COVID-19 AR

I’m imagining a dream I didn’t have: the novel coronavirus has enveloped me, and while it hasn’t made me sick yet, it has thoroughly infected my perception. The virus has hijacked every bit of sensation or information that passes through the bubble made of COVID-19 that surrounds me. That dog over there is or isn’t a carrier of the coronavirus; my most recent breath has or hasn’t welcomed the virus into my system; every number is an index of COVID-19 before it’s the number of apples in the bowl on my counter. I can still discern a world outside of COVID-19, but there’s a persistent virus-skinned overlay that I can’t disable. I’m not actually dreaming, so I don’t need to wake up to realize that life is now an Augmented Reality interface: COVID-19 AR.

COVID-19 AR isn’t unlike Google Lens or IKEA Place—apps that display information or reviews or furniture on top of a live feed from one’s phone camera. While phone-based AR provides the option of looking away or closing the app; COVID-19 AR’s operating system is thought itself and can’t be shut off, not even in sleep. The interface has an extraordinarily efficient capacity to reveal things to us that we already know. Or, more accurately, it superimposes what we already should have known over what we now know. The pandemic, apparently, has exposed the many faults in the foundation of Western, capitalist society. The crisis has exposed “global frailties and inequalities”; it has exposed “shameful treatment” of our elders; it has exposed the “holes in our social safety net.” COVID-19 AR gives us a representation of what was already there to begin with—the uneven distribution of resources, environmental collapse, systemic violence against marginalized peoples—draping an overlay of those very same things across our field of experience. Since the real and the virtual have now, for many of us, fully traded places, I suppose it makes sense that COVID-19 AR clarifies what was already clear.

The Exposure Engine that powers COVID-19 AR also both detects and amplifies cliché—an unprecedented technology that, in a perversely circular fashion, reveals just how unprecedented the effects of COVID-19 really are. “COVID-19 is an unprecedented crisis,” even though “it didn’t come out of the blue”; patients are presenting with “‘unprecedented’ blood clots,” even though, prior to the pandemic, 100,000–180,000 Americans and 10,000 Canadians were dying from embolisms every year; in Canada, the pandemic triggered an “unprecedented 500,000 jobless claims” in one week in March 2020, and the national government answered with a financial aid package of “unprecedented billions,” which topped the precedent of the unprecedented $114 billion bailout of Canadian banks after the 2008 financial crisis. But an important feature of COVID-19 AR is its History Browser, which without too much complicated navigation, shows that “COVID-19 is not unprecedented nor unpredictable.” Modern societies have weathered pandemics and economic collapses of similar or greater magnitudes, and COVID-19 AR allows quick, random access to precedent capitalist strategies that governments and institutions will employ to reboot a world that is as similar as possible to the disenfranchising, pipeline-bisected, trickle-up operating system that is currently experiencing a fatal error.

But there is a bug in COVID-19 AR, a glitch that is its greatest feature: in Simulation Mode, the platform models possibilities (however limited and incomplete) for care, for action, for the redistribution of capital, that are desperately needed. In surreal-time, I’m witnessing developments that were previously thinkable but seemingly impossible: inmates are being released from prisons in Canada and the United States, even if rates of release aren’t nearly dramatic enough to protect prisoners or guards from infection. The ACLU is working with Republicans to free inmates—what if the COVID-19 AR decarceration simulation is actually modelling a future that was only ever a dream? I’ve felt cynicism towards government aid packages that will probably do little more than bail out corporations, resuscitate the oil sector, and perpetuate the never-ending shell game of working-poor debt. But I’m watching in credulous disbelief as Spain is poised to implement Universal Basic Income as a “permanent instrument.” COVID-19 AR is performing some sort of real-time rendering of the naïvely-held possible impossibility of affordable rent in major urban centres as Airbnb-driven real estate speculation starts to crash, as tenant-organized rent strikes gather momentum, and as governments temporarily ban evictions. COVID-19 AR suggests that, in some jurisdictions, artists and freelancers should be protected from the precarities of the gig economy as in Germany where the government has allocated €50 billion to support its cultural sector.

Maybe none of this is really real. But it would be a mistake to believe that any of this isn’t unreal either—to bleakly assume that exploitation and decimation are the only predictable outcomes. I’m fumbling for a pause button or shutdown sequence in COVID-19 AR that I know doesn’t exist as I recall that Brian Massumi says that Gilles Deleuze says that the virtual is always real.