The Metamorphosis of COVID-19: State, Society, Law, Analytics

Abstract

Almost from the start of global awareness of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a general sense that it would be a transforming event. For some those transformations would be temporary, for others far more profound and long lasting. This essay examines the idea of transformation. And the emergence of its trajectories at the start of the pandemic. Focusing on the first half of 2020, the essay considers this idea of metamorphosis in four critical aspects of global and collective societal organization. That idea of metamorphosis is not based on the notion that COVID-19 has transformed the societal order into something else—rather the thesis of this essay is that COVID-19 has stripped away pre-pandemic pretensions and has made it possible for societal order to transform into itself—its more accurate representation of itself. Section 2 first considers COVID-19 as the virus of societal acceleration. That is of the way that COVID-19 accelerates trajectories already present and latent in collective bodies (and as well in the bodies of individuals within their own family collectives). Section 3 then considers the transformation of origin stories. The transformation of the story of the origins of COVID-19 align with the transformations of the relations between China and the US and between China and the international community. And these are not without consequence. Origins point to culpability, and the culpable might be held accountable. Section 4 then examines the moral transformation accelerated by pandemic. The focus here is on sacrifice—the sacrifice of the aged by the healthy, the sacrifice of the poor by those with greater means, and the sacrifice of women’s autonomy. Section 5 then considers the transformation of law. The science of law has been overcome by that of the science of data, of psychology, and of prediction. And with that transformation, an even greater transformation of the autonomy of the individual before the state. Where individuals were once assumed to be autonomous actors capable of adhering and culpable for lapses in conforming behavior to commands, now they are understood as the aggregation of the sum of their actions, actions which can be predicted and nudged through rewards and punishment. Entities, in turn, build policy by incarnating the aggregated mass of human behaviors within a community. Law is transformed into simulation even as the individual is transfigured as the incarnation of the sum of the data she generates. The essay ends with a brief consideration in Section 6, Metamorphoses, of the consequences of these transformations. It suggests the contours of the character of societal organizations that COVID-19 has revealed.

Keywords: COVID-19, pandemic, data governance, AI, poverty, international relations

JEL Classification: F01, H12, I12, I14, I18, K32, K33, M14, Z18