Tanya has been sick the last few days, laid low with a virus: not that virus, I hasten to add. It’s a nasty bug, whatever it is, but hopefully she will be out about again soon.
At least hanging around home has given me chance to start to get a work routine together, to work on a couple of pieces I’ve been asked to write for various publications. (Most of them are long deadlines, but I’ll link when they’re available.)
This morning, I saw a piece by Guy Rundle about vaccine passports and it made me think about some of the things I have been talking about here, so I thought I’d say something about Rundle’s (excellent) discussion in light of our lived experience here in Nice.
Two things really stand out for me about living in a place where lockdowns no longer exist. Okay, three things.
First, I am constantly struck by the high level of compliance with mask-wearing in those places—like shops and trams—where it is mandated. Yes, there are fines, and yes, as I said the other day, those fines are enforced, but the level of compliance genuinely seems to be based on a willingness to do the right thing.
Honestly, you barely ever see someone unmasked in these areas (the odd dicknose notwithstanding).
Second, the number of places that are required to ask for the pass sanitaire but don’t actually ask for a pass sanitaire, seems to me, is growing.
I thought this might be an indoor/outdoor thing, but as the weather cools and we tend to sit inside more, it hasn’t made any difference. I’d say less than half the places we go to check the pass.
Less than half.
Which suggests, doesn’t it, that at some point, all the demands for compliance fall in a heap once some social judgement is made about its effectiveness.
We should take this as a positive.
The third thing is that being able to access test results, vaccination records, or the pass sanitaire itself on your phone, in a single app, is incredibly convenient, and especially if we are going to go down the route of global passes, I don’t see how we do it any other way.
This is all relevant to Rundle’s discussion, in which he raises all the likely concerns with a global system of surveillance and compliance implied in the sort of regime that, to some extent, is already operating here in France.
He says that, if “COVID-19 occurred in a different historical-technological overlap—after our ability to detect and distinguish between viruses, but before the current global cyber-system was in place—it seems highly doubtful that any comprehensive system could be applied…”
But the whole point is that it isn’t happening in a different time, it is happening now, and it is inevitably subsumed in the technologies that currently exist, and I guess what I want to say is that this isn’t necessarily bad.
I don’t want to underplay the dangers, but I don’t want to throttle the positive possibilities by pretending it is all awful.
Anyway, Rundle sums up the issue this way:
Applied on a massive level, via apps, [vax passports] use the overarching, globally integrated communications-surveillance system, not only enclosing urban territories for whole populations or physical confinement for recalcitrants but criss-crossing a whole world of offices, shops and transport hubs. Earlier ensembles of such were limited by the resistance of materiality to surveillance. Now, universal licensing and certification could easily be achieved. …
Now we are acquiring a hybrid state-market system that will govern the movement of people with a mixture of legal, technical and property enforcement. The treatment of this in the public sphere is yet another demonstration of how inadequate public reflection is on the questions we face moving forward.
I agree with that last sentence in particular, and so let’s try and not and force this into the usual good versus evil framework. There is a lot of grey.
From what I can see and understand in France, although there is definitely a serious opposition to vax and to the pass sanitaire, such opposition is a minority view, and a response based on social solidarity is much more the norm.
The same in Australia is true, where long lockdowns have been surprisingly well observed and where vaccination rates—once the federal government got its act together—are astronomical, putting a lie to all the claims of vaccine hesitancy.
We should lean into this; not define it as aberrant.
We do much harm to social solidarity when we dismiss it, as many have, as a form of mindless conformity, of Stockholm Syndrome, or as evidence of the internal cop that all Australians allegedly harbour and cultivate.
I think we have too easily fallen into the frame of “surveillance capitalism” as the chief way of understanding everything from vax passports to Facebook, just as we have too easily fallen into one that views any social compliance as evidence of loving Big Brother.
As I said in another context:
Not all observation can be defined as surveillance, not if we want to see ourselves.
We do collective living (society) as much harm in presuming all observation is surveillance as we do in presuming that all individual behaviour is somehow contained within the individual.
Equality underpins all this. If people lack material equality, they cannot be social in a way that is healthy for society.
We must be able to see each other and care for each other on a planetary scale.
Rundle is aware of all this, and his main take is that there is no single solution to the problem. We need to control the spread of the disease and that means we need to know who is vaccinated and who has been where at different times.
But we need to recognise, he says, that “the more a state enforces a total program—lockdowns or vaccination—as the sole rational response…the more it will summon a synthesised resistance that seeks and finds its own rationale.”
His point being, I think, that the rationale people will find will be based in illiberalism, in anti-science, and almost inevitably, in violence.
If I could put forward, however tentatively, an underlying principle for all this, I would say that whatever solutions we go with must be as simple and as straightforward as possible. They must be easily accessible and affordable.
As I’ve said before, the biggest single thing politicians could do to improve the lives of most citizens would be to adopt policies that minimise the amount of bureaucracy in our lives, and that should go double to do with all things related to managing Covid.
And as international borders open, this must be applied at a global scale.
Great piece Tim. The positives you highlight in the Australian experience are real and we should recognise them more often.
Excellent piece Tim, thanks. I can really relate this to what seems to be happening in Melbourne which looks to me like a lot of people have decided to ignore the health orders when these interfere with their daily lives too much. This is a view gained from walking around the area
I’m living in - St Kilda East/Balaclava - which has slowly rising case numbers but no exposure sites. Lots of people aren’t wearing masks and there’s a lot of “dick noses”. Many large groups of people ( > 6) in the parks socialising and not wearing masks.