covid-19

Technocracy and pandemics

Technocracy and pandemics

From scholium

In her 2016 book Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, science journalist Sonia Shah writes a chapter on flaws in the WHO’s global system for disease surveillance. Since pandemics mean a halt to the economy and capital accumulation, we will likely see business pressure applied on governments for new solutions to contain the spread of pathogens. Those involving Healthcare IT and surveillance seem to require the lowest cost and least amount of systemic change, and therefore are possibly on the horizon. This could mean a drastic reduction in privacy and freedom.

A Prisoner’s Experience Behind Bars During COVID-19

We know that many countries around the world, such as Iran, France, and the UK, have begun releasing prisoners en masse. Considering the outbreak of COVID-19 in several US federal prisons, with the infection and death rate climbing daily, the US needs to start doing something to address these heinous conditions, and start releasing us immediately!

To the Rebels and the Dead of Modena Prison

Not only are the prisoners’ demands minimized, but their eminently political character is erased: what happened is not caused only by despair. No, the fact that the protests leaped from one prison to another makes it clear that only those whose freedom is taken away have yet managed a collective response to the restrictions imposed by the state for the coronavirus.

TOTW: Expertise

...the concept of expertise is one that anarchists have been wrestling with or felt the need to justify for a very long time. Even those who may hesitate at the power exercised by experts and the authorities they abet may find themselves looking to those same people for life-and-death knowledge or treatment in the current pandemic. Yet the seemingly non-critical view of expertise voice in the meme above is certainly not the only instance I’ve seen of anarchists embracing technocrats and other medical authorities wholeheartedly.

Let the Strikes Return, Let Squats Proliferate, Let the Looting Come

We can not return to normal, there will be no normal anymore. Power is preparing for what will come next. Let us do it: rent strikes, strikes in jobs and in schools, wildcat strike; no more parties, unions and rigid structures. And let’s take, let’s not wait, let’s suck up the empty properties that are the subject of capitalist speculation by real estate, banks and investment funds. We will build networks of solidarity and mutual support.

Five quick thoughts on the limits of Covid-19 mutual aid groups & how they might be overcome

Most of the ‘aid’ offered by Covid-19 mutual aid groups is not antagonistic to the logic of capital – it’s just shopping on behalf of other people. Indeed, whether such activity even deserves the name ‘mutual aid’ is, in my opinion, an open (if boring) question. After all: capital still has hold of what we need to survive, and we are still paying for it with the pittance they haven’t (yet) stolen from us, even if someone else hands over the money to the merchant.

200 People Take to the Streets for Unregistered Protest

Motto: Time does not stand still – Mindful protest in times of corona and state of emergency.

The protesters gathered individually and in groups of two, kept a distance of 2 meters apart and most of them wore mouth / nose protection. After 30 minutes, those assembled disbanded their protest. Prior to that, the police had asked them to end the protest.

Announcement re: the Montreal 2020 bookfair

We're inviting you to share imaginative ideas with us. How can we take or make, and then share, space to be together? Are there novel ways to dialogue about ideas, play, grieve, make art and music, offer care, show solidarity, dance, and so on, that remind ourselves we're still here, we're still strong--ways that might allow some of us to gather at a "safe" distance in person in Montreal and/or others to engage in highly participatory long-distance ways, including physically in their own locales at the same time?

A letter to friends of the desert

Once we are out of the “emergency” and out of our desert, for we must always consider dwelling within it as only transitory, we must not allow it to be only a parenthesis, full of suffering and death or even of discoveries and memorable moments, to be followed by a return to the normality of before. For it is precisely this normality that has brought us to the point where we are and which can no longer continue except by deepening the destruction. This normality also includes the normality of our earlier way of life, or rather, our ways of surviving and deluding ourselves. I see that many of us are desperately seeking to reaffirm our own normality. This is not good. In all friendship: it is not worth it.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - covid-19