Welcome to the All-Digital Economy

. . . and how's that working out for you?

The United States, along with many other industrialized nations, is currently engaged in a large-scale experiment that is in some ways the realization of the fondest dreams of a small but influential segment of the population.  For some time now, many investors, as well as leaders of the dominant high-tech companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc.—have strived to move us toward an ideal future in which all human interaction and economic activity would take place by means of digital platforms—owned and operated by them, of course.  This ideal world would consist of two classes:  the small symbolic-manipulator elites of owners, designers, and engineers who create and operate these platforms and profit mightily therefrom; and the masses of consumers whose only useful function is to use what the platforms provide. 

Well, the shelter-in-place orders that affect about half the U. S. population and have shuttered all non-essential businesses have violently catapulted us into this ideal future in a matter of a couple of weeks.  And so far, the results are not good.

Yes, a few lines of business have benefited:  food-delivery services, the online videoconferencing system Zoom, and those who provide binge-watched TV series.  But we have also seen the largest number of applications for unemployment benefits in history (over 3 million last week), a stock market slide resembling an avalanche, and a level of economic uncertainty that has no parallel in living memory. 

I have the privilege of knowing one of the few people in the U. S. whose weekly routine has been almost completely untouched by these events.  He is not a resident of a desert island, nor a fantastically wealthy hermit living in an isolated compound with years worth of supplies.  It's just that for years now, he has been following the shelter-in-place rules by choice.  This relative of mine acquired enough funds to retire about twenty years ago, and chooses to live by himself and spend most of his waking hours online in chatrooms, watching YouTube programs, and viewing the occasional sports show on TV.  He ventures outside once a week or so for grocery shopping, but other than the occasional medical problem, he has no other human contact, and likes it that way.  The only inconvenience he has experienced so far from the coronavirus restrictions is that he had to go to four grocery stores last week to find bread—the first three were sold out.  But other than that, his lifestyle is largely undisturbed.

A nation can afford only so many people like my relative.  It's a free country, so far, and so if a person chooses to cut himself off from society like that, he is allowed to do so.  But we are currently experiencing what happens when he is joined by dozens of millions more forced to live that way.  Yes, we're glad there are such things as Zoom, Netflix, YouTube, and for that matter, cellphones, electric utilities, and water supplies.  But we are also finding out by direct experience that a vast part of our economy consists of embodied people going places and being together to do useful and entertaining things.  And when you cut that part out, everybody suffers in one way or another—the subsistence-wage person who loses the low-wage service job at a restaurant or movie theater, to the wealthiest investor who has seen his net worth decline by a third recently. 

Underlying the prejudice in favor of digital everything, and the corresponding disdain for people and industries that make things rather than bitstreams, is a kind of Gnostic dualism.  The Gnostics were sects popular in the early years of the Christian era.  One prominent branch of Gnosticism believed that the universe was divided into a good spiritual part and a bad material part.  Because the physical human body was material, they disdained it and believed that the real person was a good spirit who just happened to be imprisoned in a decaying material body.  The goal of life was to free yourself from the body and all its trappings, and rejoin the other good spirits after death.  Or something like that.

Well, we are finding out what happens when we all become temporary Gnostics, and eschew as much human contact with each other and with our physical workplaces as we can.  The distant goal of having everybody exist mainly online as an anticipation of the day hoped for by transhumanists (a popular movement in Silicon Valley) when we can all free ourselves from our mortal biological "meat cages" and live forever as software, has just jumped into our laps without being invited. 

The fact is that human beings are creatures that don't just inhabit bodies:  we are bodies, but we are also more than our bodies.  We are also immaterial minds, but a mind without a body is incomplete, as is a body without a mind.  Any rational political economy will acknowledge this fact, and will plan for a future that includes bodies as well as minds—full human beings interacting in accordance with human nature, which—despite the last few hundred years of innovations in philosophy, science, and culture—has not changed. 

We as a nation will get through the coronavirus pandemic somehow, though not without serious losses that could have been mitigated with more foresight.  But the experiment we are now undergoing of trying to live all-digital lives holds lessons for us that we can all profit from, and I don't mean just dollars and cents. 

Here's an idea:  if your life has been disrupted by the pandemic, start writing a list of things you miss from back before the pandemic began.  Ask yourself why these things were important.  And when things get back to whatever the new normal will be, don't lose the list.  Ask yourself, and ask your leaders, what things we have chased after too hard, and what things we have neglected.  And then let's try to apply the lessons that this experiment is teaching us, before we forget about the whole thing and go back to the mistakes we were making before.

Sources:  The 3 million unemployment compensation applications recorded for the week of Mar. 22-28, 2020 were reported in numerous sources such as The Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/26/us-unemployment-rate-coronavirus-business.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Gnosticism. 

Conditions On the Front: The Clinical Lab Test for the COVID-19 Virus

Rodney Rohde is the head of the Clinical Laboratory Sciences department at Texas State University here in San Marcos.  His department is where people go to learn how to run the horrendously complicated tests that clinical labs do, such as the CDC 2019-novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) real-time RT-PCR diagnostic panel.  That's the official name for the CDC's test for the coronavirus.  I wouldn't know even that unless Rodney had directed me to the CDC website, where you can download the entire 48-page instruction sheet for using the test.

This is no dip-the-stick-and-look-at-the-color test.  First you have to get the reagents, which were in short supply, and according to some reports, some early sets of test kits were defective.  (Some day, when everything goes back to the new normal, whatever that is, somebody will dig around and find out exactly what went wrong.  But not right now.)  Assuming you've got a good set of reagents, and a clean-room-quality lab that has been disinfected from any kind of biological stuff that could contaminate the phenomenally sensitive test, and a 96-well cold plate at -20 C, and an Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast Dx Real-Time PCR System with SDS 1.4 software, and "molecular-grade water," whatever that is, and a bunch of gloves, gowns, pipette tips, centrifuges, and a lot of other expensive and delicate equipment, you can start doing the test—that is, if you know what you're doing, which means you have to have passed courses in Prof. Rohde's department or equivalent.  There are not that many of such trained people around.

A lot of these reagents have to be kept at -20 C or colder because the heart of the operation, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) that doubles the number of virus-derived DNA molecules for every heating-cooling cycle, is temperature-sensitive. 

Imagine following an instruction sheet for assembling an IKEA table, directions for installing new software on your computer, and filling out your own long-form tax return all at once, while balancing a spoon on the end of your nose.  That's easy compared to running this test.  Of the 48 pages, 23 are the actual instructions of how to run the test, down to which button to press and where not to put the labels on the test vials.  Each sample produces some lines on a logarithmic graph that rise with each cycle of the doubling reaction.  A positive result is when two of the lines cross a threshold after 45 cycles.  Did I mention that each heating-cooling cycle takes several minutes and has to be controlled in temperature extremely closely, or else the whole thing screws up and you have to start over?  Once you've loaded the samples into the machine after doing a bunch of fiddly aliquot combining and dilutions and agitations, the machine runs for an hour and twenty minutes, and if you've done everything right, you get valid results.  But if one of the quality-control checks indicates contamination or some other problem, the whole set of tests has to be thrown out and you start over.

It takes a very particular type of person to do this fantastically complex yet repetitive stuff correctly day after day, week after week.  My friend Rodney is one such person, and we who are anxiously awaiting the next phase of this crisis should pause to thank every clinical lab worker who is doing this kind of job.  They are probably not pausing from work right now for anything except to eat or sleep every so often.  The amazing thing is not that the CDC sent out some defective kits early on, but that the whole complicated rigmarole ever works at all.  But it does, and many lives depend on how well, and how fast, and how many tests are done right in the coming days and weeks.

As others have said, the U. S. lost precious time in early February when the first COVID-19 cases showed up here.  The winner in this regard is South Korea, as The New Atlantis editor Ari Schulman points out in an editorial posted at that journal's website.  I can endorse his opinion, because what convinced me that the U. S. was basically flying blind in this crisis was a chart I found a week or so ago that described the number of COVID-19 tests administered per million population as of March 11.  The leader was South Korea, with I think several hundred per million.  The U. S. was about the lowest on the list, with only 23 per million population tested by then.  That meant we had no idea who had the disease, comparatively speaking.

Schulman says that the South Koreans never had to shut down their country, because they did three things early enough:  (1) They performed massive testing of both ill people and well people who thought they might have been exposed; (2) officials performed rigorous contact tracing to find the sources of the infection and tested them too; (3) infected persons were rigorously isolated until they recovered.  South Korea is now on the downhill side of their new-infection curve.  They continue to be highly vigilant, but life was never shut down there like it is being shut down here, and it looks like they won't have to do that at all.

We do, because, well, never mind why.  Recriminations are pointless.  Schulman's main point is that we need a definite criterion from our national leaders as to how we will know when we can ease up on the national shutdown.  Is it that new COVID-19 cases are decreasing?  That essentially no new cases are showing up?  Or what?  He's concerned that if the shutdown goes on indefinitely, a backlash will happen that could be worse than doing nothing.

In the meantime, you now have a wide choice of online church services to attend.  Prayer has never been more popular online. Some people are saying that this whole thing is going to be what unites us as a country again.  God has a way of doing good things with bad situations, and that would be a welcome outcome.  But first we have to get through it, and here's hoping and praying that those who are performing the critical testing can do their jobs rapidly and accurately, and that we use the test results to end the epidemic sooner rather than later.

Sources:  The official instruction sheet for the CDC test can be downloaded at https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/index.html.  Ari Schulman's editorial can be viewed at https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/whats-the-plan.  South Korea's downward new-case curve can be viewed at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/.  And I thank Rodney Rohde for replying to my query in the midst of his hurricane of a life right now.