Coronavirus, Epidemics and Interfaces

Spanish version: Coronavirus, epidemias e interfaces
Portuguese version: Coronavírus, Epidemias e Interfaces

A few days ago a colleague asked me to write something about the coronavirus and the interfaces. I do not like to abuse the term but since I consider that the concept of /interface/ can be useful, I decided to share these reflections from that perspective of analysis.

First, we must start from the definition of /interface/ that I proposed in The Laws of the Interface and other texts: the interface is a “network of human, institutional and technological actors that are interconnected and maintain different types of relationships”. In How to analyze an interface? I outlined a series of steps to study interfaces of all kinds and dimensions, from a classroom to a political party. Faced with very complex interfaces that include hundreds of actors (for example an educational or gastronomic systems), the best option is to start at the “lower” levels (the classroom as an interface, the kitchen as an interface) and then “climb” until you reach the broad socio-technological ecosystem. As I wrote in The Laws of the Interface with an eye on fractal models, the content of an interface is always another interface.

I will return to this idea of ​​/interface/ as a “network of actors” at the end of this post, when dealing with a possible “research program” for the coronavirus crisis. However, before reaching that point I would like to review some authors, concepts and texts that can help us to make intelligible chaotic and uncertain situations. In this context, it could be said that the theory of the interface is also an interface where different theoretical actors interact and maintain intertextual relationships that are very useful for understanding what is happening around us.

Assemblage

Behind The Laws of the Interface there is a dense network of theories, authors, texts and models that dialogue and, in their own way, also form an “epistemological interface” on which the interface theory unfolds. Some of these theoretical interlocutors are very evident — for example the Actor-Network Theory by Bruno Latour, John Law and Michel Callon- and others a little less known. The concept of /assemblage/, introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and worked in depth by the philosopher Manuel DeLanda in two fundamental books –A New Philosophy of Society (2006) and Assemblage Theory (2016) — , establishes a direct dialogue with my idea of ​​/interface/. According to Wikipedia

Assemblage theory provides a bottom-up framework for analyzing social complexity by emphasizing fluidity, exchangeability, and multiple functionalities through entities and their connectivity.[1] Assemblage theory asserts that, within a body, the relationships of component parts are not stable and fixed; rather, they can be displaced and replaced within and among other bodies, thus approaching systems through relations of exteriority.

In A New Philosophy of Society (2006) DeLanda proposes a materialistic view founded on the idea that the analysis of the great social bodies must start from the study of their individual components. According to De Landa

a wide range of social entities, from persons to nation-states, will be treated as assemblages constructed through very specific historical processes, processes in which language plays an important but not a constitutive role. A theory of assemblages, and of the processes that create and stabilize their historical identity, was created by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze in the last decades of the twentieth century. This theory was meant to apply to a wide variety of wholes constructed from heterogeneous parts. Entities ranging from atoms and molecules to biological organisms, species and ecosystems may be usefully treated as assemblages and therefore as entities that are products of historical processes.

According to DeLanda, the Assemblage Theory can also be applied to social entities, although in reality this theoretical view crosses and is located beyond the opposition between nature-culture (in the same way that the ANT uses the concept of /actor/ to name both human and non-human entities). On the other hand, the model that DeLanda has in mind is scalable and can go from micro to macro:

Assemblages, being wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts, can be used to model any of these intermediate entities: interpersonal networks and institutional organizations are assemblages of people; social justice movements are assemblages of several networked communities; central governments are assemblages of several organizations; cities are assemblages of people, networks.

As we can see, there are many affinities between ANT, interface theory and Assemblage Theory, from the overcome of the opposition between the human/cultural and the non-human/natural to the scalability of the analytical model, which can be applied to the different “levels” of the phenomena under study.

Anthropocene

About 8,000–10,000 years ago Homo sapiens became sedentary, began to domesticate some animal species and formed the first urban nuclei. In the classic Guns, Germs, and Steel (1998) Jared Diamond explains how the domestication of animals provided Eurasians with immune resistance to certain diseases. Epidemics proliferated in urban areas where it was easy to get infected and natural selection did its job: in the absence of hospitals or vaccines, only the most adapted Homo sapiens that had developed resistance to dangerous microorganisms survived.

Currently almost 70% of the world population lives in cities, and the percentage does not stop growing:

All these urban centers are interconnected by a network of transports that make them, in fact, a great city on a planetary scale:

Viruses, germs and other microorganisms are also part of this global ecosystem. In a certain way, a phenomenon that was lived 10,000 years ago with the domestication and birth of the first Eurasian urban centers is being repeated globally today. Yes, I’m talking about the coronavirus. It is like living in a large planetary metropolis where memes and genes circulate at full speed, and the interactions -not only between Homo sapiens but also with other species- have increased exponentially.

Epidemic Assemblage

Nick J. Fox, a sociologist at the University of Huddersfield and the University of Sheffield, has just published a short article entitled “Money, markets and trade caused coronavirus pandemic”. In this text Fox points to the macro level and draws a map where viral contagions intersect with global markets and urban centers:

Once the part this environment plays is acknowledged, it becomes clear that the ultimate cause of the epidemic is not the coranavirus particle, but the concentrated centers of population, the global market and the contemporary system of international trade within which humans across the planet now live out our lives. Covid-19 is just one part of a broad assemblage of human and non-human elements that have established the conditions for diseases to pass rapidly throughout our species.

It is not difficult to agree with Fox when he maintains that the rapid spread of the coronavirus

derives from the nature of the marketized interactions between human and non-human. From the virus’s initial shift from animal to human host through to its rapid spread within communities and within physical entities such as prisons and cruise ships globalized business and trade (and associated movements of goods and humans across borders) have enhanced Covid-19’s capacity to infect large numbers.

The confluence between a global economic system, with its monetary flows, exchanges and transnational markets, and the concentration of the world population in urban centers has generated the conditions for the rapid diffusion and contagion capacity of the Covic-19. In this context, Fox proposes an analysis of what he calls /epidemic assemblage/ and takes up the founding account of this pandemic:

Somewhere in China in 2019, it is believed that the ‘patient zero’ event took place, probably in a marketplace for live animals. In this assemblage, humans, animals and Covid-19 mingled, but importantly, this took place in a market environment. Traders and customers from nonsense locations converges on such locations, which have formed the basis for commerce for millennia. What is different today is that potential hosts are linked into a far wider geographic assemblage than in previous eras.

From this original exchange, the spread of the virus went to a global stage in a few days thanks to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people who traveled for professional or personal reasons (“Market economies depend upon such movements, and business operates in a global marketplace”).

In an article titled “A construção do novo coronavírus” André Lemos, professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (Brazil), supports the concept of /epidemic assemblage/ but criticizes some limitations of Fox’s analysis:

Fox’s text leaves out central questions for understanding the genesis of the virus and the epidemic: its scientific, political and communicational construction. From a neomaterialist analysis, we can say that the virus is far from being just an isolated biological entity, causing diseases in humans and spreading at the speed of world exchanges. Before being a natural object, it is the result of the intertwining of multiple instances and agencies. He is “natureculture” (Haraway). The virus and its epidemic form a “device” (Foucault), a “phenomenon” (agency arrangements that generate entities — Barad), a virus assemblage. How would it be possible to isolate the virus from humans, or from culture?

In other words, Lemos is reminding us that the epidemic assemblage must also include mediating the coronavirus:

Media produce the phenomenon by the strength of the narratives built around its origins, the dangers of the disease, the forms of treatment, the search for vaccines and comparisons with other epidemics, such as the Spanish flu or bubonic plague.

By way of synthesis, according to Lemos

The network pointed out by Fox needs to be expanded: the virus assemblage is produced in the flows of globalization and in the interrelationship between humans and animals, but also in the research laboratories that give their name and institute their ontology, in public policies that produce concrete actions, in war of images and speeches chosen and conveyed in the media, in the choice of forms of prevention and medical treatment, in the epidemiological definition of the situation… Consequently, the virus assemblage must be identified not by isolation, but by the revelation of the interlacing that constitute it as a collective phenomenon (there is no side effect). It must be unpacked extensively, allowing effective and conscious actions of its construction.

Coronavirus and interfaces

If the interface is a “network of human, institutional and technological actors that are interconnected and maintain different types of relationships”, we could say that COVID-19 is an actor, perhaps the smallest but the most disruptive, of a complex socio-technological net that involves doctors, patients, nurses, hospitals, laboratories, states, parliaments, airports, police, politicians, microscopes, masks, and mobile applications designed to identify possible infected people around us. Analyzing a network that involves so many actors is not an easy task and, if it were to happen one day, the research team should have specific software to map so many actors, relationships and processes.

In this situation, it could more affordable to start with a study of the interfaces at a “lower” level (for example, a hospital understood as an interface, or even the market where the first contagion occurred) to “scale” the analysis until reaching the big socio-technological ecosystem. As Nick Fox well points out, economic actors and their exchange flows cannot be left aside in the analysis, in the same way that André Lemos reminds us that media actors are a fundamental part of this interface. To understand an interface or an assemblage, as Lemos says, a the research must work on “the revelation of the interlacing that constitute it as a collective phenomenon”.

If, as I wrote in The Laws of the Interface, human actors co-evolve with technological ones, the changes we are experiencing these days, both at the personal (use of masks, disinfectant liquids for hand washing, etc.) and the collective level (mobile applications to control who respects quarantine or to detect possible contagions around us, temperature controls at airports, etc.), will leave their mark on our individual and group behaviors. As after 9/11, the daily lives of millions of people around the world will change irreversibly.

Another important dimension from the perspective of an interface theory is the conflict that arises when the designers’ strategies face the users’ tactics. An example: when the Spanish State ordered the confinement of the population, some citizens went on vacation to the mountains or the beach. This distance between the “designers” (in this case the government that produced ) and the “users” (the citizens who interpreted the in their own way) is very similar to the dynamics between author-text-reader analyzed by semiotics and hermeneutical theories the last half century. Also the decrees, Umberto Eco would say, can be overinterpreted or “used” by readers-citizens. Another example: Chinese students who “knock down” the DingTalk app — which manages online education during quarantine — so they don’t have to do their homework. This type of friction between designer-users is as old as Homo sapiens and is one of the engines of socio-technological evolution.

What is happening in these weeks will be studied for decades to come. Beyond the approaches of each discipline, it is evident that only interdisciplinary approaches can provide a certain intelligibility to this global crisis. As Rolando García writes,

When we affirm that interdisciplinary research is the type of study required by a complex system, this in no way excludes partial studies of some of its elements or of some of its functions. No analysis of such systems can do without specialized studies. However, as rich and necessary as such studies can become, the simple sum of them could rarely, by itself, lead to an interpretation of the processes that determine the functioning of the system as such, that is, as an organized totality. . An integrated study of a complex system, where the operation of the entire system is at stake, can only be the work of a team with shared epistemic, conceptual and methodological frameworks.

Harsh times are coming. Soon we will be in the closest thing to a post-war period where old interfaces will creak and, in many cases, explode. New assemblages of actors will be born, supported by new narratives and with the urgency of managing a series of issues — such as the climate emergency — that these days have disappeared from our conversations but, like the Monterroso dinosaur, are still there.

Note: Thanks Marcos Palacios for the link to the texts by A. Lemos and N. Fox!

Bonus track

• A series of posts about The Laws of the Interface
• Online version (free access) of A New Philosophy of Society by Manuel DeLanda (2006)

NOTE: Sorry for the possible mistakes, I’m not an English native speaker.