Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms populism Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

The reservoirs and amplifiers of SARS-CoV-2

I was struck by the phrase used in this warning from Sage about the necessity of vaccination in prison. They point to the risk that prisons become “reservoirs and amplifiers” of the virus as the virus continues to circulate within these institutions. If I understand correctly, the risk is that these conditions create selection pressures which will amplify the most virulent strains within circulation because they will be the most likely to passed on within the prison. Furthermore, there’s the possibility to generate new strains due to ‘recombination events’ which happen when multiple strains meet each other.

Understanding these reservoirs and amplifiers will play a crucial role in grasping post-pandemic inequality. There’s not an ‘off’ switch to a pandemic but rather a tendency for it to fade as a daily concern for ever larger swathes of the population, in a process of normalisation liable to be interrupted by resurgences which can easily be cast as coming from undesirable elements who are outside the mainstream of society. This is why the cultural politics of resurgent SARS-CoV-2 in a post-vaccination nation have the potential to be so poisonous, amplifying the most reactionary currents which already existed within those societies.

,