"Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all." –Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007): 463.
In Mr. Hanssen’s biography we find the logical result of the expansion of conservative ideology, “I self-servingly make the rules and cruelly enforce them on you. I treat myself to exemption from the rules.,” (See Carl Schmitt, etc.) along with the establishment of a very large occupational sector of police. Chickens come home to roost, a great man observed.
Unlike the early 20th century Cambridge dual agents, Mr. Hanssen was not a dissident. Mr. Hanssen was quite the opposite, a product of the triumphant expansion of conservative ideology and policing. He spied for the Soviet Union not because he was a communist, and he spied for the Russians not because he was a multipolarity advocate or a fanboy of oligarchs. He didn’t even spy for the Atlantic ruling class’ geopolitical opposition because they gave him money and jewels. He spied for them for the same reason that he slipped a little adultery and other rule-breaking feats into his life: As a product of the triumph of conservatism, a devoted member of Opus Dei and the F.B.I., meaning and value for Mr. Hanssen was located in selfishly, cruelly making and enforcing rules upon other people, performatively embodying order, and exempting himself at will, playing the inegalitarian game.
…
The U.S. was converted into a vast military reserve, an inappropriate and degrading institution for most humans, a destroyer of life. In serving military and financial elites to restore their inhuman privileges and suppression security at the expense of the nascent welfare state (Hogan 1998; Murakawa 2014), the Democrat Party equally with the Republican Party caused the explosion of conservative ideology burying the U.S. The dream of democracy at the U.S.’s inception was finally defeated by slavery.
by Kirschgaessner, S., M. Ganguly, D. Pegg, C. Cadwalladr, & J. Burke
The Guardian
February 15, 2023
A team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media has been exposed in a new investigation.
The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades.
He is being unmasked by an international consortium of journalists. Hanan and his unit, which uses the codename “Team Jorge”, have been exposed by undercover footage and documents leaked to the Guardian.
Hanan did not respond to detailed questions about Team Jorge’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”’Team Jorge’ unmasked: the secret disinformation team who distort reality – video
The investigation reveals extraordinary details about how disinformation is being weaponised by Team Jorge, which runs a private service offering to covertly meddle in elections without a trace. The group also works for corporate clients.
Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe.
One of Team Jorge’s key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims. It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts.
The consortium of journalists that investigated Team Jorge includes reporters from 30 outlets including Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País. The project, part of a wider investigation into the disinformation industry, has been coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
[Thank god for Europeans, because Anglo-Americans spend all day every day throwing their all into shredding democracy.]
The undercover footage was filmed by three reporters, who approached Team Jorge posing as prospective clients.
In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team spoke of how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They boasted of planting material in legitimate news outlets, which are then amplified by the Aims bot-management software.
Much of their strategy appeared to revolve around disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns: the team even claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician, with the aim of giving his wife the false impression he was having an affair.
The methods and techniques described by Team Jorge raise new challenges for big tech platforms, which have for years struggled to prevent nefarious actors spreading falsehoods or breaching the security on their platforms. Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also ring alarm bells for democracies around the world.
Tal Hanan and his colleagues met reporters at an office in Modi’in, about 20 miles outside Tel Aviv. Photograph: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio Francehttps
The Team Jorge revelations could cause embarrassment for Israel, which has come under growing diplomatic pressure in recent years over its export of cyber-weaponry that undermines democracy and human rights.
Hanan appears to have run at least some of his disinformation operations through an Israeli company, Demoman International, which is registered on a website run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to promote defence exports. The Israeli MoD did not respond to requests for comment.
The undercover footage
Given their expertise in subterfuge, it is perhaps surprising that Hanan and his colleagues allowed themselves to be exposed by undercover reporters. Journalists using conventional methods have struggled to shed light on the disinformation industry, which is at pains to avoid detection.
The secretly filmed meetings, which took place between July and December 2022, therefore provide a rare window into the mechanics of disinformation for hire.
Three journalists – from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker – approached Team Jorge pretending to be consultants working on behalf of a politically unstable African country that wanted help delaying an election.
The encounters with Hanan and his colleagues took place via video calls and an in-person meeting in Team Jorge’s base, an unmarked office in an industrial park in Modi’in, 20 miles outside Tel Aviv.
Hanan described his team as “graduates of government agencies”, with expertise in finance, social media and campaigns, as well as “psychological warfare”, operating from six offices around the world. Four of Hanan’s colleagues attended the meetings, including his brother, Zohar Hanan, who was described as the chief executive of the group.
In his initial pitch to the potential clients, Hanan claimed: “We are now involved in one election in Africa … We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates … You follow the leads. [We have completed] 33 presidential-level campaigns, 27 of which were successful.” Later, he said he was involved in two “major projects” in the US but claimed not to engage directly in US politics.
It was not possible to verify all of Team Jorge’s claims in the undercover meetings, and Hanan may have been embellishing them in order to secure a lucrative deal with prospective clients. For example, it appears Hanan may have inflated his fees when discussing the cost of his services.
Team Jorge told the reporters they would accept payments in a variety of currencies, including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, or cash. He said he would charge between €6m and €15m for interference in elections.
However, emails leaked to the Guardian show Hanan quoting more modest fees. One suggests that in 2015 he asked for $160,000 from the now defunct British consultancy Cambridge Analytica for involvement in an eight-week campaign in a Latin American country.
In 2017 Hanan again pitched to work for Cambridge Analytica, this time in Kenya, but was rejected by the consultancy, which said “$400,000-$600,000 per month, and substantially more for crisis response” was more than its clients would pay.
There is no evidence that either of those campaigns went ahead. Other leaked documents, however, reveal that when Team Jorge worked covertly on the Nigerian presidential race in 2015 it did so alongside Cambridge Analytica.
Alexander Nix, who was the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, declined to comment in detail but added: “Your purported understanding is disputed.”
Team Jorge also sent Nix’s political consultancy a video showcasing an early iteration of the social media disinformation software it now markets as Aims. Hanan said in an email that the tool, which enabled users to create up to 5,000 bots to deliver “mass messages” and “propaganda”, had been used in 17 elections.
“It’s our own developed Semi-Auto Avatar creation and network deployment system,” he said, adding that it could be used in any language and was being sold as a service, although the software could be bought “if the price is right”.
Team Jorge’s bot-management software appears to have grown significantly by 2022, according to what Hanan told the undercover reporters. He said it controlled a multinational army of more than 30,000 avatars, complete with digital backstories that stretch back years.
Demonstrating the Aims interface, Hanan scrolled through dozens of avatars, and showed how fake profiles could be created in an instant, using tabs to choose nationality and gender and then matching profile pictures to names.
“This is Spanish, Russian, you see Asians, Muslims. Let’s make a candidate together,” he told the undercover reporters, before settling on one image of a white woman. “Sophia Wilde, I like the name. British. Already she has email, date birth, everything.”
Hanan was coy when asked where the photos for his avatars came from. However, the Guardian and its partners have discovered several instances in which images have been harvested from the social media accounts of real people. The photo of “Sophia Wilde”, for instance, appears to have been stolen from a Russian social media account belonging to a woman who lives in Leeds.
The Guardian and its reporting partners tracked Aims-linked bot activity across the internet. It was behind fake social media campaigns, mostly involving commercial disputes, in about 20 countries including the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Senegal, India and the United Arab Emirates.
This week Meta, the owner of Facebook, took down Aims-linked bots on its platform after reporters shared a sample of the fake accounts with the company. On Tuesday, a Meta spokesperson connected the Aims bots to others that were linked in 2019 to another, now-defunct Israeli firm which it banned from the platform.
“This latest activity is an attempt by some of the same individuals to come back and we removed them for violating our policies,” the spokesperson said. “The group’s latest activity appears to have centred around running fake petitions on the internet or seeding fabricated stories in mainstream media outlets.”
In addition to Aims, Hanan told reporters about his “blogger machine” – an automated system for creating websites that the Aims-controlled social media profiles could then use to spread fake news stories across the internet. “After you’ve created credibility, what do you do? Then you can manipulate,” he said.
‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’
No less alarming were Hanan’s demonstrations of his team’s hacking capabilities, in which he showed the reporters how he could penetrate Telegram and Gmail accounts. In one case, he brought up on screen the Gmail account of a man described as the “assistant of an important guy” in the general election in Kenya, which was days away.
“Today if someone has a Gmail, it means they have much more than just email,” Hanan said as he clicked through the target’s emails, draft folders, contacts and drives. He then showed how he claimed to be able to access accounts on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app.
Tal Hanan. Photograph: Source: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio France
One of the Telegram accounts he claimed to penetrate belonged to a person in Indonesia, while the other two appeared to belong to Kenyans involved in the ongoing general election, and close to the then candidate William Ruto, who ended up winning the presidency.
“I know in some countries they believe Telegram is safe. I will show you how safe it is,” he said, before showing a screen in which he appeared to scroll through the Telegram contacts of one Kenyan strategist who was working for Ruto at the time.
Hanan then demonstrated how access to Telegram could be manipulated to sow mischief.
Typing the words “hello how are you dear”, Hanan appeared to send a message from the Kenyan strategist’s account to one of their contacts. “I’m not just watching,” Hanan boasted, before explaining how manipulating the messaging app to send messages could be used to create chaos in a rival’s election campaign.
“One of the biggest thing is to put sticks between the right people, you understand,” he said. “And I can write him what I think about his wife, or what I think about his last speech, or I can tell him that I promised him to be my next chief of staff, OK?”
Hanan then showed how – once the message had been read – he could “delete” it to cover his tracks. But when Hanan repeated that trick, hacking into the Telegram account of the second close adviser to Ruto, he made a mistake.
After sending an innocuous Telegram message consisting only of the number “11” to one of the hacking victim’s contacts, he failed to properly delete it.
Hanan sent a Telegram message consisting only of the number 11 to one of the hacking victim’s contacts. Photograph: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio France
A reporter in the consortium was later able to track down the recipient of that message and was granted permission to check the person’s phone. The “11” message was still visible on their Telegram account, providing evidence that Team Jorge’s infiltration of the account was genuine.
Hanan suggested to the undercover reporters that some of his hacking methods exploited vulnerabilities in the global signalling telecoms system, SS7, which for decades has been regarded by experts as a weak spot in the telecoms network.
Google, which runs the Gmail service, declined to comment. Telegram said “the problem of SS7 vulnerabilities” was widely known and “not unique to Telegram”. They added: “Accounts on any massively popular social media network or messaging app can be vulnerable to hacking or impersonation unless users follow security recommendations and take proper precautions to keep their accounts secure.”
Hanan did not respond to detailed requests for comment, claiming that he needed “approval” from an unspecified authority before doing so. However, he added: “To be clear, I deny any wrongdoing.”
Zohar Hanan, his brother and business partner, added: “I have been working all my life according to the law!”
Today I found out about a Canadian who prioritizes scientific literacy! Dr. Matt Strauss is a hero, an embattled hero in a country of pious Counterenlightenment.
In attempting two (2) thoughtful, measured public-health interventions, in 2022, upon the hoary scientistic depredations of the state-pharma industry-medical professionals’ population control coalition, Matt Strauss, MD, has apparently been subjected to the full brunt of Canadian political assault.
Here are the 100% responsible, scientific, considered public interventions Dr. Strauss waited until 2022 to make:
The cross-Ontario medical professional, joint Liberal-Conservative political, and media assault on Dr. Strauss’ employment, humanism, and sense of democratic Enlightenment responsibility is horrifying, galling.
Corey Robin on coalitional liberal-conservative “American-style” Fear:
“It is an affair of collusion involving the grunt work of collaborators, the cooperation of victims, and aid from those bystanders who do nothing to protest fear’s repressive hold…these coalitions of fear work through the very contrivances that are supposed to check fear: the fragmented state and a pluralistic civil society, which provides the wielders of fear coercive instruments often not available to government officials.” The mechanisms of McCarthyism are still in place, particularly in the contemporary Anglo-American workplace, “for it is there, in the coercive relationship between employer and employee, that we see today the most visible and pervasive evidence of fear” (Robin 2004: 163).
“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness…You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” –Joseph N. Welch, 1954, to Joseph McCarthy, unprepossessing Red Hunt frontman
For three years, physicians, in coalition with long-embattled caretaking nurses and long-term care aides, were permitted full expression–and unquestioning implementation–of their political interests in exchange for exposing themselves to COVID-19 contagion in the course of their medical work. The politics of physicians have always been in the main autocratic, self-serving, inhumane, and contra the public good. Not scientific. They were dragged kicking and screaming to Medicare. That autocratic, inhumane tendency has exploded under pandemic policy formulated by military strategists and promoted by conservatized liberal party comms professionals. It is well past time for exceptional, scientific democratic-Enlightenment exponents like Dr. Strauss to begin to assert limits on the unhealthy antihumanism of pandemic lockdown governance.
The Chinese government maintained a zero-tolerance policy toward COVID for an inhumane length of time because they have too many people at their disposal and do not value human development; that government has broader coalitional influence than we often recognize, but fetishizing one health variable, COVID-19 infection, at the cost of many others–including healthy development–is a symptom of destructive inegalitarianism. It may be altruistic, but the main beneficiaries of the altruism are autocrats. It’s not a democratic population governance model.
There are two important moments in the reduction of Enlightenment science to positivist-mechanism:
The founding of the Royal Society in Britain. (See Margaret Jacobs)
The rivalrous alliance between the US military and the US Anglo ruling class that emerged from WWII. See Michael J. Hogan (A Cross of Iron) and Mark Solovey (Shaky Foundations, MIT Press; Social Science for What, podcast part 2).
Characteristics of imperial Anglo-American positivist-mechanism include:
Jettisoning of autonomous scientific community; military and business assume direction over scientific agenda. This dependency relationship is transformed into a patriarchal moral virtue.
Rigorous focus on simplified mechanisms in isolation qua science tout court.
Austro-Hungarian Empire inegalitarian governance expertise is relocated to AngloAmerican empire. In the US, this Antienlightenment infusion gives new wings to slavers.
TBD
These reductions violate scientific epistemology in the following ways (TBD):
Per Varoufakis 2011, there is no path forward from paradigm limits. Discipline is toggled between hard and soft premises, depending on whether evidence of limits is prominent.
Compare Econ with Biology, which did transcend anti-epigenetics paradigm through pursuing that paradigm to its limits. Is the difference the degree of top-down disciplinary control? As well, there is still moral policing around a positivist-mechanist version of epigenetics, confining epigenetic knowledge to Mother-blame.
Revisit Kuhn in light of Varoufakis 2011. Was he studying a specific form of scientific revolution, based in discipline & context?
No knowledge goal internal to discipline (tasks and paradigm set by military and business) means Enlightenment science’s rigorous comparativism (with context, presuming scientific knowledge development across positionalities) is dropped in favor of closed equations as knowledge (See Varoufakis 2011).
TBD
TBD: Interwar to Cold War history of American engineering: social composition, politics, academic politics.
Per Solovey, engineers including Vannevar Bush and Hungarian fascist/H-bomber Edward Teller worked postwar to exclude the social sciences from state funding (both the NSF and the military). The concern was that traditionally, the social sciences had formed to pursue egaliberte knowledge; under the military-finance alliance, the US was positioning to attack and reverse democratic socialism. Sneaking into NSF funding with Alpert’s quiet assistance, the social sciences worked around the engineers’ exclusionary organization, by excluding traditional Enlightenment research into comparative equality and inequality.
Economics organized like engineering as a top-down fraternal hierarchy (cite). Their collective goal, per Clara Elisabetta Mattei, 2015, was to produce an inegalitarian positivist-mechanism, proving their worth to the US’s 20th century capitalist-imperial consolidation.
Elite universities established an elite Sociology, modeled after Austrian empire philosopher Simmel’s intellectual agenda, and aiding the state in urban population surveillance.
Area Studies, Security Studies, Anthropology: foreign population surveillance.
Excluding Enlightenment science produced Counterenlightenment social sciences: Where the aim was not to help engineer inequality, the complementary goal was to manage the distribution of affliction across the working class–to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable” (as Ed Yong recently described his post-lockdown communication goal at The Atlantic). As women have entered the social sciences (and been excluded from Engineering and Economics), affliction management has been seen as patriarchal feminine moral virtue (See Elsie Parsons Clews’ and Virginia Woolf’s sociological critiques of this division of patriarchal labor).
Together, patriarchal engineering and feminine population management institutionalized inequality and reproduced inegalitarian dispositions. A key tool and virtue in inegalitarian engineering is isolating and immobilizing the population.
Case study one: Militarism (Hogan, Schrader); Carceralism (Gilmore, Davis, et al), including drugging of the incarcerated (Anthony Hatch, UMinnesota 2023).
In 1998 Sociologist Nina Eliasoph ended up at the important question Conor Dougherty wends to today in “Twilight of the NIMBY,” New York Times 2022: Why do smallholders organize myopically (“Close to Home” Eliasoph characterized it.), even when they know their personal troubles–their lack of capacitating security, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore‘s insightful conceptulization–are continuously generated by enveloping institutions and incentives organized and maintained for the primary benefit of powerful interests, for financial and military leaders?
The question languishes because elitist reflexes have long provided a too-easy, ready-made answer: Smallholders are small thinkers–unfit to govern.
Abolitionists, however, have the valid answer: Unmoderated, militarized American labor repression (see Alex Gourevitch 2015 ) leaves American smallholder communities balkanized and politically ineffectual, reeling backwards, ever Old and In the Way, reproducing inequality and smallholder decapacitation when they need to organize to make an egaliberte difference.
In short, there’s too much damn policing and there’s not enough labor rights. American institutions spend all day and all night dismantling nonelite organizing, communication, and collective action capacity, all our lives long. That’s why, inter alia, aging immigrant waves are reduced to channeling their constrained political capacities into competitively shafting newcomers, both American youth and new immigrant waves. In the American governance model, US smallholders labor away in variously pleasant and unpleasant corners of a large prison yard, frequently pausing to shiv each other; and that’s also why the world’s expropriators and exploiters plow their money into the US. In the Anglo imperial tradition, it’s a refined military-commercial system, administered by a political class, for securing global elite class stability and vast, endless, profitable smallholder dehumanization, disruption and destabilization.
To appreciate the intensive resource, logistics, and organization presuppositions of biosecurity lockdown, or carceral biosecurity, it is useful to review the strategy’s origins. They are in a bipartisan US defense intellectual collective including a couple members with MDs. The well they were tapping for the pandemic model is highly-complex military operations to lock down enemy cities.
You will notice biosecurity lockdown is unevenly applied in the US. This is because over that expanse, there is not uniform distribution of military-level resources, logistics, and organization capacity (try though Americans have). Nor is there in other low-capacity regions.
What would be required to treat some regions of the US like a military lockdown operation is what happens to the residents of Gaza, crippling incapacitation. Thus, when the US military contorted to apply biosecurity strategy to itself, the pandemic results were not successful. The social, economic, geographic distributions of capacity that are invoked in pandemic policy matter on many dimensions including health, and the pertinent variables in lockdown cannot be reduced to cooperation with professionals v. small business income.
Biosecurity is not the straight-forward, no-nonsense strategy of sheer altruism, will, and optimal results that its advocates paint. Let’s dig into what happens when the military operation of biosecurity mass lockdown is applied in low-capacity regions.
I define low-capacity regions as regions that are heavily constrained by, and to some degree systematically disorganized by, the geographical hierarchy of capitalist accumulation. While low-capacity regions may have expertise, and even institutions and resources, that could tailor demanding pandemic strategies to regional conditions, their capacity to identify and tap that expertise, those resources is very limited. Low-capacities regions are disconnected from their own appropriate expertise, and can only formulaically implement the often substantively-irrational, and deliberately- incapacitating military logic of quarantine.
I present a first example of glaringly-low regional organizing capacity, rendering military-grade mass lockdown an inefficient and counterproductive strategy: Canada has the OECD’s worst long-term care home COVID-19 results. The regional university in Manitoba has one of the country’s foremost experts on long-term care homes–but she is a female Sociologist. Despite strenuous efforts to contribute, she was excluded from COVID-19 policy strategizing and decisionmaking. Only belatedly did some medical doctors discover the systemic problems with long-term care homes, where they’ve been belatedly cited as local authorities. People in low capacity regions have no idea that most medical doctors are not researchers, or that research expertise is even needed in crisis; and a huge handicap in crises, they have absolutely no idea what Sociologists actually study and know * –particularly if the researcher presents as female. Such poor capacity to identify and source pertinent, quality knowledge means high-demand strategies like lockdown are very poorly executed.
In low-capacity Manitoba, for another example, in the first transmission wave through the ensuing summer, only one researcher, a Sociologist with an ecology background, attempted, repeatedly, to publicly flag the need for using the regional viral testing lab and enhancing its capacity to contribute to test and trace. That researcher’s efforts to stimulate organization of the region’s existing testing infrastructure was strenuously resisted and challenged by the male-regulated media network. As well, when that researcher interviewed regional health policy experts (a position requiring an MD by policy) and medical practitioners, she found that none had considered the option of organizing testing capacity throughout the first six months after the first March 12, 2020 lockdown–Though the province had its own viral testing lab. It simply was not in the medical profession’s interest to divert scarce resources to viral testing. The monopolization of policy authority by one profession is one manifestation of reduced regional capacity to allocate resources optimizing public efficiency. The ruling political party’s further decision to muzzle most of the province’s health policy analysts during the pandemic is another.
The researcher’s attempts to inquire with the testing facility were flatly refused, though like the hospitals it was being underutilized and demand was not an issue until September 2020. Only with the fall second-wave flare-up were test and tracing facilities’ capacities reluctantly, gradually expanded, but never to sufficient capacity to slow the cascade of transmission. In addition to the dearth of awareness of low-incapacitation pandemic strategies, the lack of receptiveness to the expertise offered reflects low regional capacity to distinguish and use research expertise. A contrast is in higher-capacity Minnesota, in which a senior public health official, a social scientist with health and epidemiology research expertise and graduate education through the Hubert Humphrey Public Policy Institute, was responsible for coordinating state testing capacity in the early months of 2020–though he also struggled to secure testing capacity against medical authorities and corporations defending the priority of their existing financial interests. Still, by January 2021, Minnesota’s public policy experts had made COVID-19 vaccination freely available to the public, while back in low-capacity Manitoba, no one had even thought to assign vaccine distribution responsibility to anyone until January 2021. The Manitoba government and political organizers leaned on simple, indefinite mass incapacitation. There are many other examples of sidelined and decommissioned regional capacity in low-capacity prairie Canada, including gagged public health officials with inequality-variables portfolios; a comparative COVID-19 economic policy researcher excluded from policy formation; a lack of policy tailoring the militaristic quarantine approach to isolate easily-geographically-isolatable rural patriarchal religious communities that had decided to forego any pandemic policies; and the de facto exclusion of 20-29 year olds from testing (where other jurisdictions had institutionalized ready testing access for that population of people with low likelihood of serious symptoms and high communicability risk: low job control, high service work, crowded housing, and high socialization requirements).
Given low capacity and undesirable pandemic results, there was only coordinated regional agitation for…more profound quarantine. Two important conditions show how off-track are responses to quarantine inefficiency that call for more quarantine: low-capacity regions’ insensitivity to local housing conditions, and counterproductive aping of the military logic in quarantine.
In the first case, homes are reconceived as prison cells in the defense-planning quarantine strategy. Yet in many parts of unequal North America, this strategy becomes counterproductive as the housing assumption in the quarantine model is violated. In low-capacity regions, too many people have unreliable and crowded housing arrangements that cancel their capacity to isolate in nuclear family cells. Whereas it doesn’t matter in military lockdown operations that only have the goal of incapacitating enemy combatants, housing insecurity can be a primarysource of pandemic quarantine inefficiency. Further, the population afflicted with housing security intersects with the population afflicted with low worker-control service sector work, magnifying the undercut to lockdown strategy’s foundational assumptions. Mass quarantine isn’t really the ultimate solution to pandemic. It’s not always about size, guys.
As quarantine is a pandemic intervention on the military operation model, it redistributes capacitation and incapacitation. It leaves men in military-like jobs fraternizing and roaming widely, as Essential Workers. So for example, policing-style jobs such as Conservation Officers fraternize and roam unnecessarily where their work could be accomplished from home. Well into mass quarantine, Manitoba Conservation Officers were mandated to travel back and forth between offices in high-transmission Steinbeck (a town characterized by thick patriarchal collectivism and a refusal to participate in pandemic policies) and their homes in Winnipeg, bringing COVID-19 back to the city with them. This in turn exposed female family members with work expertise that could better inform pandemic policy to SARS-COV-2 as well as increased child care demands. Low-capacity quarantine counterproductively apes the military-operations style. In quarantine pandemic strategy, the distribution of freedom, capacitation v. incapacitation, by gender (at least the gender of the work) is not incidental. It would take high state capacity and a knowledgeable citizenry to moderate the patriarchal bias of militaristic quarantine strategy. Those conditions do not pertain in low-capacity regions.
Mass quarantine has been a spotlight policy of the relatively-avuncular US Democrat Party, highly integrated and influential in worldwide liberal political party networks and policy formation. It bears remembering what interests, within an engineered-antidemocratic polity, the Democrat Party primarily represents: Wall Street and Silicon Valley. A low-capacity region cannot moderate the coordinated quarantine-and-automation campaign tied to pandemic crisis. This international campaign relies on fear of mortality and the crude, mass quarantine strategy to replace skilled, public, compensated and unionized social reproduction labour with automation. For example, politically-embedded international automation businesses added their economic weight to the effort to expand mass quarantine to replace reduced-school week, socially-distanced, small class education with 100% online training. This was sold, as commercial schemes are, with affect, by social media campaigns invoking frightened teachers. Particularly given the absence of infrastructure accommodating life–such as capital and legal controls, capital taxation, a comfortable UBI, integrity public housing, and state protections of service workers’ economic democracy rights, excessive and inappropriate automation riding the back of incapacitation threatens the human and economic development of dependent regions.
Jurisdictions that close schools and switch to heavily-touted 100% online training strategy do not reduce SARS-COV-2 transmission. They just push youth out to contribute to cross-age group transmission. The average age of COVID-19 mortality is around 84 years old, slightly older than average mortality pre-COVID-19. The capacity to take into account the age bias in COVID-19 mortality, as well as comorbidities associated with prolonged isolation, recommends augmenting our organizing repertoire beyond extended carceral biosecurity strategy.
Low-capacity regions would benefit from refraining from throwing in behind the most-promoted mass incapacitation policy, rather devoting scarce resources to identifying regional research expertise—particularly beyond the usual patriarchal authority networks facilitating extractivism—and convening that research expertise in epidemiological collectives designing and implementing tailored, targeted policy. If we could direct our organizing capacity, we could for one example separate people by age groups to improve pandemic outcomes. Incorporating recognition of the extreme upper-end age bias of COVID-19 mortality, modeling demonstrates an approach that balances the mortality-depressing objective of quarantine with the objective of reducing isolation damage. Researchers “find that separating age groups by reducing interactions between them protects the general population and reduces mortality rates” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs. Such destructive policy requires researcher attention to tactics of moderation: “While complete isolation from society may be the most protective scenario for the elderly population, it would have an emotional and possibly cognitive impact that might outweigh its benefit. The addition of new connections within the same age group to compensate for the lost connections outside the age group still has a strong beneficial influence and reduces the total death toll by about 62%.”
We have been thinking of and using quarantine as a low-capacity last resort. That is the very opposite of what the strategy is designed for. As with any military operation, quarantine is destructive and depleting; and it is particularly counterproductive where life-supporting infrastructure is absent, a common condition after a half century of neoliberalization. Moreover, quarantine is a dangerous pandemic strategy where we do not have the capacity to even detect its perverse effects, let alone anticipate or address them. In tributary hinterlands, it is normal for extractive, rentier, and patriarchal authorities to substitute for disconnected regional capacities and scientific research literacy. That social substitution makes these regions low-capacity.
On top of the tendency to dig unsatisfactory quarantine deeper, there is tremendous inclination to toss up our hands, celebrating the advent of SARS-COV-2 vaccination commerce. Yet if we research the scholarly analyses of the conditions contributing to viral virulence and transmission, we will see that epidemics and pandemics are, like other terrestrial crises, accelerating; and while celebration is nice if sad in isolation, we would be far smarter, collectively (including social epidemiology researchers, not just MDs), regionally planning how to better handle viral outbreaks in relation to local conditions.
Update, December 20, 2020
O, what have we here? The SARS-COV-2 virus mutated in the UK into B.1.1.7, and now everyone’s shutting down travel to and from the UK and Boris Johnson is personally chaining Londoners to their basement washing machines.
Trust me. I would never ask you to think about the verboten question: Should we lock up everyone indefinitely, so that 84-year-olds have the chance to die of regular flu rather than a coronavirus? No, that question is transcendentally immoral.
* Appendix: What is Sociology, and Why are Sociologists Well Outfitted to Contribute to Informed Policy Development in a Pandemic?
Typically people–including media– in low-capacity regions imagine/hope that Sociology is a homey blend of psychology, social work, finishing school, marketing, and HR (Human Resources), while Criminology is its brass-tacks masculine partner, engaged in the practical task of locking down criminals. There is a kind of Sociologist, the social-psychologist, that may approach this common-sense imaginary, and to be fair, they’re often employed in teaching mass introductory courses–courses designed to be non-threatening and pop culture-laden, so as to invite young people to pursue an undergraduate degree in the discipline, so that the department can show it is bringing in revenue.
As a Sociologist, I am a political economist and a theoretician. I research the history of elite political organization and financial policy; toxic waste politics, policy, and outcomes; comparative immigration politics, policy, and outcomes; alternative economic organizing; the development of epigenetics… that sort of thing.
When media calls me for my expertise, they ask me to pronounce as an authority on things like, “How should couples relate to each other during home lockdown?” and “Why should this immigrant group not express its history in Canadian public space?” These are normative “questions” (not really questions) by which state-corporate media regulate intimate relationships and flog the ideal of popular ignorance for the convenience of Settler Country human resources management. The journalist already has an answer, and wants the Sociologist to hit it, hopefully efficiently, so the journalist can attribute the spin to the Sociologist as a disinterested, knowledgeable observer. I am incentivized by my university to bloviate upon such regulatory topics. The upside is the kinds of things I am called as an authority on are homey, banal, and low-consequences. On the other hand, the more I pretend that these are my areas of expertise, the more the public has no idea what Sociologists do, and the more they imagine we do a homey blend of psychology, social work, finishing school, marketing, and HR.
I have a number of areas of deep and pertinent expertise that I will never be deferred to upon, or asked to relate to a public; but I am not much more of an authority on the order-reproducing corporate-state population-regulation comms than anyone on the street. As a Sociologist, I am actually much less inclined to corporate-state population regulation work than communications professionals, social workers, etc.; which is why my research expertise is commonly denied. Due to my aggregate education, experience, and skills, I can provide better guidance to them than many other people–if I could do what I do, which is research questions with significant, complex social causation. That’s not what media is about, and media deadlines prohibit research. As well, see the fact that there is already a correct answer, and being interviewed by media is simply an exercise in fishing where you are the fish. Basically, the only legitimate reasons why an academic would do media service is if she really does media-coalitional work for a patron, political party, or a country, which some do, or she is looking for a quid-pro-quo relationship with a journalist.
More typically, professional research Sociologists employed at a university are not doing anything like Introduction to Sociology, psychology, HR, or social work. What do they do? And why is Sociology particularly pertinent for navigating crises?
Sociology is a science that emerges from the Enlightenment, meaning: We specialize in researching and comparing in specified context different approaches to problem-solving issues related to social organization. This expertise comes in handy where we have a systemic, human-generated problem, such as climate crisis, racism, sexism, inequalities, and pandemics, etc.
As a science, we use and develop theory to communicate findings and sort out logic within an international and transhistorical scientific community. As a science, we proceed upon the assumption that more data points over time and space, and more minds in methodical inquiry and conversation produce better knowledge than a warlord fatcat club’s perspective, their political party’s strategy as comms, or even the more nuanced perspective of their court philosopher. While it has been dropped under pressure in certain times and places, our special responsibility is building knowledge that could be used to inform decisionmaking in a productive, high-integrity democracy. We don’t have a lot of patrons in our enterprise.
But I will say that tributary regions strongly underestimate the degree to which they could profitably use Sociological knowledge to avoid crisis-offloading and chart a less-dependent economic path. That would take a lot of insight and foresight that tends to be thin on the ground in tributary peripheries.
Though, Sociologists study philosophy, because we know what philosophers are good at: Meticulous and specified logic, given a set of assumptions and goals.
We study historians‘ work, because we know what they’re good at: Finding and reporting on original source data. Sociologists know the pace at which most social, political, and economic relations change–slowly–and we know that what historians have seen and reported is usually still the case.
We study geographers’ work, because how things work varies across different environments and social, political, and economic hierarchy spread across space.
We use legal scholarship investigating how lawyers help rulers take assets. We have studied what rulers say and do, and why, and we keep that in perspective when we’re assessing how to problem-solve.
Sociologists know what librarians are good for: Finding the higher-quality data and information, rather than spin and diversions, whether cheap or expensive.
Some Sociologists study the findings of epidemiologists, epigeneticists, and ecologists, in order to piece together what is causing health and ecological crises.
A Sociologist is prepared to pursue knowledge within the complexity of socially-intertwined relations–with multiple research methods, not only secondary research (see 4-8 above), but primary research as well, from quantitative statistical methods that allow us to identify trends based on past data, to qualitative methods that allow us to methodically interrogate people’s experiences and survey how they communicate given their context, to historical documents research that allows us to find out what people have done, felt, and said behind the scenes, behind the hype.
You might think to yourself: Well, anyone can do the above research. Mm. No, but also, they don’t, do they. There’s a reason for that, see point #1 above. Sociology keeps alive a stream of organicist science, where that is usually under attack as anti-capitalist, because the goal of full, Enlightenment science is democratic knowledge, not profit.
Not all Sociologists are trained like this. Most aren’t. But this is what Sociologists do, as distinct from social work, psychology, English Departments, and business, not to mention law, philosophy, management, and medicine.
Political partisans have been trying to claim that Sweden’s Public Health authority, fronted by Anders Tegnell, is unique in pursuing a “cruel” herd immunity goal. It is a bald lie. Herd immunity to COVID-19 is the end-game for all decisionmakers in public health, including in the authoritarian-coalition NPI (Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention, AKA mass, indefinite Isolation and Immobilization) response designed by Biosecurity experts (See the FOIA’d Red Dawn emails in the New York Times).
The difference from Sweden’s democratic-scientific approach to the pandemic is that the authoritarian coalition’s NPI Mass Isolation & Immobilization approach allows the security state to practice implementing population lockdown (Red Dawn emails discuss this goal, along with testing the internet.), while technocratic epidemiologists are thrilled to be using societies as laboratories (See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing.html). All the “early”/”late” implementation discourse in the media is scientistic nonsense typically used to sell Biosecurity indefinite mass house arrest, as opposed to a testing-forward, selective-isolation policy that no coalition has emerged to champion within the authoritarian societies.
But we must start focusing on the bait dangled by the authoritarian-coalition strategy. The avalanche of economic, social and health costs it unleashes cannot be worth the golden carrot swaying before the manhandled public: an immunization crafted over 18 months for one (1) version of coronavirus, where novel coronaviruses develop repeatedly. (A new avian flu, the Red Dawn biosecurity experts noted, had developed in China early this year even while COVID-19 was taking the spotlight.)
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 