Seeing the Coronavirus pandemic response as an exercise of Biopower
Unique health identifiers predate the coronavirus
Fourteen years ago I and my team specified and architected a system of personal and practitioner unique health identifiers (IHI/HPI) that now serves as the basis for the australian government’s life time shared electronic health record — MyHealth Record.
More that ten years of delay between design and deployment as a result of the legal changes required to remove privacy hurdles and in-fact made this an opt-out scheme up until 1/31/2019. New citizens will infact be automatically enrolled from birth and may delete it if they choose. [1]
Core to the original ‘official’ Council of Australian Governments (COAG) business case for this $200M+ system is infact what we are facing today with the Coronavirus: identifying, locating and quarantining of individuals; identification, locating and mobilising of health care professionals and medicines. This MyHealthRecord identification system is in fact not an IT system per se, it is actually a kind of medical technique that operates at the population level, using the science of heath informatics.
This business case was all before SARS or Coronavirus emerged. For such viruses to cross the interspecies barrier is highly unusual, and Australia had not experienced a pandemic before SARS except in 1919 with Spanish influenza which killed 15,000 people, so the ‘unofficial’ reason for the business case is in fact along the lines of scaring the bejeezus out of COAG to get a unique network wide human identifier in place that had failed to get clarity or funding for decades before.
I think that if you could talk to a person from the 19th century and say in the 21st century people will have a unique serial number, a barcode attached to them for their lifetime like a pocket watch has a unique serial number they may be horrified. Yet, due to the power of data storage technologies, here we are.
Thanks to the magic of jet powered flight allowing fast continental travel for hosts, a new interspecies pandemic has infected peoples around the world, so far a total 6000 humans, with a ~3% mortality rate. SARS mortality rate was ~10%. The COAG business case ironically became fully realised after the fact.
To Quarantine or not to Quarantine?
And the australian government response is clear. Quarantining. Citizens who were in Wuhan are being evacuated to an offshore island facility that is also used for detaining refugees. Australia has a strict biohazard policy that pertains to animals and food like fruit and veg, seeds, and of course drugs. Now the people have become the biohazard.
Quarantining, or involuntary incarceration, has been happening for millennia, just like the biblical leper colony, as infact the leader of Christmas Island has compared the government’s response to. Something we don’t understand how to cure we’ll get all those people in one spot and isolate them away, same theory as putting the ‘insane’ in psych wards made notorious by the fictional Gotham Arkham Asylum.
Now, on the face of it, it may seem noble that the government is doing this. Taking the citizens out of harms way from the Chinese mainland and isolating them on Christmas Island. Protecting those who are not sick from the potentially contagious.
We think we are in charge of our lives so long as we do not break the law, but another way to look at this coronavirus response is as a population level exercise of lawful authority which can identify and manage citizens lives for them.
In one of his latest videos, the Washington State based Cody X (Wranglerstar.com ‘Modern Homesteading’) gave his advice on how to stay clear of the coronavirus. And his advice on hospitals is clear, stay away from them like the plague, he’d rather die at home in peace and comfort than die in a cold austere hospital where no one knows him and there is a concentration of sick people.
Or, in other words, retain his dignity and liberty.
Yet, these Australians have voluntarily declared their presence to department of foreign affairs and trade (DFAT), most likely on the basis that the 19 million people in the metro and urban areas in Wuhan have been locked down and the food is running out. A tradeoff of dignity and liberty for life and food.
A governmental respond to the pandemic
At a population level, techniques of authority and control (power-relations) that apply to groups of people instead of the individual is a concept called Biopower:
“Configurations of power-relations that concerns themselves not with the exercising of the sovereign right to put subjects to death or demand the sacrifice of their lives in war but, rather, with exercising the power to make human beings live…suggesting that the imperative to manage populations typically involves of leads to a desire to ‘purify’ them” [2]
“Sovereignty took life and let live, and now we have the [19th C] emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and let die” [3]
This is exactly the power that the Australian and other governments are now exercising, power over life, using unique digital identifiers, quarantining and removal of liberty without trial to ‘purify’ them. To judge them hale or sick, and on that basis to allow or deny their freedom.
Obviously these individuals will receive medical treatment. But that is at the local level between the medical practitioner and them, from the governments global level viewpoint they are an undifferentiated group that is a threat.
Perhaps unlike in 1919, the infected and contagious in 2020 are a threat to government because without a population, there is no need for a government. To be a government, people must be there and they must be taxed. Without tax there can be no power.
This is the simple logic which gives a purely governmental perspective on the Coronavirus pandemic.
And while we and every medical practitioner of course wish for everyone to be safe and healthy, the government needs to ‘make you live’ so they have a population to govern, people to discipline, and most importantly, someone to tax.
Tax, the ultimate ‘technology’ enabling the exercise of power-relations over populations.
Footnote
[1] Privacy provisions in place publicly state that the individual is in control of their records and can delete at anytime whereas infact the departmental data archive policy is to never delete anything.
[2] Proveti, John (ed.) (2006) ’A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy’, pp-67,68; Yale Uni Press, Connecticut, USA.
[3] Foucault, Michel (2004) ‘Society Must Be Defended’, p247; Penguin, London, England.
