an interview with the coronavirus

horsemouth saw a brief clip of it being interviewed on a moscow satirical tv show. what does the virus say? while horsemouth's russian is poor to nonexistent, this is what he thinks it is saying.

the virus is pleased to be on tour and said it had been in moscow for a while (this was back in february). previously it had been in china where it found the people very friendly (italy too). it is obviously delighted to have made it out of bats or pangolins into humanity (a sub-species of monkey who infest the planet to such an extent they are busy destroying it). but thank you humanity, you have enabled him to see the world).

still he’s delighted to have killed half a million of you and to have infected millions more. (sorry).

his future plans? the virus (in his new expanded habitat) may mutate to become less lethal and less infectious and travel with humanity to the stars as brothers, or he may mutate to become more lethal and more infectious, and accidentally kill us all (sorry). life is a journey and one should be open to new experiences, and, if worst comes to worst, he can always go back to the bat cave.

it gets up to sing a song, 'it ain’t over (til it’s over)'.


a frog in a well sees only part of the sky and from there it is tempting to assume that every cloud has a silver lining

yvette cooper sits on a committee and they worry (as politicians have done for the entire of horsemouth’s life) about the displacement of the low skilled from work by automation and how social cohesion will be maintained. and yet the jobs for the low skilled keep coming - in fact there are more and more of them and they pay less and less (hell they’re not even jobs any more, more bob-a-jobs and hookups).

and then the virus reveals them as being key workers all along.

the struggle of capitalism is to make the workers invisible. to tell you a story of magical economic laws and genus entrepreneurs. to make the work that goes into the product arriving on your doorstep invisible (even as you thank the person delivering it - they must be heroes, music brings us all so much closer (but not really you understand)).

after the virus came the rise of the robots (or at least automation says cooper).

the virus halts a face to face capitalism. we become digital homesteaders and all of a sudden we really are alienated consumers. (but are we really?) lots of people are still working in the physical deed/ meet economy - not least the people still manufacturing the goods we consume, growing the food we eat or shipping it to us. the people who would sell it to us face-to-face would work too - and soon that will be allowed again. but that whole sector will bounce lower. the giant rapid mass transit systems run empty (no we tell a lie -they are full at rush hour still). the day comes where whatever the actual safety of it they will be pronounced safe. will we ( virus or no virus) really go back to the daily commute?

at some point the virus hits the factories and the farms of the third world - where people live hand-to-mouth and cannot socially distance or lockdown without actually starving. chronic flare ups of the virus hit production (this meets a demand for reduction in production coming the other way from a lazy non-reproductive capital).

the change that technology could bring does not arrive when the technology is invented but when the conditions become right for it (usually it takes the arrival of that horseman of the apocalypse war). in this case pestilence takes the lead. but it is not just technology that changes. agamben is not wrong to warn us over the rise of the biopolitical but at the same time the ruling class - hollowed out to the point of imbecility by neo-liberalism and the idea that the market can fix everything - botch introducing monitoring apps and full track and trace. just as technology is much more about the fantasy of overcoming dependence on the workers than actually able to overcome capitalism’s dependence on workers.