Disasters, and the Discoveries That Changed Our World. Inspiring stories of individuals who shaped prevention as a public good.
I put my seat belt on without thinking about it. Door closes, hand reaches, click. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a decision and became part of the car, like the steering wheel.
It wasn't always like that. For years the belt was there and almost nobody wore it. Then the car started beeping. Then came the fines. Then, slowly, the click moved from the law into the hand, and from the hand into a habit nobody notices anymore.
That's the strange thing about prevention when it works. It disappears.
Barry calls it a victim of its own success. Measles leaves the country, and the reason to vaccinate leaves with it. The thing that kept the danger away becomes the argument for letting our guard down.
Nobody throws a party for the fire that didn't happen.
But fire, at least, is visible. When Ben Franklin wrote that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, he wasn't talking about medicine. He was talking about fire. Smoke, flames, a street where houses used to stand. Nobody needs a statistic to believe in it.
Car crashes are visible too. Doctors see them every day in the emergency room, and we see them in the news and in the streets.
Floods are visible too. We watch the water rise, live, on every screen.
Other harms are not as visible as these.
A disease you've never seen becomes an abstraction, then a rumor, then something your neighbor isn't sure is real. A cyberattack makes no smoke. I've spent more than a decade around cybersecurity, and most of the damage there is invisible. Data walking out the door. Identities stolen and used somewhere far away. Companies compromised for months before anyone notices. We sweep it under the rug and wait for the big one, the event so dramatic it will finally change us. Barry isn't sure even that would work. People move on.
And now AI, where the harm won't even look like harm. It will look like a decision. A mortgage denied for reasons nobody can explain. A diagnosis checked by a machine, or not. A video of someone saying something they never said. No smoke, no flood, nothing on the news. Just an outcome that seems perfectly normal, until you ask who decided, and nobody quite knows.
The technology world has a name for getting ahead of this: security by design. It's a good idea with an old soul. It's prevention. Franklin would have recognized it in a second.
It also carries the same curse. If it works, nothing happens. And nothing is very hard to defend in a room full of people who want to ship.
That makes the job harder. Prevention has always started from what we can see. For these harms, it has to start from what we can imagine.
That's a different muscle. It's the one we use for stories, not statistics. Science fiction has always done this kind of work, rehearsing disasters so we don't have to live them. Kim Stanley Robinson opens The Ministry for the Future with a heat wave that takes twenty million lives, because that's what it takes to get the world in his novel to move. Fiction can afford that kind of catastrophe to make its point.
We can't.
Maybe that's what the beep has been all along. Not a sensor. A story, repeated until we believe it without needing the crash.
When we're kids, someone tells us not to touch the candle. We touch it anyway, just to be sure.
We have always learned faster from the burn than from the warning. More and more of the burns are invisible.
You don't have to touch the candle.
— Marco Ciappelli
marcociappelli.com
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About the host
Marco Ciappelli is a branding advisor, journalist and writer, and the host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age. He works one-on-one with professionals building their personal brand and advises companies on positioning and storytelling, in English and Italian. In 2015 he co-founded ITSPmagazine, where he covers technology, cybersecurity and society.
Branding advisory & coaching: https://marcociappelli.com/book-consultation/
Writing: https://marcociappelli.com/writing/
Journalism, ITSPmagazine: https://www.itspmagazine.com/about-us
For cybersecurity and technology companies, Studio C60: https://www.studioc60.com
Website: https://marcociappelli.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-ciappelli/
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