Chernobyl of Coronavirus.
The British government recommends self isolation. This is very important to ensure the safety of our elderly and most vulnerable. But let’s appreciate this irony: isolation itself historically one of the biggest killers for the elderly and vulnerable.
Brits already spend 90 percent of their time indoors. In our cities around 35 percent of adults aged 45 and older can be categorised as lonely. The risk of premature death is 50 percent lower for adults who had a greater connection with others, compared with those who were socially isolated.
With this in mind it’s almost certain that the fabric of our cities and the way they design out social spaces kills more people than the coronavirus outbreak ever will.
Isolation and fear of ‘the other’ is a greater problem than the virus. But Corona actively threatens the fabric of globalised capital and transforms it’s strength into it’s weakness — the instant delivery of goods and services. China is the world’s largest trading nation in goods and the courier carries the virus.
China also seemingly single-handedly pulled the world out of the global recession post 2008. It’s extreme building operations between 2011 and 2013 meant that China consumed 50 percent more cement than the United States had in the entire twentieth century. But today, new apartment sales in china dropped a staggering 90% from the same period a year ago, this may be a key trigger for a global crash, unless mitigated.
This relationship to the global economic apparatus is enough to justify it’s 1.1bn mentions on the global news, more than double that of any other outbreak in history. This immediate media sprint is aiming to limit damage. I am a skeptic that this is to limit more deaths of people. Climate change is predicted to be the biggest killer of the next century, with 50% of all carbon emissions coming from the built environment, cement production is one of the biggest CO2 emitters. But this cement consumption was seen positively by the global financial markets. Locally in the uk the figures of homeless deaths in the UK alone almost doubled last year. Instead this is a sprint to quarantine the death of global capital markets and wealth transfer.
This leads to a poetic, concise and clear rationale that chimes with global neoliberalism — we must separate ourselves from each other to save one another, Individualise to collectivise. And do so patriotically.
The internet was designed to resist a nuclear disaster ensuring that work in the military could go on. Today the UK being is a service economy with it’s largest output being financial services. The average brit now spends over 8 hours a day consuming media, and it is possible to do most work that constituted GDP in the home, however, because of our colonial legacy we still rely on the goods and services produced by others. Things owed to us as debt because of the western leaning Keynesian architecture of the IMF, established just after world war two. Only 39% of people on earth have access to the internet, so it makes it easy for us to carry on. But without the operative distribution of products from the likes of china. It brings us to the question our speculative financial and media services.
Coronavirus, like Chernobyl before it can be seen as a Hyperobject. It transcends spatiotemporal specificity because of its relations. These relations are so massively distributed in both time and space that the totality of it can never be understood through it’s local manifestation alone. This makes engaging with it with traditional architecture or mechanisms difficult or even pointless.
Because of this: hyperobjects are beginning to have a dialogue. People naively suggest that radiation can kill coronavirus, discuss how Tom Hanks gets coronavirus, what coronavirus means for Tesla. A media narrative in a world of it’s own — hyperobjects overrule ironic distance because ‘they adhere to any other object they touch‘ meaning the irony of and disparity of the time and meaning are be eliminated, The person experiencing this fear because they feel this as part of a total media object.
But chillingly, everyone has coronavirus already. And the germ was transferred when we read the first news article about it on the internet. Our central nervous system is extended by the internet, we cant disconnect from it. As computers can get viruses, so now can our minds through the distribution of digital media. The sensationalism related to coronavirus far outweighs other epidemics, like loneliness.
Thankfully, the British city is somewhat eerily designed to enable individualisation already. Self isolation won’t be too difficult.
Hello Skype. Again.
