COVID in Colorado: an inventory of effects
Signs Preceding the End of the Roll
Nancy Walker (Rosie) as seen in Bounty’s 1978 television ad campaign. www.doitbest.com
For a brief period in early March, we could pretend the most immediate threat to American life was an itchy anus and an empty paper towel dispenser. Lodged in the folds and literally embossed on every square of America’s leading paper towel manufacturer* were sacred rights to Bounty, excess, disposability. Household countertops the nation over faced the very real possibility of being swallowed up by a tsunami of toasted bagel crumbs. One could, of course, fashion reusable cloth rags or repurpose a hand-pumped weed sprayer as a DIY bidet, but to do so would be to admit a terrible truth about the situation.
The toilet paper roll clutched like pearls, that thin white sheet standing between civilization and barbarism, was also funny. Which made for a good meme -- its comic potency flowing from a collective desire for personal agency and comfort. Viral test kits? Out of reach and exhausted on celebrity athletes. Stimulus for millions of laid-off workers? Elusive. Toilet paper? Scarce, and yet with the right kind of rugged determination, attainable. The rolls themselves, interchangeable, fungible and pleasing to stack like coins, have elevated to a parallel currency. To stockpile is to self-soothe. When it became obvious, if it hadn’t been from the start, that our ruling caste of oligarchs and kleptocrats were asleep at the wheel, more concerned with managing stock portfolios than managing a global contagion, a broad cross-section of the country looked to toilet paper and towels as a countable bulwark against a vast unraveling: my bank accounts empty but the pantry is full.
Howling at the Prepper
Kurt Russell in the original ‘Escape From New York’. 1981. www.nme.com
For Coloradans like Mike, host of popular YouTube channel “Last Line of Defense,” conduit for tactical gear, and booster of OVERLANDING -- automotive subculture for militarized car campers -- the viral outbreak has looked great for business. He’s leveraged the opportunity to hawk concealed pistol holsters for those nervy moments in the Safeway checkout line.
Preppers have been waiting a long time for a catastrophe to validate the core virtue of the movement: preparedness. Preparedness is wellness for collapse-porn addicts, a philosophy that emphasizes health and security as a personal pursuit, and an expensive one at that, rather than a collective social project. A prepper’s credo is a variation on the instructions for airplane oxygen masks. Help yourself instead of helping others. But the prepper intuits a systemic fragility that’s real. We see it in the bungled state and federal response to the crisis, one in which many Americans are effectively responsible for their own survival. The prepper delights in the possibility of collapse because it promises the reinvention of the self; the transformation from the office worker, software developer, sales associate, to the ennobled outlaw survivor. This outlook is invigorating but fundamentally nihilistic. Cooperation, on the other hand, seems difficult and devoid of crossbows and armored vehicles and guns -- it doesn’t look like an episode of The Walking Dead. Boring.
Nevertheless, here, in Colorado, a mass rejoinder against the atomized individual takes place at 8 pm each night. Denverites howl in solidarity, catharsis in tough times. “[It’s] a way to connect with people we couldn’t connect with in person,” Westword quotes founder Shelsea Ochoa of Go Outside and Howl. The coyotes in the open space down the road joined dogs and humans in the chorus yesterday. Howling is the song of local resilience and an ode to a class of workers scholars refer to as “the maintainers.” In spite of the mandate to isolate, isolation is only possible through the sacrifice of individuals in the service of others: the baggers, EMTs, cooks, deliverers, and mutual aid systems we rely on to stay sheltered in place. While the prepper sees the ineptitude of government and retreats into a citadel of guns and hoarding, the howler responds with community support.
The Internet is 1989 again
Photo by Pape, Dave. Original VPL DataSuit. 1989. Wikimedia Commons
Imagine for a second that it’s the late 20th century. William Gibson published Neuromancer, propelling “cyberspace” into the cultural lexicon just as his impossibly cool universe of CyberPunk hackers threatened to digitize their consciousness onto your Lenovo ThinkPad with the next leap of Moore's Law. Jerone Lanier, dreadlocked, vatic, designs the first commercial VR headset a year later. The first ISP arrived shortly after. As Sean Monohan put it, instead of “checking our socials,” we would be “surfing the web” and BlackMirror wouldn’t air its first episode on BBC’s Channel 4 until 2011.
In 3 BC (Before Corona, 2017), Geert Lovink wrote: “our disillusionment with the internet is fact.” The earnest buzz around digital detoxing seemed to capture a cultural malaise in which most users had long since abandoned the illusion of a truly social, social media. Facebook had seen a terminal decline in active posting and most Millenials I know in their twenties were using Instagram to graze content rather than create it. Gen-Z, immersed in the digital wilderness since birth in some cases, retreated into the safety of Snapchat’s disappearing message. Living online during the twenty-teens could feel like a bad case of digital-Stockholm syndrome.
But In 0 AC? not so much. The internet is 1989 again and it’s time to party -- at a distance. Though we might still slide into feed-scrolling in our idle hours, the story of the internet during COVID is the story of live chats, live streams, video calls, and open-world gaming. When was the last time you were such an active user? Stuck inside, each of us gravitates towards the best simulation of the thing we miss. It came as a surprise to me that isolation and the subsequent infrastructure of Discord channels erected by friends brought me closer to many of them than I’ve been in years. But the new intimacy graphs like an asymptote: the paradox of closing the distance with people you never actually touch.
Some writers have witnessed the great pilgrimage back to the screen with horror. The normative concern for whether tech mediated communication ever can (or ever should) replace face-to-face contact is well taken, even if it misses the opportunity to see this moment as an inventory of effects. When technology is relied on for all social functions, as it is now, our relationship to it becomes far more complex and certainly more interesting.
Video games in late April of 2020 are a spectacular macrocosm of escape. As IRL shrinks to the size of a house, apartment, room, games are the teeth by which to bite a hole in the world and climb out. Animal Crossing’s explosive sales numbers and the resurgence of the open-world survival genre (Space Engineers, Minecraft) demonstrate an emotional demand not just for connection, but for propriety and the routine of work. Those living alone or forced back into homes with family -- and many who couldn’t leave in the first place, trapped by rising rents and student debt -- reprise a simulated ownership through the sweat equity of grinding. No backyard for gardening? Harvest shiny little fruits off the floor of your Animal Crossing island and revel in the therapy that comes with watching the crops grow. If you can’t afford a house, you can still build one out of Minecraft’s voxel cubes. My Minecraft house is beautiful, too. It’s immaculate and spacious, unlike the room my body lives in. The trouble is you can’t sleep there.
By this time Sunday (the 26th), the stay-at-home order will be lifted (prematurely according to medical professionals) and the weeks spent indoors will lose their immediacy, replaced by the reality of a post-pandemic recession. Perhaps this brief, involuntary experience of virtualized social life will inspire a new set of priorities for the kinds of platforms and online communities we inhabit; or extend beyond the digital to an appreciation of public space and renewed interest in local forms of community. I hope so. But what’s also certain is that economic fallout radiating from the contagion will demand our sustained activism and organizing, not escape. Artificial approximations of core material needs -- homeownership, a job -- while serviceable stand-ins under the unique conditions of lockdown, were always a short-term survival strategy at best. At worst, a seductive opiate reached for again and again.
The American Dream with Chinese Characteristics
Photo by Guoyin, Li and Yong, Su. Chinese Dream slogan on rice field, Yinchuan. 2019. www.chinadaily.com.cn
A liquor store signboard between Louisville and Lafayette, about a mile from my childhood home read, “Thanks China!”, followed by 14.88, an oblique reference to Adolph Hitler’s 14 words. Two weeks prior, the Governor of Colorado felt compelled to visit Asian restaurants in Denver. Many had seen a drop in business from patrons who must have assumed COVID-19 was a congenital disease endemic to the Chinese diaspora.
H1N1 despite its American provenance, was not the American Virus but Swine Flu. COVID-19 though, to many of your neighbors, and maybe yourself, is undeniably, unequivocally Chinese. Chinese for its bat eating origins, Chinese in its scope, Chinese in its novel design, “exotic” and inscrutable like mandarin characters. Chinese because it’s potentially tucked into every product you buy: Made in China. But if COVID can be said to be from Wuhan, the crisis of COVID and its many faces is All-American.
The official CCP slogan should sound familiar. One dimension of Xi Jinping’s gnomic “Chinese Dream” invokes the spirit of Rockwell, whose freedom from want implies the decadent, meet-heavy diet of the American. The average Chinese citizen is eating more meat than ever, contributing in part to the total reorganization of rural life. As it follows, changes in land use equivalent in scale to those under Mao’s tenure have returned with a distinct free-market flavor, thrusting livestock, wild animals, and humans into dangerous proximity. Global/regional supply chains, factory farming, intensive agribusiness scything deep into wild ecologies; these are American exports that simultaneously rationalize disparate food markets and unwittingly double as a streamlined infrastructure for pathogenesis. Critical epidemiologists (quoted here from the Monthly Review) think so at least. They hope to emphasize the link between modes of production and labor geographies that potentiate novel viral outbreaks:
Other than describing the wild food market in the typical orientalism, little effort has been expended on the most obvious of questions. How did the exotic food sector arrive at a standing where it could sell its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market in Wuhan? [...] Well beyond fisheries, worldwide wild food is an increasingly formalized sector, evermore capitalized by the same sources backing industrial production. [...] As a result, forest disease dynamics, the pathogens’ primeval sources, are no longer constrained to the hinterlands alone. [...] A SARS can suddenly find itself spilling over into humans in the big city only a few days out of its bat cave. (quotation condensed for readability)
Each of these logistical systems has found a willing accomplice in China since the return of permanent normal trade relations in 2000. Many older citizens who came of age during the rampant food insecurity and mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward view plentiful, cheap meat, wild or otherwise, as both a status symbol and a marker of the country's progress. The CCP was happy to oblige, ever desperate to legitimate single-party control, in turn providing official cover for a capital intensive yet largely unregulated food industry. All of this for the Chinese Dream, a land of plenty made real on your dinner table, flanked by new electronics out of Shenzhen; on the coat hanger a SUPREME hoodie; in the foyer, a bootleg pair of Yeezy Boosts made in the same Adidas factory as the real ones, nearly indistinguishable; and very nearly our own dream.
Observing the continuities between two dreams of national ambition, how could a fiction of difference be sustained? Because to Trump and his “China Virus,” accepting American culpability and thereby indicting market-oriented development strategies (what’s often referred to as the “Washington Consensus”), would be nothing less than a desecration of American Exceptionalism: a shameful admission of guilt. The guilty conscience that deploys a racist epithet against a microorganism was always ready to look outward for the problem so as not to see themselves in it. To the exceptionalist, viruses, immigrants, and foreign languages are interchangeable. Each, in their own way, symbolizes a crisis of interiority, a border wall perforated like the body by a virus. As with the fall of man from Eden, exceptionalism presupposes an original, singular purity, defiled as it were, by outside influences. Such is the appeal of MAGA to sublimate all crises into an alien-other. The inside-outside distinction collapsing, the guilty conscience imagines as Holly Herndon does, that “we are completely outside ourselves and the world completely inside us.”
* Header Image: Dr. Rami Amaro. This is the main viral protein involved in host-cell infection. Institute of Engineering in Medicine, UC San Diego. 2020
* If you look at the ranking, you’ll notice Private Label as the largest manufacturer, but Private Label is more of a paper towel “platform” or franchise. It isn’t a vertically integrated towel brand with one symbolic identity like Bounty.
