The pandemic, the war against the coronavirus, and the hygiene panic may be evolving with tools and methods that would have seemed inconceivable just a short time ago, but this does not mean that they emerged out of nowhere or were built in the blink of an eye from zero basis. Preceding them were the Ebola epidemics from 1995, peaking in 2014, SARS in 2002, H1N1 in 2009, MERS in 2014, Zika in 2015 (as well as bird flu and mad cow disease), which on one hand established a climate of constant threat to humanity and on the other provided all the necessary elements for constructing a certain and specific certainty regarding an impending and inevitable pandemic. The documentation of this prediction was a circular, self-reinforcing confirmation: pandemics have occurred throughout all periods of history – a long time has passed since the outbreak of the last one – the emergence of a new one is inevitable – the longer it is delayed, the more imminent its outbreak becomes. The absence of a pandemic became the absolute argument for its impending arrival.
In previous health crises, the burden of response had been borne mainly by large pharmaceutical companies, assisted by universities and research centers. The goals were within the field of medicine, health care services, but also of demonstrating global humanitarianism. To find the appropriate vaccine, to develop the appropriate treatments, to design the appropriate diagnostic tools, to test them intensively in the most affected countries of the third world and of course to secure patents and share lucrative contracts. Bioinformatics technologies and tools of the fourth industrial revolution were not absent, but they did not even determine developments; the answers continued to be medically-oriented.
The example of the H1N1 virus and swine flu is characteristic of the gradual involvement of bioinformatics in managing health crises. In 2009, with swine flu having erupted and spreading at a planetary level – and the prophecy of the inevitable and murderous pandemic being on the verge of fulfillment – Google was the one that first applied in the field of health a technology that later would be at the forefront of bioinformatics restructuring: big data analysis aiming to construct early forecasting models. The company’s analysts found that they could identify where the next outbreaks of flu would appear by studying the terms users entered into the search engine. The results proved accurate enough to allow health authorities to act preventively, having in their hands a relatively valid estimate of the geographical spread of the virus. The predictive processing ultimately identified 45 search terms, such as “flu complications,” “cold/flu treatment,” and “antibiotic treatment,” which began appearing on Google servers. Collectively, these terms showed a strong correlation between impending flu outbreaks and the locations from which the searches were made.
While it may seem simplistic that flu cases will be found where a large number of users are searching “flu treatments,” the significance of Google’s research lies in how appropriate terms were narrowed down and identified among 50 million related search terms. Instead of making assumptions about which terms are most relevant, testing them to identify connections, and gradually compiling a list of the most effective terms, the developers created an algorithm that simultaneously examined all searches on all topics and identified those most related to public health records on the flu. Ultimately, the correct terms—literally all of them—revealed themselves, and with proper processing, the estimation work was completed. Since then, big data, mathematical models, and algorithmic analyses have moved to the center of medical methodology.
In the 11 years since that pioneering big data processing, technological restructuring and widespread digitization have advanced at exponential rates. However, the problem is that the progress of the fourth industrial revolution is not a linear, continuous, and smooth process; the paradigm shift does not occur with the modern simply demonstrating “superiority” while the old is merely pushed aside as obsolete.
First of all, the invested interests in established structures and relationships are enormous. The automobile industries are not going to shut down just because autonomous/flying/electric vehicles are technologically superior; bureaucracy is not going to resign just because digitization makes it obsolete; universities are not going to cease their operations just because they insist on a useless educational process; nothing “old” is going to give up just because no capitalist, no matter how “banal” their activity, decides on their own to commit suicide.
Moreover, it is these very societies that find themselves technologically in an almost civilizational divide. While one segment has, to a greater or lesser extent, adapted to the generalized digital mediation and lives in 2030, another segment—which may even be the majority, especially among older age groups—has such an occasional and superficial relationship with bioinformatics and the cyberverse that, if transported back to 1980, they would notice no significant difference. This is the problem: society is entrenched in established structures, patterns, and relationships, making it impossible to smoothly transition from one model to another. Society is burdened by legacy systems: it wants to handle paper money, watch television, commute for work to a place it calls an “office,” be confined to a closed, structured space it calls “home,” own a private vehicle, hold certain attitudes toward personal data, and maintain a behavioral repertoire with historical depth.
Under such conditions, the bio-informational restructuring suffocates. The capabilities of new technologies have surpassed the users’ abilities and have not bent the tolerances they display towards the “old.” This is a contradiction that, under conditions of normalcy, would require enormous time margins—not to be resolved but at least to be smoothed out; yet the agents of the new paradigm do not have that much time, because competition at the stage of radical technological restructuring occurs on terms of “your death, my life.” Unless… Unless something so shocking and extreme happens that it disrupts normality and unleashes the trapped technological capabilities.
When the pandemic was declared—officially on March 11 and practically from January—states one after another across the globe, with few exceptions and varying degrees, imposed draconian emergency regimes. The decisive factor that transformed the “campaign against the coronavirus” into a campaign of violent and immediate imposition of the bio-informational paradigm was certainly the lockdown. The decision for mandatory, universal population confinement did not arise “suddenly” under the pressure of the pandemic; plans had existed for years for various pretexts. For example, in the U.S., the possibility of a lockdown was anticipated both after 9/11, under the pretext of possible new attacks, and in 2009 during the H1N1 epidemic; in any case, the goal was neither security nor health, but universal control. If the lockdown could now be imposed to such an extent, intensity, and effectiveness, it is because the necessary technological infrastructure was finally available. Neither in 2001, nor in 2009, nor ever before in the past, were there the tools that would allow states on one hand to enforce and oversee the confinement of the entire population, and on the other hand, for the confined to continue working, consuming, and maintaining a digital simulation of “social life.” Conversely, without the lockdown, it would have been impossible to apply so extensively and intensively all the cutting-edge technologies of the fourth industrial revolution. From the perspective of paradigm change, the lockdown was ultimately the catalyst that violently suspended “normality” and overturned the stagnant conditions that hindered the development of the bio-informational restructuring.
The generalized uncertainty managed to give the lockdown only two interpretations – contradictory indeed, but equally fantastical. Either that of the “foresight” of the paternalistic state which, even if arbitrarily, acted promptly as a savior through necessary measures, preventing massacres. Or that of a conspiracy by certain elites who, under the pretext of the pandemic, seek to impose their own dark interests. What is overlooked is that capitalism does not evolve mechanically or automatically, especially when dealing with sequences of events of the magnitude we are experiencing now, but rather, foresight is taken, tendencies are analyzed, plans are developed, and necessities ultimately impose their logic and define priorities. Strategy in capitalism does not emerge as the pure product of the intellect of some invisible center of centers, but rather as a plurality of dynamic processes that shape tendencies and developments, the resultant of which ends up having the weight of a coherent action program. Moreover, from the perspective of general capitalist interest, the plan exists and is non-negotiable: the acceleration of the fourth industrial revolution and the completion of the biotechnological restructuring. The techno-medical-police dictatorship under the pretext of the coronavirus was the force majeure that violently nullified all established contracts (in military terms, we would call it a deliberate, studied, planned, and anticipated destruction), unleashed the confined technological dynamics, and set in motion processes that objectively constitute a plan and certainly not a peripheral or circumstantial consequence.
The following texts attempt to highlight certain “snapshots” of what preceded the pandemic and reveal exactly this: that there was prior preparation and planning, and the hygiene war with all the changes it imposed did not erupt “suddenly.”
The first text, titled Lock Step, is an excerpt from a 2010 report by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Business Network on global development and technology. Instead of focusing on current developments, the report attempts to trace alternative paths that the global situation might follow, doing so in the form of scenarios. Four different and graded scenarios are presented, with the most adverse of all being Lock Step, which begins as follows: “In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for so many years finally struck.”
In certain respects, the scenario’s predictions are remarkably accurate. China is the country that achieves the best results in dealing with the pandemic, thanks to the strict quarantine it imposed; the authoritarian state assumes the center of direction/management, imposing suffocating restrictions and control over the population and subordinating individual interests to a central, national plan; citizens prove willing to voluntarily surrender whatever independence they have in exchange for greater security and protection; suffocating control remains in place, if not intensified, after the pandemic. Elsewhere, the predictions are nothing but the politicization of expectations, and thus the racist presumption that the third world would be the one devastated by the pandemic was not confirmed; on the contrary, the “tragedy” appears to have chosen model countries of the first world. On the issue of technology, the scenario also arrives at conclusions that prove reliable under today’s conditions: surveillance and control technologies are those evolving the fastest, as are technologies related to online activities; furthermore, states assume the central directive role here as well in research and innovation. It remains to be seen to what extent the pandemic will accelerate existing technological rivalries and whether it will result in the fragmentation of the global digital web.
The second text, titled The shape of things to come, concerns the technological competition between the US and China, as perceived and interpreted from the American side. The subject of the text is an extensive presentation made just a year ago by an American agency, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, focusing on the Chinese technological landscape and the state of the American technological apparatus in the war against Chinese competitors. Two elements run through American assessments. The first is undisguised envy for Chinese achievements and for the way Chinese society is structured, which allows innovation to be adopted and amplified without obstacles. The second is the certainty that the US, although once at the forefront, now risks losing any advantage, if not already defeated, and becoming followers in a technological future that will be dominantly shaped by Chinese technologies. The problem, interpreting the agency’s view, is on one hand that American society is now in a phase of sclerosis and remains attached to outdated frameworks, and on the other, a series of constraints, such as “data privacy protection” or the “free market,” which hinder full cooperation between the state and big tech companies.
Let us note in advance: the American voice makes absolutely no mention, neither of pandemics, nor of deadly viruses, nor of hygiene campaigns. Yet, most of what it proposes lies precisely at the heart of the bioinformatics restructuring now unfolding under the pretext of the coronavirus. We suspect that while the whole world frantically rubs their hands with soap and water, in certain agencies—not only in the US but everywhere—others are rubbing their hands with satisfaction at the golden opportunity presented by SARS-CoV-2.
In the third text, titled Biometrics, Digital Identities and Vaccines, we present the work of another noble global organization, ID2020. The organization’s goal is to promote digital ID, that is, digital identity that will draw validity not from the registry of some police service, but from the recording of biometric and other personal data on some server. Among the basic arguments in favor of digital ID is “health protection”, insofar as it includes information about the person’s vaccinations and thus will improve, they say, the health coverage of the population. Paradoxically, neither ID2020 mentions pandemics and wars against viruses. But now it is that the digital recording of the population becomes urgent and topical, under the pretext of controlling the pandemic. And somehow processes that until recently might have seemed independent, under the pressure of the hygiene campaign, are now articulated into a unified design.
Harry Tuttle