New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Following Spring Breakers

As I noted earlier, cellphone tracking data is proving an interesting tool in trying to understand the spread of COVID-19.  You'll recall that Florida beaches featured a whole bunch of tightly-packed WOO-HOO SPRING BREAKers.  And that they then presumably left the state.  Where did they go?  Here's a map based on cellphone data.

Thanks Gov. DeSantis, who I never even had a chance to vote against!

The epistemology of COVID-19 – indicators edition

By Gordon Hull

A recent piece in the Guardian points to the limitations of models in understanding the spread of COVID-19: principally, those models are often not based on reliable data specific to the disease, so they can be wildly off.  As I argued earlier, the bottom line is that we really have no idea what we’re doing, and that lack of knowledge is an important reason why we’re having to adopt non-risk-based strategies like maximin to deal with the virus spread.  The decision to move to those strategies needs to be understood as a (bio)political one (just as the general preference for risk is); that they are not risk-based is probably part of why right-wingers are deciding it’s time to go “back to work.” It’s not that they have any better idea what’s going on than anybody else, they’ve just adopted a different political epistemology, and have decided that their idea of economics is more important than everybody else’s view of human life.

In the middle of any efforts at modeling or analysis are indicators.  These have been the subject of a fair amount of recent interest, as for example the recent (2015) anthology, The World of Indicators.  As the editors note in the book’s introduction, “indicators are typically presented as taken-for-granted facts. Yet, indicators are not neutral representations of the world, but novel epistemic objects of regulation, domination, experimentation and critique” (5).  More specifically, there is a fundamentally socio-political process at work behind any indicator.  We can all see the point with indicators like “women’s social equality,” since that concept means different things to different people.  So too, the point is clear enough in psychological categories like “normal” or “deviant” or “personality disorder,” as Foucault made clear.

Less obviously, it applies in more narrowly medical situations as well.  Consider malaria.  Malaria is a thing in that it’s a disease caused by a parasite.  Everyone knows that – it’s not an essentially-contested concept like “privacy.” And yet, as Rene Gerrets indicates in his contribution to the anthology, similar problems apply to malaria tracking in sub-Saharan Africa. 

COVID-19 reading

Stuart Elden at Progressive Geographies is curating a list of "geographers, sociologists, philosophers etc. on covid 19."

There's a ton of fascinating material there, and he is updating it regularly.

Big Data, Cellphones and COVID-19: Social Distancing Scorecard

At company called unacast has used cellphone tracking data to produce a “Social Distancing Scorecard.”  It breaks down the US by state and county to measure the distances that cellphones travel as a proxy for social distancing.  It then grades areas from A to F based on the percentage decrease. Obviously this is a rough proxy social distancing, but it’s currently the best we have.

It’s interesting to note geographical disparities.  Eyeballing it, urban areas are doing more social distancing than rural ones.  The Mountain West is doing less.  All of that tracks what we know about how different demographics and political orientations are responding to the virus.  Interestingly, Alaska is doing much more than most other areas, with the exception of the far north. 

My own Mecklenburg County (which includes the city of Charlotte, though the metropolitan area encompasses several other counties, and which just issued its stay-at-home order today) gets an ‘A,’ for a reduction of 43%, despite the County Health Director’s repeatedly telling media that people aren’t adhering to social distancing guidelines.  Next-door union County gets a ‘B,’ but that’s for a 40% reduction.  There are a couple of counties in the eastern part of the state that have seen an increase.  The state as a whole gets a ‘B’ for a 36% reduction – probably in part because the governor has been quite proactive in pushing social distancing.  Ohio is down 40%, presumably also because of a proactive governor.  It wouldn’t be hard to use this data to track the effects of specific policy interventions.

If you go down to Florida, the Miami area (and the cities up the coast) are all down 50% or so.  The Panhandle, where a lot of WOO HOO SPRING BREAK happens are doing a lot less distancing.

And so it goes.  The Washington Post has a write-up that gets at some of the privacy and other issues.  It should be noted that social media data is already useful in public health surveillance.  To cite only one example, one study found that content analysis of Twitter was able to predict community cardiovascular disease mortality – a significant result, since the average age of Twitter users is quite low, and (as the authors put it) “the people tweeting are not the people dying,”

Why We Are Not Bare Life: What's wrong with Agamben’s Thoughts on Coronavirus

By Gordon Hull

In a follow-up to a controversial piece in which he argued (in late February) that the social distancing and quarantining in Italy presented the temptation to universalize the state of exception, Agamben says this:

“Fear is a bad counsellor, but it makes us see many things we pretended not to see. The first thing the wave of panic that’s paralysed the country has clearly shown is that our society no longer believes in anything but naked life. It is evident that Italians are prepared to sacrifice practically everything – normal living conditions, social relations, work, even friendships and religious or political beliefs – to avoid the danger of falling ill. The naked life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that brings men and women together, but something that blinds and separates them. Other human beings, like those in the plague described by Manzoni, are now seen only as potential contaminators to be avoided at all costs or at least to keep at a distance of at least one metre. The dead – our dead – have no right to a funeral and it’s not clear what happens to the corpses of our loved ones. Our fellow humans have been erased and it’s odd that the Churches remain silent on this point. What will human relations become in a country that will be accustomed to living in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society with no other value other than survival?”

To be sure, there are and will be bad actors.  William Barr’s DOJ has apparently seen the epidemic as a good time for a power grab (notably, one that has been sharply critiqued from both the right and the left).  Ohio seems to be using it as a pretext to stop abortions.  So – and this will be my point – we must always be vigilant about the expansion of emergency powers.

But when you have a leitmotif, you stick with it, and so Agamben reiterates his basic thesis about the combination of state of exception and bare life:

COVID-19 links

It seems that Trump is descending into his usual self-aggrandizement and racism - somebody must have slipped something into his Diet Coke for Monday's (semi) coherent performance.   Unfortunately, that's now worn off.  If you haven't seen it, the Washington Post skewers the blatant hypocrisy of Fox News.  Also, the Trump administration was given the opportunity to think about pandemic response during the transition from the Obama administration.  Most of the people involved are no longer with the administration, even the subset of them who managed to act interested.

One of my arguments last time was that the U.S. social fabric was ill-equipped to handle COVID-19.  Here's a nice, short piece that condenses a lot of the reasons why the social safety net is a disaster.  For something more optimistic about the social fabric, read this.

I also suggested that the point of suppression and curve flattening needed to be viewed as stalling for time.  I focused on the development of treatments; over in The Atlantic, Aaron E. Carroll and Ashish Jha point out that the time could be used to put in place a comprehensive testing regime that would enable more targeted suppression efforts, instead of the blanket lockdowns we have now.  They also emphasize that if we succeed in slowing the disease now, we urgently need to avoid developing a false sense of security from that fact.

Finally, this is the first piece I've seen that details the gender dynamics of the coronavirus response.

 

The Epistemology of COVID-19

As communal life comes screeching to a collective halt for the indefinite future (including not-quite-Italy-but-close bans on movement in San Francisco), and as public health officials go into “more lockdown is better” mode, it seems important to underline at least three things: (1) no one knows what they are doing, hence (2) these measures are a rough approximation of acting according to a maximin principle, and (3) they are not socially sustainable.  I'll conclude with what strike me as the only two currently-plausible off-ramps.

Let’s start with (1).  John Ioannides makes the best case I’ve seen for the uncertainty behind what we’re doing in a recent piece on StatNews.  The depth of our collective ignorance is astonishing.   Before we even get to Ioannides’ argument, note that (a) Everyone knows about the catastrophic, Trump-induced failure to get testing and surveillance going early on, and that this failure cannot ever be remedied because we will never again be in those early stages.  Trump’s and FOX News’ collective failures here should be treated as cases of criminal negligence.  But notice that this means that we have absolutely no idea about basic facts about the disease prevalence.  (b) Even if we had good testing, recent data says that lots and lots of COVID-19 is escaping detection.  How many cases?  We don’t know, of course, because these are undetected cases.  They may not be as infectious.  But whatever the number, it profoundly affects everything from the case fatality rate to how long a hypothetical “herd immunity” would take to develop.  (c) As Ioannides points out, a lot of the data we do have isn’t worth much.  For example, the mortality data is meaningless.  I’ll let Ioannides give you a sense of why:

COVID-19 Testing: just how bad the U.S. is

In one easy chart:

The Autumn of the Patriarch

We are here on the balcony because of a pan-demic, a terrible pandemic that we have handled perfectly.  More testing for the virus is coming soon.  But also not everybody needs or should get testing.  Also we are going to cap off the petroleum reserve gas tank at a great price.  Many wonderful amazing people are here to tell you what an honor it is to work with The Leader.  The Leader’s ministers are now partnering with the private sector to produce a drive-through test.  Which will be available soon!  Then things will be more perfect, and more tremendousness is just around the corner.  When will the test be available?  Soon!  What about emergency legislation that the ministers have been working with the opposition party on?  The Opposition doesn’t want enough, doesn’t want what we want.  There are so many problems with the Opposition. 

The Leader would like to shake your hand.  If there were another solar eclipse, The Leader would gaze at it again.

Thoughts on COVID-19

By Gordon hull

The coronavirus outbreak showcases a lot of what is wrong with the Trump administration and the stupid, preening narcissist at its head (this is a president who claimed not to have known that flu kills thousands of people every year – but whose own grandfather was a victim of the 1918 pandemic).  At the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin thinks that coronavirus is likely to bring down the entire GOP house of cards in November, as it relentlessly exposes the corrupt ineptitude of Trump; as goes Trump, so go his sycophantic enablers in the Senate.  This would be karmic.  It would also be no comfort to the many, many people that Donald Trump is about to kill.  Indeed, not just the actions of Trump’s egomaniacal incompetence but our collective need to think about it (guilty!) is itself part of why we aren’t prepared.

That is, people will die because the failure of the government to do anything meaningful towards containment in the early stages of the epidemic, in no small part because of Trump’s narcissistic dithering and lying.  Even now, as we’ve moved from “containment” to “mitigation,” nowhere near enough people are being tested.  This makes it much harder to know who is at risk of contracting the disease and spreading it to others, which in turn makes it more likely that they do so.  More people will get sick.  Not testing enough people also makes it impossible to know how deadly the disease is, because it denies you a sensible denominator for predicting the case fatality rate.  When Trump said he had a “hunch” that the WHO’s widely-circulated 3.4% fatality rate was too high, he was probably right (with lots of provisos) – but his own stonewalling on testing make it impossible to substantiate the point.  Trump will also kill people through his prior stupid policy decisions, like forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their number is someday called, in makeshift camps that lack even the running water necessary for hand-washing.

A Deleuzian Undercurrent to Foucault’s “What is an Author?” (part 2)

Last time, I began the to make the case that there is evidence of an engagement with Deleuze in Foucault’s “What is an Author.”  Specifically, I made the case that there is an implict Platonism behind the concept of authorship as Foucault articulates it.  This time, I will look at the way that Barthes overturns authorship, and how Foucault’s language distances himself from that, while of course beginning with the proposition that the author is, in fact, a fiction.  For Deleuze, the question of difference, when posed against Platonism, is substantially a question of attending to the “swarming” differences that lie outside the Platonic metaphycial schema, and which are accordingly illegible wihtin it, insofar as they cannot be referred back to the anchoring eidos.

This language of swarming differences that are inexpressible and illegible from within a representative schema is also found in Barthes, who is often Foucault’s presumed interlocutor in “Author.”  As Barthes  sees clearly, “writing” and “text” radically exceed this space of authorship, bringing into play indefinitely many differences and ways of thinking difference.  Writing is, to revert to Deleuzian terms, “a world of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities” (DR 277).   Barthes’ “Death of the Author” is the most obviously relevant contribution here, and he famously opens “Death of the Author” with praise of “writing:”