Bioinsecurity
Pop culture, mutual aid, and the social imaginary after the plague year
It’s been one year since two Utah Jazz players tested positive for COVID-19, leading the NBA to suspend their season, and the country to accept that the pandemic was real.
Since then, infection rates have risen and fallen in increasingly extreme oscillations, like a backwards roller coaster today ominously stabilized at the previous peak. The culture war that defined the early days of the lockdown has now exhausted in a pathetic truce, in which the bold condemnations of liberals like Andrew Cuomo have ceded to agreement that we must rapidly reopen in March in order to avoid financial ruin. Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell were on the court for the 2021 all-star game. Half a million lives may have been cut down, but we cannot stop the spring.
It’s tempting to say nothing has changed. With trillions of dollars centralizing in big capital, the same economic order has only fortified, squeezing the expanding underclasses deeper into precarious hell. That pressure, however, has undoubtedly changed us. This is an attempt to anaylze the nature of those changes through mainstream comedy, autonomist writing, and scenes from the New York streets over the past year.
Sick Jokes
Probably the first major piece of media to address life under COVID was the South Park Pandemic Special. Since 2016, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone reevaluated their previous niche as trollish right-libertarians for the Trump era, and this episode reflected their reluctance to be socially relevant ever since. The special’s half-hearted gross-out humor, lazy treatment of police murders (the towns’ slapstick cops gun down the school’s only black student, Token), and running joke of Randy Marsh constantly apologizing for “the pandemic special,” referring both to a discount he was running on marijuana and the episode itself, demonstrated how intimidated they were by the unfolding pandemic. They knew their formulaic irreverence and kneejerk cynicism wasn’t going to be helpful.
It took until October for the first two pandemic features to be released. The first was Host, a slasher/thriller that takes place entirely in a Zoom hangout. I haven’t seen the film, because on our Halloween episode Jamie and Leslie Lee III made it sound too scary. The other was Borat II.
Like the first Borat, the narrative is a mix of scripted scenes and vicious pranks on well-chosen victims, mostly conservatives. The film will likely be remembered, then, as a campaign ad against Donald Trump—one that, given Biden’s horrifically slim margin of victory, may have been effective. Audiences also may remember the film’s twist ending—that the true purpose of Borat’s trip was not just to win-over Trump, but to destroy America with the Kazakh-designed Coronavirus of which Borat was patient zero.
In a less memorable twist, Borat confronts his antisemitism when a prank on a synagogue goes awry and he realizes that Jews are really ordinary people who have suffered unfairly. He brings this revelation home by replacing Kazakhstan’s annual “running of the Jew” with a “running of the Americans”—in which MAGA-hat wearing, gun toting-mascots massacre an effigy of Dr. Fauci. That Borat merely switched out one bigotry for another strays from Sascha Baron Cohen’s former principle of equal-opportunity offensiveness, because the Trump movement and the shadowy ex-Soviets manipulating it are the true real villains of the film. This conclusion is emblematic of how anxiety of the first months of the pandemic was popularly processed through didactic culture war.
Shot in early 2020, part of the plot of Borat II was retooled in real time around the unfolding pandemic, offering surreal shots of deserted streets and the paranoia of life locked-down. A more thoughtful portrayal of the sudden shift last March came in the season finale of HBO’s documentary/comedy series How to with John Wilson: “How to cook the perfect risotto.” The first half of the episode shows Wilson attempting to make the rice-dish for his elderly landlord who lives downstairs, does his laundry, and makes him meals. Failing to do so (perhaps because he’s always at work, camera in-hand), he goes on an isolated skiing trip, returning to a bizarre scenes of a new New York: a shirtless man social distancing in a line for ice cream wearing a flimsy blue mask, dozens of shopping carts filled to the brim packing every aisle of a grocery store, a tissue-box taped to a taxi door. One scene captures a typical conversation around this time that could have been a scene in the South Park Pandemic Special: a couple chatting with Wilson on FaceTime about the safety of ordering take-out. It’s a debate between people who know nothing besides what little they’ve gleaned from combining the news and personal assumptions, ending with a shrug and honest “Nobody knows.”
Wilson worries his landlord could contract the virus, but is unsure how to help. “Maybe you can still get close without causing any harm. But it’s hard to know how close you can get…” He realizes that his neurosis had been holding him back from what he really meant to do: not to make the “perfect” dish but simply repay her kindness. He makes the dish the best he can and leaves it by her door, just as she did for him. The episode closes with Wilson urging us all to spend the time to reassess who we are, what we care about, and how we are going to take care of each other in a rapidly changing world, all over footage of a beautiful Queens sunset.
No New York
Wilson’s depiction of the grounding and healthy contemplation provided by the lockdown was one part of the story. Another was the constant sirens. Thousands dying agonizing deaths alone visible only as data on line charts. Make-shift morgues and plans for mass graves in public parks. Massive job loss, food banks closing, and rent still due. Even with broad agreement that it was everyone’s responsibility to “flatten the curve” by staying inside, the quick shift to isolation caused poverty, misery, and fear.
Among these anxieties was that everything that we were already losing in New York would be swept away by the pandemic: the charming small businesses, DIY projects, protest movements, and general public sociality. Parks and schools would be closed permanently. Our only contact with the outside world would be deliveries from Amazon drones. Some even wondered if the danger of the virus itself was exaggerated in an elaborate “great reset” to finally achieve techno-capitalist dystopia.
These concerns manifested anti-lockdown protests championed by the petit-bourgeois and rightwing, but also among leftish anti-authoritarians like the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his newly translated collection of essays over the past year, Where are we now? The first essay, written last February, argued that COVID-19 is likely a “normal flu” being transformed into a terroristic threat to expand the powers of the security state. An essay a month later admitted the epidemic was real, but maintained measures like mandatory mask wearing and isolating dying patients are demeaning society to a mechanism for “mere survival.” In July, Agamben defended conspiracy theorists and implied the World Health Organization and Bill Gates’ previous pandemic predictions were evidence of some sort of elaborate plot, perhaps to abolish “all contact.”
While Agamben is correct to point-out the “biosecurity” apparatus poses a threat of expanded social control by the ruling class (what doesn’t?), his disinterest to examine particularities have made his critique utterly useless. The managers of society are not interested in creating a new fully automized, atomized world, but in returning to “normal.” Restaurants, bars, and parks never closed in the United States. Reopening schools remains a top priority. Going to movies, concerts, and sporting events, peacefully protesting, dating and fucking are all good for social and economic stability.
As Bini Adamczak of the group Zero Covid pointed out to me in our interview this week on the Antifada, the strategy of reducing cases to zero has led to relative normality in South Korea, Vietnam New Zealand, and Australia. While China’s intense contact-tracing combined with state-of-the-art surveillance culture offers a stark vision of the future, it’s unclear how these other countries are any more dystopian this year than last, or what tyranny we’ve been spared by the softer “flatten the curve” or eugenocidal “herd immunity” methods of Europe and the US.
Lockdowns that only restrict leisure activities without reducing “essential work” to an absolute minimum can only temporarily reduce infection rates, allowing the economy to chug slowly along on rails to which hundreds of thousands of elderly and poor are tied. Once again the shibboleth of “personal responsibility” emerges to vilify Trump supporters, spring breakers, Orthodox Jews, or whoever else can be scapegoated for instances of protocol flaunting, while the virus spreads mostly between workers, then to their homes and families.
In the United States, a sort of revolt against the neoliberal measures arrived initially in the form of mutual aid and rent strikes, then the uprising. The first specifically targeted the economic devastation of the lockdown through the conversion of closed kitchens and social centers to hubs to distribute food, supplies, and the newfound free-time of those laid-off. The second was inspired by the murder of George Floyd for trying to pass a bad check while infected with COVID. The attempt to protect a shop-owner’s $20 turned into wide-scale looting, arson, and prison revolts. The main target was the carceral state, as if to say the crimes of poverty should not be a capital offense, either through state activity or passivity.
Although studies following those mass protests showed outdoor gatherings rarely spread the virus, no one knew it at the time. Suddenly “protesting” became “essential,” alongside mutual aid. It was self activity, then, not Bill Gates or Dr. Fauci, that determined the pace of reopening as cases dropped in New York.
New New York
Far from the petit-bourgeois conspiracy theorizing of the anti-lockdown movement, the uprising and mutual aid projects demonstrated the desire to neither blindly accept the “new rules” of biosecurity nor return to “normal.” Summertime became a glorious festival of picnics, packed beaches, rooftop parties, dinners in community gardens, park shows, public drinking, massive bike protests, and illegal outdoor raves. When the rates rose again in late October, the fun largely ended on its own volition.
The happy hermits and unhappily funemployed will now return to a different place than it was a year ago, with “free fridges” in every neighborhood, daily distributions of food and supplies organized by activists, and new solidarity networks.
Many leftists, including revolutionaries with whom I mostly agree, are quick to point out that these initiatives and brief rioting are not enough to really challenge power. Last month I went on Pod Damn America to discuss these critiques in the context of Woodbine’s mutual aid project (see John Raubach’s documentary on the subject). In the conversation we discuss two recent critiques from a communist perspective: Mutual Aid: A Factor in Liberalism by Gus Breslauer for Regeneration Mag, and How Does One Shoot a Frozen Clock? by Luhuna Carvalho for Ill Will Editions.
Breslauer writes that those who see mutual aid as anarchist practice in-itself misunderstand the history of the term, and today’s projects lack the revolutionary “fighting organization” dimension of the groups they often idolize like Black Panthers and Young Lords. Carvalho is more optimistic about mutual aid if it’s part of a larger offensive strategy of building occupations, struggles against the policing, with a goal of pushing crisis mentality towards rejection of normality:
In other words: how can the initiatives we organize become indistinguishable in their constructive and offensive aims? Rather than thinking of care and mutual aid as actions whose value resides in their noble ideals, in how they allegedly portray a fairer world to come, or in how they might constitute a tiny and brief respite from the hostility of capitalist social relations, we should understand them as weapons, as a method of interruption and suspension.
The tension between basic do-goodery and the frustration at being unable to confront the conditions that makes charity necessary, or the confusion of the two, is a theme in Megan May Daalder’s short Teenage Mutiny UWS. The film is about this summer’s struggle to defend the tenants of the Lucerne, an Upper West Side luxury hotel turned into a homeless shelter during the pandemic, told through the TikToks of a local teen named @trustfundkiddy. As she scours her neighborhood for liberal cringe for her followers, she discovers a solidarity “free store” of clothing and food outside the hotel, and learns of the campaigns both for and against its new residents. To her, the opponents of the shelter are the same John Lennon-idolizing NIMBYs for whom the area is known, proving the “dark side” of rich liberals, while the direct distribution of goods and support impresses her as breaking from their preferred “contactless charity.”
After attending a couple demonstrations and witnessing the success of the campaign to (temporarily) allow the residents to stay at the Lucerne, she replaces her former alien TikTok filter with a homemade Patti Hearst mask and calls on her teen followers to emancipate themselves from their parents. The film leaves the nature of this emancipation unexplained. Will it be the formation of an urban guerrilla movement? Turning their parents’ luxury apartments into squats? Or was it all just posturing for clicks?
Was it all a dream?
Organizing in a way that really revolutionarily challenges power is the theme of Adam Curtis’ Cant Get You Out of My Head, released last month. In the six-part BBC series, Curtis tells dozens of disparate stories of celebrities, political figures, scientists, etc., to build a narrative of how a neoliberal coalition of finance capital and politicians (both traditional and populist), are ushering in a society managed by algorithms, overseen by technocrats, and monitored and repressed by an expanding carceral apparatus. Everyone knows that corruption, exploitation, and organized crime is at the heart of this order, Curtis argues, and we can even say so and propose a better future, so long as we pose no real challenge to its stability.
But the series ends on an optimistic note: this future will not happen. It is built on the wrong assumption that people are irrational, selfish, and stupid, and thus can and should be controlled by mass media, algorithms, and empty populist promises. In reality, no one really believes in the neoliberal order or its loyal-oppositional strongmen, and people all around the world are already fighting back in many different ways, rediscovering their collective agency as they do.
It’s reasonable to believe Curtis is being over optimistic. The Arab Spring went from a democracy movement to one of the most horrific civil wars in the history of the world. The riots of 2019-2020 for the most part fizzled with little trace of new political programs or platforms. Among the heartwarming stories of mutual aid in New York there was a spike of violence, including dozens of horrific instances of hate crimes against homeless people, Jews, and people of Asian descent. These stories tell us that challenging power, the NYPD or the State, for instance, is a huge mistake. We should instead try to win influence through peaceful means, or ignore power altogether, worrying just about ourselves and those immediately around us.
While mutual aid projects and sporadic uprisings do not indicate the emergence of a revolutionary anti-capitalist project recognizably like those of the past, their communitarian spirit challenges this idea that catastrophe and crisis inevitably results in racial civil war and interpersonal violence. The laborious and somewhat dangerous work offers a practical method of solidarity between neighbors, as opposed to an ideological anti-racism dead-ended in uneventful protests and Instagram infographics. The participants are bound together by a desire to immediately self-organize to share goods and services for social use instead of commerce, and to experiment in expanding the capacity to share at larger scales—not a love of Democratic politicians or a hatred of Trump. This sharing is devoid of the “means-testing” and negative solidaristic privilege politics common to neoliberalism—as a general principle, no one deserves anything more than anyone else.
A pile of boots and bananas on the sidewalk is of course not enough, but neither is reheated Bolshevism. The explosion of mutual aid projects was not the product of a misguided revolutionary strategy so much as an indication of what challenges and sacrifices tens of thousands of people are willing to take in this moment of political and economic crisis. Mask-sewing workshops, food distros, language exchanges, free-fridges, yes. Weeklong-riots, autonomous zones, and months-long demonstrations against police murders, yes. Occupying vacant buildings to house the homeless, eviction defenses, and eviction court blockades, yes. A militant organization on the scale of a vanguard party? Over the past year the situation arose, and no one jumped.