Daily Archives: April 9, 2020

In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren was the first presidential candidate to release a plan for combating coronavirus. In March, she released a second plan. Days later, with the scale of economic damage increasing, she released a third. Warrens proposals track the spread of the virus: from a problem happening elsewhere and demanding a surge in global health resources and domestic preparation to a pandemic happening here, demanding not just a public health response but an all-out effort to save the US economy.

Warrens penchant for planning stands in particularly stark contrast to this administration, which still has not released a clear coronavirus plan. There is no document you can download, no website you can visit, that details our national strategy to slow the disease, transition back to normalcy, and rebuild the economy.

So I asked Warren to explain what the plan should be, given the grim reality we face. We discussed what, specifically, the federal government should do; the roots of the testing debacle; her idea for mobilizing the post-coronavirus economy around building affordable housing; why she thinks this is exactly the right time to cancel student loan debt; why America spends so much money preparing for war and so little defending itself against pandemics and climate change; whether the Democratic primary focused on the wrong issues; and how this crisis is recasting Ronald Reagans old saw about the scariest words in the English language.

You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. A transcript of our discussion, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

There still isnt a single coronavirus response plan from the White House I cant actually go and look up our strategy as a nation for stopping and recovering from this. During your presidential campaign, you released three plans on coronavirus one in January and two in March. But the situation has gotten worse since then. What should the plan be now?

Lets start with the fact that if you want to get something done, you ought to have a plan. Back in January, I put out a plan that really focused on the importance of getting ready: making sure that we had all the masks and the gowns and the respirators and all the things health care professionals need, and opening up centers to help people if the health care system got overwhelmed. It was also focused on testing because the testing is crucial. We need enough test kits not just to test people who are showing raging symptoms, but enough test kits to be able to test people who appear to be healthy, so you can keep detecting it in the population and identify hot spots.

Thats what a plan should still look like today, even though this thing is huge. Weve got to keep our doctors and nurses safe. They need personal protective equipment. And we need to have enough test kits so that were testing not just people who are being admitted to the hospital or showing high fevers, but were testing in the population on a regular basis. Thats our best chance in dealing with it.

But it all comes down to having a plan.

The White House has taken the attitude that this is mainly a problem for states and localities to respond to, and to the extent theyre asking for federal help, it reflects failures on their part. What is the specific role for the federal government here? What can they do that others cannot?

The White House is just simply wrong on the notion that somehow the states can manage this on their own. We need a national response. Think about what I was just talking about. It is the federal government that can order the tests. It is the federal government that can use the Defense Production Act in order to force companies to produce the test kits, the masks, the gowns, the kinds of things that we actually need in a crisis. The states dont have the power to do that. Only the federal government does.

Look at whats happening when the states are out there trying, for example, to buy these masks in a market with no rules. What happens is states end up bidding against each other. New York bids against Massachusetts and they both are bidding against Arizona and California. Thats great for whoever is sitting on a couple of million masks, but its sure not good for the states that desperately need these masks and are paying more and more and more just to get basic supplies. It is the federal government that can allocate these masks not based on who bids the highest price, but where theres a real need. That is what a federal government that has a plan can do.

The other half of this is the economic half. Only the federal government can cushion the economic blow here in a meaningful way. The state of Massachusetts, for example, already predicts that were going to have a $3 billion shortfall because expenses have gone up dramatically as were trying to support people out of work, those who need shelter, and our hospitals. At the same time, revenue has gone down. Taxes wont come in until July 1, and with a lot of small businesses closing and a lot of people out of work, tax revenues are likely to be lower.

It is only the federal government that can actually print money in a time of crisis. Only the federal government that can deficit spend. Massachusetts, as a matter of our state constitution, cannot engage in deficit spending. So its the federal response that we need both on the health front and on the economic front.

I want to pick up on this idea of the federal government as an allocator of resources. It does seem that the government is allocating resources, but Florida is getting everything it has asked for and Kentucky is getting more than it asked, while Massachusetts, among others, is getting less than it asks for.

There have been concerns that the way the Trump administration is allocating these resources is based on which states they feel have been politically friendly to them and which states they feel are important for them in 2020. Do you think thats true?

Donald Trump has made clear for years now that he cares about exactly one thing: Donald Trump. Its all politics all the time. And now hes focused on how Donald Trump is going to get reelected. That invades every decision that he makes.

So just look at the data you cited. How can it be that Kentucky and Florida get 100 percent or 100 percent-plus of what they need while Massachusetts doesnt? I think anyone would look at that and say its Donald Trump playing politics once again.

In your plan earlier, you talked about testing and about getting health resources out. But what comes next? I think one of the most damaging parts of there being no clear national plan is that people who are sheltered in place, like me, have no idea how long that will last or what will come after. If you are creating the plan, what would you tell people comes after social distancing? What is phase two of the public health response?

Its a great question. The first part of this is to collect as much data as we can. Thats what testing should be all about: so we can keep watching where the hot spots are and how this plays out over time. Whos most affected? Where do we need to intensify our resources in terms of a response?

But theres the second part to it to think about. Over time, were going to have a growing proportion of the population that is immune because theyve had the coronavirus and theyll have antibodies. That means there are going to be people who can go out and start engaging in the activities we need, helping restart both our economy and helping support our health care system. We need to start to think of them as a resource, both getting us through the worst part of this crisis and also helping us to restart parts of this economy as quickly as possible. But that only happens if were collecting that data.

We are, as a country, testing far fewer people per capita than, say, South Korea. What is your view of the testing failure? Why did it take so long to roll the testing out? And what is needed to get this scaled up quickly?

The reason we didnt have testing early on was plain old politics. Donald Trump didnt want to see those numbers.

Remember when [Trump] said that he didnt want people to disembark from the ship that had an infection? He said he didnt want the numbers to go up, meaning the confirmed number of cases at that point.

I believe that the reason that the Trump administration wouldnt buy the World Health Organization test kits was they didnt want them. They didnt want to see a crisis here in America. I think this is part of a mindset that a president believes that he can just declare how the world works and somehow the world will conform to him. And, boy, that doesnt work in reality. It sure doesnt work in a pandemic.

That point about mindset is interesting. When I look back at your January plan, what is striking about it is you were looking at coronavirus at a time when it was not yet primarily here. It was a problem in China. And the question was, can we contain it? That plan was very much about how to surge global public health, how to make sure we are getting good global testing results, how to make sure that we are in good information flows with other countries.

What were seeing right now as the Trump administration responds politically to coronavirus is a sharp increase in tensions with China. There is a very aggressive effort to get American companies to stop exporting to other countries, even if that means in critical ways other countries will stop giving us things that we need.

Can you talk a bit about the difference between approaching a global health crisis like coronavirus from the perspective that we are in transactional competition with all these other nations, versus a positive-sum perspective?

What youre asking is the question we face all the time around climate change: We may be in competition with other countries economically and politically, but when it comes to saving the planet, we have to find a way to work together. Theres no such thing as saving the United States of America and letting the rest of the planet burn up. That wont happen.

The same is true about a pandemic. We live in a world where if this disease spreads in one country and one region, then its going to reach all around the globe. And its going to do it fast. Part of the failure of this administration is that their mindset is to build a wall rather than work cooperatively with other countries to address the risks that we all face. Had we helped contain this earlier, the spread might have been slower it might have been arrested entirely. China is not blameless. But, even so, we should be supporting international information sharing.

I also believe that a big part of foreign relations is a value statement about who we are. Yes, we have terrible problems with Iran and Irans development of its plan to develop a nuclear weapon and its support for terrorism. But Iran is in the throes of a true crisis of enormous proportions. This is a moment when we could offer a generous hand to the Iranian people, and demonstrate both to them and to the rest of the world that we want to do our best to build a world where everyone is treated with some dignity and some respect. The idea that the Trump administration wants to use this moment of crisis as a way to sharpen our pressure on other nations and throw elbows economically I just think is fundamentally the wrong approach.

I dont think thats who we want to be as a nation. And, frankly, I dont think it makes us safer over the long run. I think we build more security for the United States when we try to work with other nations and treat other human beings with respect.

I want to hold on this point for a minute, because what youre saying, something your colleague, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), said to me, which is that if you look at the federal budget, we spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year buying insurance against the possibility of a Russian attack. We spend almost no money buying insurance against the possibility of a global pandemic.

Someone who thinks a lot about issues of risk made the argument to me that we take risk very seriously if we can locate it in an external enemy, like another country or a terrorist group. But when there is a risk that would affect the whole world, that cannot be seen as adversarial risks like climate change and pandemics we tend to downplay or ignore them. Im curious if you think theres truth to that.

I very much agree with what youve just described, but I think theres another dimension to understanding it. Think about the two kinds of threat that youve just talked about. One is the kind that weve understood since the time that human beings lived in caves. And that is punching each other, competing for resources, using ever-sharper weapons.

But the second kind [requires] a better understanding of the world around us, the world of threats to our health and, ultimately, threats to the planet we live on. What troubles me so deeply about the past three years in the Trump administration has been the hostility to science and not just the science of climate change. Driving the scientists out of the Department of Agriculture. To disregard what our scientists tell us about the world around us puts this country and this world in grave danger.

I want to move our conversation to the economy. We saw more than 6 million new unemployment claims this week. For those not used to looking at this data, that is apocalyptic; it makes the Great Recession disappear on a chart.

Theres been an argument going around that we are facing a choice between our economy and our lives. Weve heard from some people, including from President Trump, that we cannot let the cure of social distancing be worse than the disease. Do you think that is the choice our economy or our lives were facing? Is that the right way to frame it?

No, that is not the right way to frame it. These two work together. Saving lives strengthens our economy, and strengthening our economy can help us save lives. The idea that there is a choice between those two, and somehow they are in competition with each other, is just flatly wrong.

Let me talk about this at two levels. First, what does it mean to be a nation if were not here to take care of our own people? The first job of the president of the United States of America is to help keep Americans safe. What that means in a time of a pandemic, then, is making sure that we have adequate health care that we have a plan to deal with this crisis.

It is also the case that its just false on the economics. Theres a great new white paper out at the Safra Center at Harvard that talks about three possible responses to the pandemic. One is really hardcore sheltering for a truly extended period of time. One is about sheltering to try to flatten the curve and moving back into some economic activity over time. And the third is to just give up and say its the economy and nothing more.

It turns out the costliest is to say it is only about the economy and let people go about their business. The reason that is the costliest is that it causes the maximum number of deaths, and deaths are costly. We lose the benefit of those lives. They use what is the standard dollar value we put on a life and show that it will be far more expensive if we just let this pandemic race through our country, without trying to take these measures to protect the lives of people. These two things are not in tension. If we want to strengthen our economy, then we need to solve this medical problem.

You were deeply involved not only in the policy response to the financial crisis, but also in making sense of it for people. That was a financial panic that froze much of the real economy, and the problem was in supporting businesses and people to unfreeze. Now we have frozen much of the economy by choice.

What is different in how people need to think about the economic needs and policies here compared to the financial crisis? If youre coming into this with 2008 as the operative metaphor in your mind, how do you need to change the way youre looking at it?

The first thing that changes is theres such a powerful health overlay to everything were looking at. You cant just say, lets have an infrastructure package and send everybody to work on this piece of infrastructure. We still have to worry about contagion. That changes everything we think about in terms of getting people back to work.

The second part of it is that it touches the economy in a very different way. In the 2008 crash, everyone could still go to work. The problem was whether or not the money system would freeze up. This time its different. Small businesses are leading the shutdown, not because they cant get access to money, but because they cant have workers there and cant access their customers.

So you have to think about this differently. For example, the tool of simply getting money into the hands of tens of millions of people across this country is critically important. Why? Because we want them to buy food. If they buy food, we keep that part of the economy functioning. We need that supply chain to keep working so that the grocery stores are still stocked. And that only happens if customers are coming in. Then the grocery stores buy from the wholesalers and the wholesalers are buying from the farmers and from the canners and other producers. And the truckers are still up and running. We want to keep that supply chain functional both for the health of the American people and for the health of the economy. And that only happens if people have money to buy food.

The question about people being able to stay in shelter is a little different. Do we give people money so they can make their mortgage payment and rent payment, or do we just say were going to freeze debt collection so that nobody gets evicted? Nobody gets foreclosed against, nobody gets a bad credit rating during this. But were gonna have to hit the pause button here on people making their payments for shelter, and for those owners of those properties making their payments. So you have to think about this structurally in a different way.

One of the lessons from 2008 was that, frankly, the Republicans just wouldnt go for a big enough stimulus package. And that meant the recovery was slower and more anemic than it would have been had we put more money into stimulus. They were determined not to let Barack Obama have that kind of power in the recovery. And we paid a price for it as a nation. Were still paying a price for it. Now, its the same kind of thing. Weve got to have a strong enough response to support our families, to support our small businesses, to keep the parts of this economy functioning that are absolutely essential for our physical health and ultimately for our economic security.

In the same way that we talked earlier about two phases of public health response, I think we can also think of two distinct phases on the economic side. What youre talking about is phase one: putting the economy on life support. That means giving people the money to continue buying groceries and paying rent while at home, and potentially give businesses money through forgivable loans to stay open.

But after we do that for some number of months, some parts of that economy are going to come back and some wont. Unlike the financial crisis, I dont think we can just unfreeze the economy we had before theres going to be too much damage.

To that end, there have been arguments for different kinds of post-virus mobilizations in response to this crisis. One is a public health mobilization. But also there are different mobilization ideas that have been lurking for some time now, around a Green New Deal or on infrastructure. Are we going to need some kind of economic mobilization, in the way we often see them during wartime?

One of the mobilization efforts I would add to your list is housing. Weve had a real problem in this country and that is that we havent built enough housing for middle-class families, for working-class families, for the working poor, for the poor-poor, for people with disabilities, for seniors who want to age in place, for people who are returning from prison, for people who are homeless.

I grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bath house built by a private builder. The garage was converted to hold my three brothers. Private builders arent building those houses anymore. They build mansions. Im not mad at them thats where the profits are. But the housing that houses middle-class families is just not being built privately anymore. And theres a federal law in place now that says for every new unit of public housing brought on, the federal government has to take one old unit off.

So when you ask the question about where should we be thinking about mobilization? I think that in this time of crisis, we see the importance of safe, secure, affordable housing for everyone. Over the next few years, we need to expand our housing availability for folks. This is true in cities. Its true in small towns. Its true in rural America. It is a widespread problem and its a place where we could make a federal investment that, in the short run, gets people off the street and puts people to work in construction. And then in the long run, creates a stronger, more stable housing supply that takes a lot of economic pressure off families.

So as we move out of the economic life support period of this, Congress and the administration need to think about a more publicly planned economy to rebuild and create a bridge back to a fully functioning economy?

I think its going to be absolutely necessary. This is a chance to upgrade our energy grid, a chance to harden our infrastructure over time against coming climate change, to make a real investment in public transportation. And those have double economic advantages: They put a lot of people to work, but they also reassure markets and investors that were going to build our way out of this depression.

When you have a plan and people can see it, they can start making their plans to supplement that whether its small businesses or its big Wall Street investors. Were going to print money for a while to make it happen, but thats going to get money down into this economy. Thats going to build up demand. Thats how you build a boom. You dont do it with stock buybacks. You do it by actually investing in people and in the things that people need.

Theres a moral dimension of this I want to ask you about. Right now, were seeing a lot of solidarity and sacrifice being demanded of working-class people, of young people many of whom feel, I think correctly, that America hasnt shown a lot of solidarity and sacrifice when confronted with their needs in the years before this. What needs to be done with this moment so the people from whom weve asked the most feel like this is an ethic that extends to them, not just one that is activated to take from them when needed?

I want to see us cancel student loan debt. Right now, theres a six-month hiatus. So weve got a little breathing room. But I want to see us cancel a big chunk of this debt or all of this debt. And the reason for that is partly economic: We can now track that student loan debt has been having a negative effect on our economy. It depresses small business startup. Young people are not buying homes. So theres an economic stimulative effect from doing this.

Young people have just been left behind. Theyve been cheated. I graduated from a college that cost $50 a semester. I didnt have a big student loan debt burden because I could go to a school and get an education for a price that you could pay for on a part-time waitressing job. That alternative is just not out there for young people today. And the consequence is young people who try to get an education, who try to invest in their future, have been left out pretty much on their own.

The federal governments response is to lend you the money at interest and then be your biggest creditor for years and years to come. I think thats an intergenerational crime. Its fundamentally wrong. So I think forgiving this debt would not only give a boost to 45 million people, but would also be an acknowledgment that a lot of young folks in this country caught the short end of the stick here.

This economic recession is going to be tough on all of us, but its going to be especially tough on people who are graduating into it on people who are in their first jobs. And I think that canceling out our federal government as their biggest creditor would be a way of acknowledging that and saying: Its your future that we want to invest in.

When you look back on the Democratic primary, given whats happening now, does it feel like the debate was focused on the wrong things?

I dont think so. I think we talked a lot about the role of government a government that is either working just for the rich and the powerful, or a government thats working for everyone else. In this crisis, that truly is the issue.

Remember Ronald Reagans famous line? The worst words in the English language are Im from the government and Im here to help. Those are not the worst words in the English language. Weve seen during this crisis that among the worst words in the English language are, Were in a crisis and the government doesnt have a plan to help us get out of it.

The idea that somehow were all going to be better off with a government that doesnt invest in science and in long-term planning has been shown not only to be wrong, but to be dangerous. I think that what the election in 2020 is going to be about, in part, is people who want a government that is competent and that is on their side in planning for an uncertain future.

You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Elizabeth Warren on coronavirus, the presidency, and the economy - Vox.com

COVID-19 is a major global public health challenge. Its outbreak in China presented the fastest spread, the widest scope of infections and the greatest degree of difficulty in controlling infections of any public health emergency since the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949.

In the battle against the outbreak, China actively leveraged digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud computing, blockchain, and 5G, which have effectively improved the efficiency of the countrys efforts in epidemic monitoring, virus tracking, prevention, control and treatment, and resource allocation.

Here are a few of the ways information technologies were effectively leveraged:

A new strain of Coronavirus, COVID 19, is spreading around the world, causing deaths and major disruption to the global economy.

Responding to this crisis requires global cooperation among governments, international organizations and the business community, which is at the centre of the World Economic Forums mission as the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.

The Forum has created the COVID Action Platform, a global platform to convene the business community for collective action, protect peoples livelihoods and facilitate business continuity, and mobilize support for the COVID-19 response. The platform is created with the support of the World Health Organization and is open to all businesses and industry groups, as well as other stakeholders, aiming to integrate and inform joint action.

As an organization, the Forum has a track record of supporting efforts to contain epidemics. In 2017, at our Annual Meeting, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched bringing together experts from government, business, health, academia and civil society to accelerate the development of vaccines. CEPI is currently supporting the race to develop a vaccine against this strand of the coronavirus.

In a crisis, collaboration is key. During the outbreak, a range of companies made their algorithms publicly available to improve efficiency and to support coronavirus testing and research.

Baidu Research, a world leader in AI R&D, open-sourced LinearFold (its linear-time AI algorithm), to epidemic prevention centers, gene testing institutions, and global scientific research institutions. The algorithm is an important tool for gene testing institutions, and R&D institutions during the epidemic, reducing the time taken to predict and study coronaviruss RNA secondary structure from 55 minutes to just 27 seconds. The algorithm also improves the speed of predicting and studying coronaviruss RNA secondary structure by 120 times and saves the waiting time for virus detectors and researchers by two orders of magnitude With the improved algorithm comes much-improved efficiency in virus detection and diagnosis than traditional algorithm.

Additionally, Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Zhejiang CDC) launched an automated genome-wide testing and analysis platform. Based on the AI algorithm developed by the Alibaba DAMO Academy (a platform funded by Jack Ma for science research), the group has shortened the genetic analysis of suspected cases from several hours to half an hour and can accurately detect virus mutations.

A security guard looks at a screen at Wuhan's Hankou Railway Station as travel restrictions for leaving the city, the epicentre of a global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, are lifted and people will be allowed to leave the city via road, rail and air, in Wuhan, Hubei, China April 8, 2020.

Image: REUTERS/Aly Song

Artificial intelligence was also leveraged in subway stations, train stations and other public places where there is a high concentration of people and a high degree of mobility. While using the traditional method of temperature measurement is time-consuming, and would increase the risk of cross-infection due to the clustering of the people, companies such as Wuhan Guide Infrared Co. Ltd put forth new temperature measurement technology based on computer vision and infrared technology. This technology made it possible to take body temperature in a contactless, reliable, and efficient manner, with the people even unaware of it. With this technology in place, those whose body temperatures exceeded the threshold could quickly and accurately be located.

After the outbreak, big data played an important role in prediction and early warnings, analyzing the flow of people and the distribution of materials. Qihoo 360, a leading Internet company in China, released Big Data Migration Map this past February which users can access through mobile phones or computers to view the migration trend of the Chinese mainland from January 1, 2020 up to date. The tool became an important means of understanding and predicting changes in the epidemic situation nationwide.

A student attends an online class at home as students' return to school has been delayed due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, in Fuyang, Anhui province, China March 2, 2020. Picture taken March 2, 2020

Image: China Daily via REUTERS

In the epidemic response, relatively mature cloud computing technologies became as essential as water or electricity. Alibaba Cloud made its AI computing power available to public research institutions around the world for free to accelerate the development of new pneumonia drugs and vaccines. Meanwhile, Didi offered GPU cloud computing resources and technical support for combating the novel coronavirus to domestic scientific research institutions, medical and rescue platforms, for free.

As the virus spread, the demand for cloud-based video conferencing and online teaching has skyrocketed. Various cloud service vendors have actively upgraded their functions and provided resources. For example, Youku and Ding Talk (an all-in-one platform under Alibaba Group) launched the "Attending Class at Home" program to provide students with a secure learning environment and convenient learning tools. The Online Classroom function, which is made available for students of universities, primary and middle schools across China without charges during the epidemic, can support millions of students to take online classes simultaneously and has also covered schools in vast rural areas.

Furthermore, other enterprise companies increased access to their tools. Tencent Meeting made unlimited-time meetings for up to 300 participants free until the end of the epidemic. WeChat Work can support the audio and video conference up to 300 participants during the epidemic. During the epidemic, the tool provided free access to stable HD video conferences are accessible from phones allowing sharing documents and screens among up to 300 participants.

Blockchain technology eliminates intermediary, prevents data loss and tampering and provides traceability. It can play an important role in ensuring the openness and transparency of the epidemic information and the traceability of the epidemic materials. For example, blockchain technology can be used to record epidemic information and ensure that information sources are open, transparent, and traceable, thus effectively reducing rumors.

Lianfei Technology launched the nation's first blockchain epidemic monitoring platform, which can track the progress of COVID-19 in all provinces in real time, and register the relevant epidemic data on the chain so that the data can be traced and cannot be tampered with. The data links based on transparent monitoring and accountability are initially established to ensure that epidemic information is open and transparent.

5G, which has just been commercialized, has also played an important role in the epidemic prevention and control. It is mainly used in the fields of live-streaming video and telemedicine. China Mobile opened 5G base stations at Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals, and realized 5G high-definition live broadcasting of the construction of these two hospitals, providing real-time views of the construction sites on a 24-hour basis for more than 20 mainstream media platforms such as People's Daily and Xinhua News Agency. The content was also distributed by China Daily overseas simultaneously, and the number of online viewers exceeded 490 million.

In addition, the epidemic also witnessed the transition of 5G + health from "experimental phase" to "clinical phase". In order to make full use of the resources of experts in large cities and hospitals, the 5G + remote consultation system has been quickly implemented in many hospitals across the country. The first remote consultation platform of Huoshenshan Hospital allows medical experts far away in Beijing to work with front-line medical staff of Huoshenshan Hospital through remote video connections and conduct remote consultations with patients, thus further improving the efficiency and effectiveness of diagnosis and treatment.

"New generation information technologies have unique advantages and can play an important role in responding to major public health challenges."

China's practice has proven that the new-generation information technologies have unique advantages and can play an important role in responding to major public health challenges.

The COVID-19 outbreak is a common challenge faced by mankind with all countries' interests closely intertwined. Countries continue to develop new solutions as the epidemic spreads. As it does, countries must share their learnings and work together. By doing so, they can collectively find the solutions needed to fight the virus and save lives.

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Written by

QI Xiaoxia, Director General, Bureau of International Cooperation, Cyberspace Administration of China

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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How emerging technologies helped tackle COVID-19 in China - World Economic Forum

Consultant Aecom is working with Highways England to embed circular economy thinking across some of the countrys biggest road projects including the A303 at Stonehenge.

Sustainability in design and construction is a hot topic with organisations increasingly seeking routes to mitigate environmental damage and reduce resource depletion.

The concept of the circular economy offers a philosophy for sustainable resource management, which has gained increasing traction in the construction industry in recent years.

But varying academic definitions of circular economy principles have ultimately led to some confusion about what the concept actually means.

Consultant Aecom started working to develop a circular economy approach for Highways England in 2015 and sought to adopt a specific working definition for the concept. It has based its definition on that promoted by charity the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

This relies on the principles of designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use and regenerating natural systems.

In a traditional linear economy, you take resources, you use them and then you dispose of them at end of life or you might recycle a certain proportion. Its very much about take, use and dispose, explains David Smith, Aecoms technical director for business sustainability.

In contrast, circular economy thinking aims to disrupt this conventional approach and avoid disposal to landfill by keeping resources at the highest level of utility for as long as possible.

Within the context of an organisational approach to the circular economy, its critical to embed these processes from the start of a project, insists Smith.

Traditionally, companies follow processes and end up with waste. They then start to think about how or where that waste can be recycled.

With the circular economy approach, you plan the route for the sustainable management of resources right from the outset.

Mitigating the environmental impact is an obvious benefit of the approach, but there are also advantages in terms of reducing supply chain risk.

With major construction projects getting the green light across the UK, there is more competition for resources.

But from a business perspective, circular economy principles can help an organisation retain control.

For example, if a business recycles its own resources, then theres less need to go out into the marketplace to buy in those new materials,says Smith.

However, the circular economy approach is broader and far more ambitious than simply recycling resources.

Smith explains it is about taking a holistic view of how resources are managed from the outset and making design decisions that keep opportunities open.

So how has Aecom applied these principles to its work with Highways England?

With the circular economy approach you plan the route for the management of resources right from the outset

Its first commission from the highways operator was at a corporate level. The project involved developing a transition plan to explore existing activities that could contribute to a circular economy, as well as identifying key stakeholders andhow they might facilitate that transition.

A key element of this work was a pathfinder project, which involved developing and recording the practical applications of circular economy thinking at project level to support the transfer of knowledge to future projects.

It was about finding out what works and what doesnt work, says Smith.

The 1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme is the first Highways England project to incorporate circular economy principles. Aecom joined the project during the detailed design phase.

Most of the key elements of the scheme had been designed before Aecom joined the project, laments Smith.

From a theoretical perspective, the earlier youre involved in a project, the greater your ability to influence the design.

The bottom line is that humanity isnt using resources sustainably, so something has to change

In contrast, for the 1.9bn A303 Amesbury to Berwick Down (Stonehenge) project Aecom was involved through the preliminary design phase. The scheme includesa 12.8km dual carriageway and a 3.2km tunnel underneath the World Heritage Site.

The team has participated in the statutory powers and procedures phase of the scheme, which includes work towards the appointment of main contractors.

Smith says: Weve sought to integrate circular economy requirements into the contracts so that they get taken forward in the project. Potential contractors need to demonstrate particular behaviours, impacts and deliverables.

Weve learnt and refined our approach from our experience on the A14 project, he adds. Weve deliberately sought to integrate the circular economy into business as usual. Instead of being an academic research exercise, its practical, its hands on, and its about collaboration.

A collaborative approach is key to the success of circular economy principles. Smith insists it is impossible for any organisation to embrace the approach in isolation.

You need to work with other stakeholders. You need to be aware of where your materials are coming from and what infrastructure and requirements are likely to be available to manage those resources at the end of service life, he says.

It is also important for organisations to understand any critical restrictions or limitations on resources. For example, combining particular materials during a project might prevent them from being recycled or reprocessed at a later date, so understanding resource flows and communicating this to key stakeholders is essential.

Ensuring consistent communication across projects is vital, especially because circular economy principles can be highly nuanced, and organisations tend to approach them from differing perspectives.

Everybody has a piece of the puzzle, but they dont necessarily see the big picture. The approach requires fundamentally changing how we do things, explains Smith.

He insists the key to Aecoms success in implementing circular economy thinking across projects has been identifying the right stakeholders with the influence and motivation to make it happen. As a consultant, gaining client buy-in is crucial.

Highways England has been brilliant as a client from that perspective, he adds. They get it and theyre really committed.

Aecom is increasingly looking to promote the circular economy across projects and ensure it is widely recognised as a requirement.

With sustainability high on the agenda for most organisations, circularity offers a much-needed step change to ensure that a thriving economy does not come at the expense of the natural environment.

The bottom line is that humanity isnt using resources sustainably, so something has to change, says Smith.

The circular economy is a way of contributing to a more sustainable future.

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Highways England and the circular economy - New Civil Engineer

If philosophy ever manifested itself as helpful, redeeming, or prophylactic, it was in a healthy culture. The sick, it made ever sicker.Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

In 1919, after the First World War, the French poet Paul Valry in Crisis of the Spirit wrote: We later civilizations we too know that we are mortal.1 It is only in such a catastrophe, and as an aprs coup, that we know we are nothing but fragile beings. One hundred years later, a bat from Chinaif indeed the coronavirus comes from batshas driven the whole planet into another crisis. Were Valry still alive, he wouldnt be allowed to walk out of his house in France.

The crisis of the spirit in 1919 was preceded by a nihilism, a nothingness, that haunted Europe before 1914. As Valry wrote of the intellectual scene before the war: I see nothing! Nothing and yet an infinitely potential nothing. In Valrys 1920 poem Le Cimetire Marin (Graveyard by the Sea) we read a Nietzschean affirmative call: The wind is rising! We must try to live! This verse was later adopted by Hayao Miyazaki as the title of his animation film about Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed fighter aircraft for the Japanese Empire that were later used in the Second World War. This nihilism recursively returns in the form of a Nietzschean test: a demon invades your loneliest loneliness and asks if you want to live in the eternal recurrence of the samethe same spider, the same moonlight between the trees, and the same demon who asks the same question. Any philosophy that cannot live with and directly confront this nihilism provides no sufficient answer, since such a philosophy only makes the sick culture sicker, or in our time, withdraws into laughable philosophical memes circulating on social media.

The nihilism Valry contested has been constantly nurtured by technological acceleration and globalization since the eighteenth century. As Valry wrote towards the end of his essay:

But can the European spiritor at least its most precious contentbe totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and the general spread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio capitis for Europe must these be taken as absolute decisions of fate?2

This threat of diffusionwhich Europe may have attempted to affirmis no longer something that can be confronted by Europe alone, and probably will never be completely overcome again by the European tragist spirit.3 Tragist is first of all related to Greek tragedy; it is also the logic of the spirit endeavoring to resolve contradictions arising from within. In What Begins after the End of the Enlightenment? and other essays, I have tried to sketch out how, since the Enlightenment, and after the decline of monotheism, the latter was replaced by a mono-technologism (or techno-theism), which has culminated today in transhumanism.4 We, the moderns, the cultural heirs to the European Hamlet (who, in Valrys Crisis of the Spirit, looks back at the European intellectual legacy by counting the skulls of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Marx), one hundred years after Valrys writing, have believed and still want to believe that we will become immortal, that we will be able to enhance our immune system against all viruses or simply flee to Mars when the worst cases hit. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, researching travel to Mars seems irrelevant for stopping the spread of the virus and saving lives. We mortals who still inhabit this planet called earth may not have the chance to wait to become immortal, as the transhumanists have touted in their corporate slogans. A pharmacology of nihilism after Nietzsche is still yet to be written, but the toxin has already pervaded the global body and caused a crisis in its immune system.

For Jacques Derrida (whose widow, Marguerite Derrida, recently died of coronavirus), the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center marked the manifestation of an autoimmune crisis, dissolving the techno-political power structure that had been stabilized for decades: a Boeing 767 was used as a weapon against the country that invented it, like a mutated cell or virus from within.5 The term autoimmune is only a biological metaphor when used in the political context: globalization is the creation of a world system whose stability depends on techno-scientific and economic hegemony. Consequently, 9/11 came to be seen as a rupture which ended the political configuration willed by the Christian West since the Enlightenment, calling forth an immunological response expressed as a permanent state of exceptionwars upon wars. The coronavirus now collapses this metaphor: the biological and the political become one. Attempts to contain the virus dont only involve disinfectant and medicine, but also military mobilizations and lockdowns of countries, borders, international flights, and trains.

In late January, Der Spiegel published an issue titled Coronavirus, Made in China: Wenn die Globalisierung zur tdlichen Gefahr wird (When globalization becomes deadly danger), illustrated with an image of a Chinese person in excessive protective gear gazing at an iPhone with eyes almost closed, as if praying to a god.6 The coronavirus outbreak is not a terrorist attackso far, there has been no clear evidence of the viruss origin beyond its first appearance in Chinabut is rather an organological event in which a virus attaches to advanced transportation networks, travelling up to 900 km per hour. It is also an event that seems to return us to the discourse of the nation-state and a geopolitics defined by nations. By returning, I mean that, first of all, the coronavirus has restored meaning to borders that were seemingly blurred by global capitalism and the increasing mobility promoted by cultural exchange and international trade. The global outbreak has announced that globalization so far has only cultivated a mono-technological culture that can only lead to an autoimmune response and a great regression. Secondly, the outbreak and the return to nation-states reveal the historical and actual limit of the concept of the nation-state itself. Modern nation-states have attempted to cover up these limits through immanent infowars, constructing infospheres that move beyond borders. However, rather than producing a global immunology, on the contrary, these infospheres use the apparent contingency of the global space to wage biological warfare. A global immunology that we can use to confront this stage of globalization is not yet available, and it may never become available if this mono-technological culture persists.

During the 2016 refugee crisis in Europe, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk criticized Germanys chancellor Angela Merkel in an interview with the magazine Cicero, saying, We have yet to learn to glorify borders Europeans will sooner or later develop an efficient common border policy. In the long run the territorial imperative prevails. After all, there is no moral obligation to self-destruction.7 Even if Sloterdijk was wrong in saying that Germany and the EU should have closed their borders to refugees, in retrospect one may say that he was right about the question of borders not being well thought out. Roberto Esposito has clearly stated that a binary (polar) logic persists concerning the function of borders: one insists on stricter control as an immunological defense against an outer enemya classical and intuitive understanding of immunology as opposition between the self and the otherwhile the other proposes the abolition of borders to allow freedom of mobility and possibilities of association for individuals and goods. Esposito suggests that neither of the two extremesand it is somewhat obvious todayis ethically and practically undesirable.8

The outbreak of the coronavirus in Chinabeginning in mid-November until an official warning was announced in late January, followed by the lockdown of Wuhan on January 23led immediately to international border controls against Chinese or even Asian-looking people in general, identified as carriers of the virus. Italy was one of the first countries to impose a travel ban on China; already in late January, Romes Santa Cecilia Conservatory suspended oriental students from taking classes, even those who had never in their life been to China. These actswhich we may call immunologicalare conducted out of fear, but more fundamentally out of ignorance.

In Hong Kongright next to Shenzhen in Guangdong province, one of the major outbreak regions outside Hubei provincethere were strong voices urging the government to close the border with China. The government refused, citing the World Health Organization advising countries to avoid imposing travel and trade restrictions on China. As one of two special administrative regions of China, Hong Kong SAR is not supposed to oppose China nor add to its recent burden of underwhelming economic growth. And yet, some Hong Kong restaurants posted notices on their doors announcing that Mandarin-speaking clients were unwelcome. Mandarin is associated with virus-carrying Mainland Chinese people, therefore the dialect is considered a sign of danger. A restaurant that under normal circumstances is open to anyone who can afford it is now only open to certain people.

All forms of racism are fundamentally immunological. Racism is a social antigen, since it clearly distinguishes the self and the other and reacts against any instability introduced by the other. However, not all immunological acts can be considered racism. If we dont confront the ambiguity between the two, we collapse everything into the night where all cows are grey. In the case of a global pandemic, an immunological reaction is especially unavoidable when contamination is facilitated by intercontinental flights and trains. Before the closing of Wuhan, five million inhabitants had escaped, involuntarily transporting the virus out of the city. In fact, whether one is labelled as being from Wuhan is irrelevent, since everyone can be regarded as suspect, considering that the virus can be latent for days on a body without symptoms, all the while contaminating its surroundings. There are immunological moments one cannot easily escape when xenophobia and micro-fascisms become common on streets and in restaurants: when you involuntarily cough, everyone stares at you. More than ever, people demand an immunospherewhat Peter Sloterdijk suggestedas protection and as social organization.

It seems that immunological acts, which cannot simply be reduced to racist acts, justify a return to bordersindividual, social, and national. In biological immunology as well as political immunology, after decades of debate on the selfother paradigm and the organismic paradigm, modern states return to border controls as the simplest and most intuitive form of defense, even when the enemy is not visible.9 In fact, we are only fighting against the incarnation of the enemy. Here, we are all bound by what Carl Schmitt calls the political, defined by the distinction between friend and enemya definition not easily deniable, and probably strengthened during a pandemic. When the enemy is invisible, it has to be incarnated and identified: firstly the Chinese, the Asians, and then the Europeans, the North Americans; or, inside China, the inhabitants of Wuhan. Xenophobia nourishes nationalism, whether as the self considering xenophobia an inevitable immunological act, or the other mobilizing xenophobia to strengthen its own nationalism as immunology.

The League of Nations was founded in 1919 after the First World War, and was later succeeded by the United Nations, as a strategy to avoid war by gathering all nations into a common organization. Perhaps Carl Schmitts criticism of this attempt was accurate in claiming that the League of Nations, which had its one-hundred-year anniversary last year, mistakenly identified humanity as the common ground of world politics, when humanity is not a political concept. Instead, humanity is a concept of depoliticization, since identifying an abstract humanity which doesnt exist can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as ones own and to deny the same to the enemy.10 As we know, the League of Nations was a group of representatives from different countries that was unable to prevent one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century, the Second World War, and was therefore replaced by the United Nations. Isnt the argument applicable to the World Health Organization, a global organization meant to transcend national borders and provide warnings, advice, and governance concerning global health issues? Considering how the WHO had virtually no positive role in preventing the spread of coronavirusif not a negative role: its general director even refused to call it a pandemic until it was evident to everyonewhat makes the WHO necessary at all? Naturally, the work of professionals working in and with the organization deserves enormous respect, yet the case of the coronavirus has exposed a crisis in the political function of the larger organization. Worse still, we can only criticize such a gigantic money-burning global governing body for its failure on social media, like shouting into the wind, but no one has the capacity to change anything, as democratic processes are reserved for nations.

If we follow Schmitt, the WHO is primarily an instrument of depoliticization, since its function to warn of coronavirus could have been done better by any news agency. Indeed, a number of countries acted too slowly by following the WHOs early judgment of the situation. As Schmitt writes, an international representational governing body, forged in the name of humanity, does not eliminate the possibility of wars, just as it does not abolish states. It introduces new possibilities for wars, permits wars to take place, sanctions coalition wars, and by legitimizing and sanctioning certain wars it sweeps away many obstacles to war.11 Isnt the manipulation of global governance bodies by world powers and transnational capital since the Second World War only a continuation of this logic? Hasnt this virus that was controllable at the beginning sunken the world into a global state of war? Instead, these organizations contribute to a global sickness where mono-technological economic competition and military expansion are the only aim, detaching human beings from their localities rooted in the earth and replacing them with fictive identities shaped by modern nation-states and infowars.

The concept of the state of exception or state of emergency was originally meant to allow the sovereign to immunize the commonwealth, but since 9/11 it had tended towards a political norm. The normalization of the state of emergency is not only an expression of the absolute power of the sovereign, but also of the modern nation-state struggling and failing to confront the global situation by expanding and establishing its borders through all available technological and economic means. Border control is an effective immunological act only if one understands geopolitics in terms of sovereigns defined by borders. After the Cold War, increasing competition has resulted in a mono-technological culture that no longer balances economic and technological progress, but rather assimilates them while moving towards an apocalyptic endpoint. Competition based on mono-technology is devastating the earths resources for the sake of competition and profit, and also prevents any player from taking different paths and directionsthe techno-diversity that I have written about extensively. Techno-diversity doesnt merely mean that different countries produce the same type of technology (mono-technology) with different branding and slightly different features. Rather, it refers to a multiplicity of cosmotechnics that differ from each other in terms of values, epistemologies, and forms of existence. The current form of competition that uses economic and technological means to override politics is often attributed to neoliberalism, while its close relative transhumanism considers politics only a humanist epistemology soon to be overcome through technological acceleration. We arrive at an impasse of modernity: one cannot easily withdraw from such competition for fear of being surpassed by others. It is like the metaphor of modern man that Nietzsche described: a group permanently abandons its village to embark on a sea journey in pursuit of the infinite, but arrive at the middle of the ocean only to realize that the infinite is not a destination.12 And there is nothing more terrifying than the infinite when there is no longer any way of turning back.

The coronavirus, like all catastrophes, may force us to ask where we are heading. Though we know we are only heading to the void, still, we have been driven by a tragist impulse to try to live. Amidst intensified competition, the interest of states is no longer with their subjects but rather economic growthany care for a population is due to their contributions to economic growth. This is self-evident in how China initially tried to silence news about the coronavirus, and then, after Xi Jinping warned that measures against the virus damage the economy, the number of new cases dramatically dropped to zero. It is the same ruthless economic logic that made other countries decide to wait and see, because preventive measures such as travel restrictions (which the WHO advised against), airport screenings, and postponing the Olympic Games impact tourism.

The media as well as many philosophers present a somewhat naive argument concerning the Asian authoritarian approach and the allegedly liberal/libertarian/democratic approach of Western countries. The Chinese (or Asian) authoritarian wayoften misunderstood as Confucian, though Confucianism is not at all an authoritarian or coercive philosophyhas been effective in managing the population using already widespread consumer surveillance technologies (facial recognition, mobile data analysis, etc.) to identify the spread of the virus. When the outbreaks started in Europe, there was still debate on whether to use personal data. But if we are really to choose between Asian authoritarian governance and Western liberal/libertarian governance, Asian authoritarian governance appears more acceptable for facing further catastrophes, since the libertarian way of managing such pandemics is essentially eugenicist, allowing self-selection to rapidly eliminate the older population. In any case, all of these cultural essentialist oppositions are misleading, since they ignore the solidarities and spontaneity among communities and peoples diverse moral obligations to the elderly and family; yet this type of ignorance is necessary for vain expressions of ones own superiority.

But where else can our civilization move? The scale of this question mostly overwhelms our imagination, leaving us to hope, as a last resort, that we can resume a normal life, whatever this term means. In the twentieth century, intellectuals looked for other geopolitical options and configurations to surpass the Schmittian concept of the political, as Derrida did in his Politics of Friendship, where he responded to Schmitt by deconstructing the concept of friendship. Deconstruction opens an ontological difference between friendship and community to suggest another politics beyond the friendenemy dichotomy fundamental to twentieth-century political theory, namely hospitality. Unconditional and incalculable hospitality, which we may call friendship, can be conceived in geopolitics as undermining sovereignty, like when the Japanese deconstructionist philosopher Kjin Karatani claimed that the perpetual peace dreamed of by Kant would only be possible when sovereignty could be given as a giftin the sense of a Maussian gift economy, which would follow the global capitalist empire.13 However, such a possibility is conditioned by the abolition of sovereignty, in order words, the abolition of nation-states. For this to happen, according to Karatani, we would probably need a Third World War followed by an international governing body with more power than the United Nations. In fact, Angela Merkels refugee policy and the one country, two systems brilliantly conceived by Deng Xiaoping are moving towards this end without war. The latter has the potential to become an even more sophisticated and interesting model than the federal system. However the former has been a target of fierce attacks and the latter is in the process of being destroyed by narrow-minded nationalists and dogmatic Schmittians. A Third World War will be the quickest option if no country is willing to move forward.

Before that day arrives, and before an even more serious catastrophe brings us closer to extinction (which we can already sense), we may still need to ask what an organismic global immune system could look like beyond simply claiming to coexist with the coronavirus.14 What kind of co-immunity or co-immunism (the neologism that Sloterdijk proposed) is possible if we want globalization to continue, and to continue in a less contradictory way? Sloterdijks strategy of co-immunity is interesting but politically ambivalentprobably also because it is not sufficiently elaborated in his major worksoscillating between a border politics of the far-right Alternative fr Deutschland (AfD) party and Roberto Espositos contaminated immunity. However, the problem is that if we still follow the logic of nation-states, we will never arrive at a co-immunity. Not only because a state is not a cell nor an organism (no matter how attractive and practical this metaphor is for theorists), but also more fundamentally because the concept itself can only produce an immunity based on friend and enemy, regardless of whether it assumes the form of international organizations or councils. Modern states, while composed of all their subjects like the Leviathan, have no interest beyond economic growth and military expansion, at least not before the arrival of a humanitarian crisis. Haunted by an imminent economic crisis, nation-states become the source (rather than the target) of manipulative fake news.

Lets return here to the question of borders and question the nature of this war we are fighting now, which UN Secretary-General Antnio Guterres considers the biggest challenge the UN has faced since the Second World War. The war against the virus is first of all an infowar. The enemy is invisible. It can only be located through information about communities and the mobility of individuals. The efficacy of the war depends on the ability to gather and analyze information and to mobilize available resources to achieve the highest efficiency. For countries exercising strict online censorship, it is possible to contain the virus like containing a sensitive keyword circulating on social media. The use of the term information in political contexts has often been equated with propaganda, though we should avoid simply seeing it as a question of mass media and journalism, or even freedom of speech. Infowar is twenty-first century warfare. It is not a specific type of war, but war in its permanence.

In his lectures collected in Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault inverted Carl von Clausewitzs aphorism war is the continuation of politics by other means into politics is the continuation of war by other means.15 While the inversion proposes that war no longer assumes the form Clausewitz had in mind, Foucault hadnt yet developed a discourse on infowar. More than twenty years ago, a book titled Wars without Limit (, officially translated as Unrestricted Warfare or Warfare beyond Bounds) was published in China by two former senior air force colonels. This book was soon translated into French, and is said to have influenced the Tiqqun collective and later the Invisible Committee. The two former colonelswho know Clausewitz well but havent read Foucaultarrived at the claim that traditional warfare would slowly fade away, to be replaced by immanent wars in the world, largely introduced and made possible by information technology. This book could be read as an analysis of the US global war strategy, but also more importantly as a penetrating analysis of how infowar redefines politics and geopolitics.

The war against coronavirus is at the same time a war of misinformation and disinformation, which characterizes post-truth politics. The virus may be a contingent event that triggered the present crisis, but the war itself is no longer contingent. Infowar also opens two other (to some extent pharmacological) possibilities: first, warfare that no longer takes the state as its unit of measure, instead constantly deterritorializing the state with invisible weapons and no clear boundaries; and second, civil war, which takes the form of competing infospheres. The war against coronavirus is a war against the carriers of the virus, and a war conducted using fake news, rumors, censorship, fake statistics, misinformation, etc. In parallel to the US using Silicon Valley technology to expand its infosphere and penetrate most of the earths population, China has also built one of the largest and most sophisticated infospheres in the world, with well-equipped firewalls consisting of both humans and machines, which has allowed it to contain the virus within a population of 1.4 billion. This infosphere is expanding thanks to the infrastructure of Chinas One Belt, One Road initiative, as well as its already established networks in Africa, causing the US to respond, in the name of security and intellectual property, by blocking Huawei from extending its infosphere. Of course, infowar is not waged only by sovereigns. Within China, different factions compete against each other through official media, traditional media such as newspapers, and independent media outlets. For instance, both the traditional media and independent media fact-checked state figures on the outbreak, forcing the government to redress their own mistakes and distribute more medical equipment to hospitals in Wuhan.

The coronavirus renders explicit the immanence of infowar through the nation-states necessity to defend its physical borders while extending technologically and economically beyond them to establish new borders. Infospheres are constructed by humans, and, in spite of having greatly expanded in recent decades, remain undetermined in their becoming. Insofar as the imagination of co-immunityas a possible communism or mutual aid between nationscan only be an abstract solidarity, it is vulnerable to cynicism, similar to the case of humanity. Recent decades have seen some philosophical discourses succeed in nurturing an abstract solidarity, which can turn into sect-based communities whose immunity is determined through agreement and disagreement. Abstract solidarity is appealing because it is abstract: as opposed to being concrete, the abstract is not grounded and has no locality; it can be transported anywhere and dwell anywhere. But abstract solidarity is a product of globalization, a meta-narrative (or even metaphysics) for something that has long since confronted its own end.

True co-immunity is not abstract solidarity, but rather departs from a concrete solidarity whose co-immunity should ground the next wave of globalization (if there is one). Since the start of this pandemic, there have been countless acts of true solidarity, where it matters greatly who will buy groceries for you if you are not able to go to the supermarket, or who will give you a mask when you need to visit the hospital, or who will offer respirators for saving lives, and so forth. There are also solidarities among medical communities that share information towards the development of vaccines. Gilbert Simondon distinguished between abstract and concrete through technical objects: abstract technical objects are mobile and detachable, like those embraced by the eighteenth-century encyclopedists that (to this day) inspire optimism about the possibility of progress; concrete technical objects are those that are grounded (perhaps literally) in both the human and natural worlds, acting as a mediator between the two. A cybernetic machine is more concrete than a mechanical clock, which is more concrete than a simple tool. Can we thus conceive of a concrete solidarity that circumvents the impasse of an immunology based in nation-states and abstract solidarity? Can we consider the infosphere to be an opportunity pointing towards such immunology?

We may need to enlarge the concept of the infosphere in two ways. First of all, the building of infospheres could be understood as an attempt to construct techno-diversity, to dismantle the mono-technological culture from within and escape its bad infinity. This diversification of technologies also implies a diversification of ways of life, forms of coexistence, economies, and so forth, since technology, insofar as it is cosmotechnics, embeds different relations with nonhumans and the larger cosmos.16 This techno-diversification does not imply an ethical framework imposed onto technology, for this always arrives too late and is often made to be violated. Without changing our technologies and our attitudes, we will only preserve biodiversity as an exceptional case without ensuring its sustainability. In other words, without techno-diversity, we cannot maintain biodiversity. The coronavirus is not natures revenge but the result of a mono-technological culture in which technology itself simultaneously loses its own ground and desires to become the ground of everything else. The mono-technologism we live now ignores the necessity of coexistence and continues to see the earth merely as a standing reserve. With the vicious competition it sustains, it will only continue to produce more catastrophes. According to this view, after the exhaustion and devastation of spaceship earth, we may only embark on the same exhaustion and devastation on spaceship Mars.

Secondly, the infosphere can be considered a concrete solidarity extending beyond borders, as an immunology that no longer takes as its point of departure the nation-state, with its international organizations that are effectively puppets of global powers. For such concrete solidarity to emerge, we need a techno-diversity which develops alternative technologies such as new social networks, collaborative tools, and infrastructures of digital institutions that will form the basis for global collaboration. Digital media already has a long social history, though few forms beyond that of Silicon Valley (and WeChat in China) assume a global scale. This is largely due to an inherited philosophical traditionwith its oppositions between nature and technology, and between culture and technologythat fails to see a plurality of technologies as realizable. Technophilia and technophobia become the symptoms of mono-technological culture. We are familiar with the development of hacker culture, free software, and open-source communities over the past few decades, yet the focus has been on developing alternatives to hegemonic technologies instead of building alternative modes of access, collaboration, and more importantly, epistemology.

The coronavirus incident will consequently accelerate processes of digitalization and subsumption by the data economy, since it has been the most effective tool available to counter the spread, as we have already seen in the recent turn in favor of using mobile data for tracing the outbreak in countries that otherwise cherish privacy. We may want to pause and ask whether this accelerating digitalization process can be taken as an opportunity, a kairos that underlines the current global crisis. The calls for a global response have put everyone in the same boat, and the goal of resuming normal life is not an adequate response. The coronavirus outbreak marks the first time in more than twenty years that online teaching has come to be offered by all university departments. There have been many reasons for the resistance to digital teaching, but most are minor and sometimes irrational (institutes dedicated to digital cultures may still find physical presence to be important for human resource management). Online teaching will not completely replace physical presence, but it does radically open up access to knowledge and return us to the question of education at a time when many universities are being defunded. Will the suspension of normal life by coronavirus allow us to change these habits? For example, can we take the coming months (and maybe years), when most universities in the world will use online teaching, as a chance to create serious digital institutions at an unprecedented scale? A global immunology demands such radical reconfigurations.

This essays opening quote is from Nietzsches incomplete Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, written around 1873. Instead of alluding to his own exclusion from the discipline of philosophy, Nietzsche identified cultural reform with philosophers in ancient Greece who wanted to reconcile science and myth, rationality and passion. We are no longer in the tragic age, but in a time of catastrophes when neither tragist nor Daoist thinking alone can provide an escape. In view of the sickness of global culture, we have an urgent need for reforms driven by new thinking and new frameworks that will allow us to unbind ourselves from what philosophy has imposed and ignored. The coronavirus will destroy many institutions already threatened by digital technologies. It will also necessitate increasing surveillance and other immunological measures against the virus, as well as against terrorism and threats to national security. It is also a moment in which we will need stronger concrete, digital solidarities. A digital solidarity is not a call to use more Facebook, Twitter, or WeChat, but to get out of the vicious competition of mono-technological culture, to produce a techno-diversity through alternative technologies and their corresponding forms of life and ways of dwelling on the planet and in the cosmos. In our post-metaphysical world we may not need any metaphysical pandemics. We may not need a virus-oriented ontology either. What we really need is a concrete solidarity that allows differences and divergences before the falling of dusk.

I would like to thank Brian Kuan Wood and Pieter Lemmens for their comments and editorial suggestions on the drafts of the essay.

Yuk Hui currently teaches at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, his latest book is Recursivity and Contingency (2019).

2020 e-flux and the author

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One Hundred Years of Crisis - Journal #108 April 2020 - E-Flux