Editorial

OurDoom

by Guy Rundle

It has been good to see that the world is capable of acting collectively in the face of a threat from a virus capable of causing unprecedented harm and misery. Unfortunately, the virus in question is the MyDoom computer virus, a string of 1s and 0s — or on and off flashes, absences and presences — carried down phone lines to innumerable PCs. Simultaneously, an actual virus, bird flu, with a potential capacity to wreak untold havoc on what computer geeks call ‘meatware’ has bubbled beneath the surface of the news, occasionally making it to the front pages alongside dead cricketers and the half-time entertainment at the US Superbowl.

With epidemiologists experienced in handling the SARS outbreak warning that bird flu represents a much greater threat, you would think that a bit of collective focus might come into play. Yet governments and corporations across the world are doing their best to fail to come to terms with the matter. Dictatorships such as China are proving once again that such forms of government can often be less efficient in responding to a crisis than their command structure would suggest. The corporate dominated West is doing its bit by delaying cooperation in working on a vaccine, due to the patenting of naturally occurring sustances called plasmids that would constitute the building blocks of such a medicine. A media with a diminished capacity for investigation is treating it as just another story among an array of interesting matters, rather than a basic threat to the possibility of there being matters of interest at all — i.e. as a threat to life of a categorically different order. Each sector of the global postmodern economy is dysfunctioning smoothly and efficiently, and doing its best to make sure that any opportunistic infection will get the chance to take advantage of our global malaise.

It is statistically unlikely that bird flu will become a global pandemic, since the odds are against any individual disease. Nevertheless, it is becoming clearer to many that we are in the middle of a rather grim lottery whereby the world keeps drawing new ‘numbers’ — new mutations, viruses, hybrid conditions — with the increasingly likelihood that ours will eventually come up.

The particular conditions of this have been gone over endlessly, with only small progress towards reforms. One day, some future society will look back at our global practice of feeding factory-farmed animals antibiotics and not know whether to laugh or cry. With the same wonder with which we contemplate medieval societies that had not yet worked out the advantages to be had from separating the village cesspool from the fresh water supply, they will wonder what we can possibly have been thinking to allow agribusiness to undermine the capacity of the whole species to resist infection.

Yet, even identifying the damage to be done from such obscene practices as these does not really get to the guts of the issue — and one suspects that therein lies the reluctance to think about the real implications of ‘bird flu’. For its rise makes clear what we know deep down — that there is no way we will get away with the exponential extension and intensification of a society of globalised mobility without some major consequences. It is only three decades since the Boeing 747 was introduced to service, intensifying the volume of global air travel to such a degree that it changed the character of global society. At any moment hundreds, thousands of metal tubes containing reticulated air, hundreds of people in each, are being shuffled from one side of the world to the next. Let’s face it, the world is an enormous petri dish, a huge experiment to see what we can come up with. Maybe not this year, maybe not the next, but there is an indefinite time-span within which the biological world can come up with something faster and deadlier than we can handle. There’s no reason why the lethality of the coming plague would not match that of an earlier one, and dispatch up to a third of humanity.

The global boosters will argue that it is precisely some of the features of global society — rapid transfer of information, global co-ordination and the like — that will allow us to defeat such a disease. They may be right in the short-term, but the natural world is pretty good at trumping our ace. Antibiotic-resistant golden staph has succeeded in making a hospital one of the riskiest places to be, and HIV/AIDS is an all purpose meta-disease, which attacks the very apparatus that defends us from all the other conditions.

Indeed, this is where the metaphorical idea of a virus may be more telling than its inventors know. For it is not that a telecommunicated computer program is a virus — it is that the global membrane of disease is a giant computer, running through endless sequences of molecular recombination until it hits the killer app. Its criterion of success is maximum transmissability — lethality is a mere side-effect. Given all that we are doing and not doing about it, it will eventually find both. Viruses are death’s information and there is no telling how many have to be sent before we finally get the message.