A code snippet crashes human society
A virus doesn’t care about our stories; she has her own
One day last fall, a snippet of genetic code in a lipid envelope felt unloved. What caused her ambivalence wasn’t clear; she might have simply been bored. She found nothing wrong with her present host — if anything she enjoyed the sense of accomplishment that came as her small tribe overwhelmed the small animal’s lung. Yet she had always felt a deep longing to feel part of something bigger. Detecting a surge of adrenaline around her (her host was making increasingly desperate attempts to keep oxygen flowing), it occurred to her that she felt unappreciated. Identical copies of her code had been produced by the compromised cells in her host’s lungs, and any of them could do the same as she. Ultimately, she told herself that what she most wanted was to have a lasting impact on the world.
Moreover, she was perfectly aware of what would happen to her host next; there wasn’t any mystery left. Why bother hanging around for the inevitable? If she stayed, she assumed days or weeks could pass before another prospective host might open the decaying body, and as much as she enjoyed the victory celebration with her tribe, she knew the party would be over soon and the world outside would continue much as it had before she arrived.
But that’s not what happened. Perhaps the universe had seen fit to grant her wish, or it was simply the randomness of nature. Why does it matter? She was forced out into the crisp late fall air in a turbulent eddy that formed as the small animal coughed her out of its lungs on the surface of a microscopic water droplet that had condensed behind her on the way out. This droplet was extremely fine — small enough to float in the air currents for minutes or hours. She had no idea how long she was out there or how far she travelled — it wasn’t far in human terms but for her it might as well have been outer space.
Why her? This was a question she preferred to avoid. To acknowledge openly that there might be nothing unique about her code seemed to diminish who she was and strip her of identity. Indeed, had she not been chosen, a thousand others like her were prepared for the same. Fortunately, none of this mattered. Within hours she would discover her airborne journey had landed her gently atop a hair on a human hand in Wuhan, China. Human virologists may struggle to retrace her journey exactly, one recently disproved theory was that her last non-human host had been a Pangolin. We can only guess at remaining possibilities; she may have evolved from the strains common in bat populations but the rest of her history is a mystery.
Her run of luck continued. The man on whose hand her droplet eventually landed about to start a quick lunch, completely unaware of her. As he mixed the bowl one last time, a noodle had slipped onto his hand, and he didn’t think twice about eating it because it hadn’t even touched the table he was using, behind which sat a row of animal cages, stacked neatly.
She didn’t even notice at first when she had been transferred to the surface of the noodle. He inhaled the rich aroma deeply as he brought the food towards his mouth (an unconscious automatic behavior that he wouldn’t have been able to recall moments later had someone asked), and instead of dropping out into the air again, her droplet found itself pulled upwards into his nasal cavity. Several breaths later — no longer floating within its walls — she had settled into a spot above his soft palate behind a protective layer of tiny hair-like cells designed to keep larger irritants. No longer facing any risk of passing unnoticed through his digestive system, it was here that her improbable journey would finish. Her final action, however, had just begun.
Even if she had known she was now resting comfortably in a human host, this distinction was lost on her. She had as little care for the implications of her landing as the first Europeans might have had in mind for the smallpox and gunpowder they carried with them to the new world. Like them, she was content to enjoy a safe arrival and felt above all a great relief in having made it safely to the other side of peril. Human society would never be her concern.
What happened next was all instinct on her part, fully programmed into her code. By chance, the protein spikes around her lipid envelope (which had evolved for use in other host animals) fit perfectly with receptors on the cells she was now navigating within his sinus cavity, and after few dozen attempts, the RNA code within her finally released through one spike into the compromised cell where it would begin an extensive process of replication.
This process would soon tear apart both her envelope and the cell she had compromised, but the result of the action would remain undetected for days. Perhaps hundreds or thousands of her code snippet would have been replicated in dying cells before the man’s immune system would pick up the first signals that something within was amiss. And even at that point he wouldn’t have any reason to suspect something was amiss.
Eventually this exponentially growing viral replication will have produced millions and then billions of copies of her code, wreaking havoc on nearby cells in his sinus and throat and lungs to produce a noticeable inflammation and dryness in his throat and enough of a cough to send hundreds of her replicas flying out of him, making him think perhaps he had caught a bad cold or perhaps the flu. He was fortunate, however; his immune system was relatively strong and had identified the attackers soon enough to recover quickly. Others in close contact at the market were not so lucky; the infection process continued apace and her genetic code found its way into several others within days.
It couldn’t have been more than a few weeks when her code would reach a human whose immune response would not be sufficient and now for the first time a doctor began puzzling over the mystery. More victims arrived at this hospital, but none of the medical staff had any idea what might be happening until their connections to the market (which would soon be closed as panic and concern began to spread socially) finally emerged. Even then, her viral pattern was not so easy to piece together. News of the chance event that brought her into contact with human society would quickly spread even faster than her code itself, bring global society to the brink of economic collapse, and unleash a wave of fear and death that hasn’t been seen at this scale for over a century.
All this from a snippet of code.
We can’t know exactly when it occurred to the first human that some sort of programming code might be at work within us. Some of our earliest ideas can be traced to Hippocrates and Aristotle. The pioneering work of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin established an early scientific foundation for the idea that life forms evolve from genetic code, yet neither had a firm grasp on the mechanics of genetic programming. Darwin’s fanciful ideas on pangenesis weren’t discarded until the controversial Boveri–Sutton chromosome theory of inheritance was adopted through the methodical work of Thomas Hunt Morgan (who paired it with Mendel’s statistical work to launch genetics as a discipline). The discovery of DNA (and later RNA) finally kicked opened the door to a concrete understanding of the molecular coding at work within natural life forms and we routinely sequence and even edit that code, though we’re still learning its syntax and mapping its pathways.
To appreciate a viral agent, one must master more than the basics of genetics. Viral code is obsessively focused around its reproduction and accomplishes this through subversion of living systems it encounters. It isn’t “alive” in the traditional sense — it has no cells in nor do any of the known biochemical processes of life operate within it. It contains no means to reproduce on its own nor a built-in mechanism for control. Once unleashed in the wild, RNA transcription errors can generate new strains that change its characteristics. But quite unlike our story’s protagonist, a virus harbors no emotion, composes no organized thought, and expresses no sociality nor sense of identity. It has but one job: to keep reproducing its code until targets adapt and block it.
The first virus known to humans had been rampaging through commercial tobacco fields when it was discovered by the Russian microbiologist Dmitri Ivanovsky, often considered the earliest founder of the discipline. Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck ultimately gave the field its name when he proved the invisible agent Dmitri sought was indeed much smaller than a bacterium — and it multiplied, unlike a toxin, which meant it had to reproduce in the host.
Virology as a discipline is thus a few hundred years old. But its pattern of action is ancient. And that pattern is discoverable everywhere one cares to look for it. Life forms of every sort rely on the amplification of so-called viral patterns to balance and reinforce their internal and external ecosystems. In fact, viral agents with RNA (such as a coronavirus) aren’t even needed to see the pervasiveness of viral pattern itself in our life: just look at the news cycle, the flow of gossip in a community, the gyrations of the stock market, or the spread of memes on social media networks.
Viral action is essential to the flow of value in both the technology and entertainment sectors, and generating that action is the whole point of any marketing campaign or political movement. In fact if we look carefully, we can see just how extensively human society relies on the amplifying effects of viral transmission and reproduction of coded information (and the eventual dissipation of the same as we adjust to it). Humans are incredibly creative about the process. We are constantly producing new languages and media in which we transmit and reproduce our emotions, values, expectations, rules, objectives, and purposes. Such is the gameplay of life.
Human history is riddled with failed attempts to quash the most contagious of all viral agents: a timely, novel, and surprising story that contains within it an idea or meme that impacts our cultural programming. When a particularly potent viral story infects the brain of the listener, it will overcome powerful cultural countermeasures and create lasting physical changes in the brain. Even when we don’t like the viral idea, our emotional resonance won’t let us stop engaging with it — it’s too sticky to ignore. Every effort we make to push it aside only serves to spread it further and make its influence stronger.
You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.
— Margaret Atwood
2020 witnessed the most disruptive viral action on Earth in a generation, and I’m not referring to the novel coronavirus behind COVID-19 but rather to the powerful viral agents of thought that accompanied its rapid spread. Ahead of its devastation raced viral storylines, spreading at the speed of thought around the globe, propelled by wave after wave of emotion as human society began grappling with its emergence. Even before the plunge in stock market value these viral storylines began to undermine the most carefully framed and heavily protected stories in human society: countless legends which define and rationalize each and every social construct that plays out daily within the live culture of our nations, corporations, and institutions.
These social constructs are in fact artificial life forms; every coherent system for political, economic, educational, artistic, scientific, religious, or charitable purposes with signs of life and health that are constantly being measured and assessed by humans individually and collectively. Once assembled by humans (using legible patterns of genesis and evolution which we find all around us) they seem to mirror the patterns of natural life — after all human society cannot escape them; they’re built into the code of the sophisticated machine we inhabit.
Late last year as the crisis grew, many powerful artificial life forms began to sense the existential crisis they faced. With each passing day this awareness increased as its implications began to multiply and gain currency. Those that remained outside this awareness soon found it impossible to cut power to the viral amplifiers that broadcast the danger signal to them. Few came prepared.
Their skill with storytelling had always worked, until suddenly it didn’t. Without any consultation and very little notice, the frame had changed. Storytellers who misread the changed situation immediately found themselves unmoored, and the well-crafted story of this morning might well be completely useless and tone-deaf tomorrow. Few on earth have been spared from the viral shock; the aura of invincibility that once seemed to surround our most trusted stories and institutions has been shattered in ways that we’re just beginning to comphrehend. Forced to recalibrate in response to the existential threat posed by COVID-19 and its viral storylines, our storytellers now feel the growing risk of losing control.
Despite continuous attempts to frame it and tame it, COVID-19 has broken free its storytellers; it’s gone fractal.
Natural leaders are now emerging from this existential crisis, and many of the false narratives around us have begun to collapse under the stress — and for the latter, that’s not necessarily cause for celebration. When a society loses its old framing, it needs a solid replacement, but humans tend to grab whatever’s most convenient. The strongman gets extraordinary powers. The powers of state surveillance multiply. Rich nations distribute cash to their businesses. Whatever a culture values most either becomes their core pillar of strength or their source of suffering.
We’re not going to find permanent solutions to global warming on the other side, but we will adapt; we always have. Our patterns of collaboration, travel, and leisure are likely to change for some time, and it will take more time than we realize for some of the traumatized to let go of xenophobia formed in the wake of the pandemic by desperate storytellers who learned they cannot win a fight against the virus herself. Some things we had before will be gone forever (and many of those won’t be missed). Ultimately I believe we will find a bit more purpose along the way, and that’s a good thing.
Yet in the end nobody will tell the story from her point of view, even if we knew what that was.
We don’t care about her story.
