A Post-Truth Proactionary Look at the Pandemic
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A Post-Truth Proactionary Look at the Pandemic Steve Fuller 1 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Quantum Epistemology in Action When the Covid-19 crisis was about to send my university into lockdown in midMarch 2020, I sent a message to all my students about how they might think about the crisis (Fuller 2020). I stressed the anchoring effect of how the crisis first received worldwide attention. An overstretched doctor working in an intensive care unit at a hospital in Wuhan, China, panicked at the rate of patient intake and their rate of death— and did so on social media. The social media part was the truly new development, arguably more novel than the coronavirus itself. After all, viruses mutate all the time and can even pass between species, and air pollution in Wuhan—like other big Chinese cities—had long been a breeding ground for the viruses that cause respiratory ailments. Indeed, it is an ecological legacy that has been felt in the waves of more or less lethal forms of ‘influenza’ worldwide that have beset the entire industrial era. In the first instance, influenza tests the capacity of health care systems, and in the past, most have struggled and many have failed to cope—but without raising the alarm at the global level to such an extent that capitalism was brought to its knees, as it has been by Covid-19. After all, it is not every day that the Financial Times (2020) calls for a ‘Welfare State 2.0’ on a scale that 75 years ago led to the establishment of the United Nations. Because flu viruses typically feed on existing vulnerabilities in a patient’s condition, hospitals would typically need to register a higher than expected morbidity rate before a new virus was detected. But of course, previously the world’s health care systems were not being exposed simultaneously for all to see on social media. As the capacity for a virus to go ‘viral’ increases, sensitivity to the virus’ presence increases, which in turn reduces the time before an ‘epidemic’ and then a ‘pandemic’ is declared, which serves to accelerate the comprehensiveness with which measures are taken to fight the virus. Moreover, and importantly, intensified scientific scrutiny on the virus also generates backpropagation effects, effectively a rewriting of medical history whereby earlier data is reclassified so that a greater number of people—both living and deceased—are revealed to have contracted the virus.
* Steve Fuller [email protected]
1
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Postdigital Science and Education
What I have just described is the outworking of a quantum epistemology, whereby ailments and deaths that would have been diagnosed as extreme instances of the default disease categories are ‘converted’—as in a Gestalt switch—so as to be directly attributed, both in retrospect and in prospect, to Covid-19 through the ‘observer effect’ of the intensified medical gaze (Fuller 2018: chap. 6). In short: the more we look for Covid-19, the more likely we are to find it. What had been non-existent is now and always is everywhere.
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