Controlavirus: Clarification?
By Alexander Dunlap
With the spread of COVID-19 — and corresponding authoritarian (safety) measures — the term “controlavirus” has surfaced. #Controlavirus on Twitter will show you a page with varying opinions that range from protesting freedom of speech, a right to work, people calling the police on each other, mothers being arrested in playgrounds for violating social distancing, skate parks being filled with sand, cops arresting and beating black youth and women, and so on.
COVID-19 is real. While there is misinformation, statistical manipulation, missing health services and, generally speaking, a forfeiting of public health to pharmaceutical industries and their view of health, it does not change the fact that COVID-19 is real. The controlavirus, however, is equally real, and is a greater threat: either historically creating the conditions for COVID-19 or advancing the pretext for greater authoritarian policies and population control measures, which include corporate and elite interests and plundering of the public sector. While many suffer directly from the COVID-19, more will suffer indirectly from government policies and expressions of “disaster capitalism:” fast food chains flourish while small businesses close, rent is due when income is scare, panic and anxiety generate mental health issues and even suicide, and many countries — and/or their cities — are experiencing life under a police state flexing its muscles. Despite the real effects of COVID-19, the source of it — more than anything — is the result of a control virus. In fact, COVID-19 builds from the pre-existing controlavirus that has created not only negative direct health concerns but also indirect authoritarian measures.
What is the Controlavirus?
Control is the root of the COVID-19 crisis. This stretches back centuries, if not to the ethos of civilization itself. The philosophy of dominating and not living with — accepting you are a part of — nature is the root of the COVID-19 and exemplified by controlavirus. Genesis 1:28 is a foundational document of the controlavirus: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” This exemplifies an ideology of ecological separation and control. Human supremacy is a flagrant expression of the controlavirus.
Human supremacy and domination of nature is the root of civilized development, though it becomes more extreme each century. The instructions of Genesis 1:28 underline the civilized, capitalist, and industrial project. That project manifests in enclosing land, designating space, and performing zoning activities that deny people daily interactions, connections, and attachments to nonhuman natures.
The “civilizing process,” colonization, war, and the police are processes and apparatuses exerting control over human and nonhuman natures; they regiment landscapes, discipline bodies, and manage the subjectivities of people. The workhouse, school, police, prison, and hospital are institutions of domestication and social ordering, separating humans from nature and means of subsistence, herbalism, and the hermetic sciences; eliminating diversity; and establishing norms in the name of plurality, liberalism, safety, and health. Let colonial invasion, plague, and witch-hunts be reminders of the fear, insecurity, and control exerted through mass-killing and genocidal-ecocidal violence against the so-called “heretic,” or Other, practicing outside the imposed and prescribed conduct.
Control is exerted through city planning. Human and nonhuman resource extraction was a necessity for cities and, later, industrial development. Plague and disease ravaged emerging cities and necessitated energy intensive sanitation systems — the flush toilet — and a constraint reordering of space and sociality to perfect statist and market oriented strategies of control. While social upheaval and insurrection necessitated the redesigning of cities around military barracks and wide roads, they would only enable an urban density separated from, and necessitating the mining of minerals, forests and hydrocarbons — an environment suitable for COVID-19.
The factory and Taylorism sought to control the movements of the body. Within the planning of the city, people became dependent on factory work and, later, the office. Taylorism is the science of industrial productivity: it places people in confined and murderous working environments to extract increasing efficiency — and profits — from their bodies. The factory has now morphed and decentralized, outsourcing intensive industrial activities in the so-called “Global South” while energy intensive systems of monitoring consumption habits have been digitized with energy heavy cybernetic infrastructures based on computer algorithms that stretch to the scale of the city with “smart cities.” This type of lifestyle, however, does not seem smart nor ecologically friendly — especially considering the atrocious quantiles of mineral extraction and e-waste production — even if “quarantine” can delay the effects of COVID-19.
From Ecosystems to Genetic Manipulation: Colonization is Domination
The logic of the city and the factory are expressions of modern scientific marvels. Using the methodology of (scientific) separation to dissect problems, the same principles are expressed through divisions of labor in the factory and industrialism itself. This mechanizing principle extends to the internment camps of North America, South Africa, and Namibia, reaching industrial perfection in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. It was ordered perfection, even if distasteful, grotesque, and genocidal.
It’s no irony that these grotesque “camps” served for advancement in biotechnology, previously known as “eugenics.” Fascination with controlling humans extends to genetic material. The testing, measuring, and constructing of biological hierarchies of humans through the racist science of evolutionary biology, or the pseudo-science of Phrenology, never stopped. Proponents went silent, changed the name, and readjusted their science of perfecting control in the name of biotechnology: genetic cataloging, splicing, and engineering. This is done for the advancement of humanity and health, after all.
There is a socio-cultural fixation on and tension for total control. This tension is easily traced to ancient civilizations or states, and is present around every corner: in trees encased by concrete, lights to deter theft, building materials to prevent arson (of places that should not exist), and city layouts to prevent insurrection, and increasingly deter suicide. Michel Foucault outlined the ‘military dream of society’ working to perfect an ‘internal peace and order’ based on ‘the mechanism of the perfect army, of the disciplined mass, of the docile, useful troop, of the regiment in camp.’ We need to consider that this objective of a perfect, geometrical, mechanical, and now, cybernetic order is unhealthy and socio-ecologically destructive. Maybe this is a bit obvious, or masked by a bureaucracy and culture that forms a self-reinforcing socio-institutional feedback loop justifying its social organization, rules, and politico-economic activities.
This obsession with control, this flagrant existential insecurity of civilized or industrial humans, has been externalized onto the world to the point of planetary destruction. The controlavirus expresses itself, not just in COVID-19, but in every other systemic crisis related to technological and industrial capitalist forms of organization that manifest economic, social-cultural, ecological, and pandemic crises. There are no natural disasters; there are only social disasters and socio-ecological hubris, planned and learned ignorance. Crisis is the outcome of spreading the (colonial) ideology and relationship of the factory across the world.
Controlavirus
The controlavirus is the root of COVID-19. Slowing contagion is important, but are authoritarian measures really the answer? Why are there so many disbelievers? Media and social institutions in many countries have lost all credibility — for a variety of reasons — but health does not seem to be the concern taking center stage. Fast food prevails while extractive operations still operate; pharmaceutical companies are aligned to benefit, and even the victories, as in Spain’s “permanent basic income,” still fail to get to the root of the socio-ecological problem. The agents, companies, and governments most responsible will not be held accountable, unless people make sure they are. Social media is organized so that we eat each other before we change our own actions, let alone stop the engineers of socio-ecological destruction.
COVID-19 represents a global opportunity for disaster capitalism — using disaster to advance industries, profit, and solidify governmental control over populations. COVID-19 is deforestation, water pollution, resettlement into densely populated areas, starvation, and the socio-economic conditions that produce viruses and diseases — for which every capitalist profiteer and government is responsible. Now is the time to restructure the socio-cultural values of governments, their institutions, and their infrastructure and begin a transition towards sustainable degrowth societies organized to support and replenish ecosystems.
Alexander Dunlap is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo in Norway. Working across anthropology, geography, and political ecology, his work critically examines police-military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development, and extractive projects in both Latin America and Europe.
