Viral
In the new year, Yi-Ling and Sophie mull on things that go viral, both online and off.
YL: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Blah blah. So it goes. We know this. Our old institutions — governments, nation states, organized religions — have eroded and disintegrated. But as they fall apart, we have also realized that during this long, drawn-out process of disintegration, new phenomena — ideas, memes, conspiracy theories, viruses — have begun to sprout and proliferate from the debris. In the last century, things fell apart. In the new one, things go viral.
Now we drift in a swirling vortex of viral phenomena, both benign and malignant. #MeToo posts. Right-wing trolls. Greta Thunberg. Baby Shark. In 2019, grassroots protest movements moved through the world like contagion, spreading a spirit of popular resistance from Hong Kong to Paris to Spain to Chilé. In 2020, corona moved through our trains and airports and cities, spreading both solidarity and support but also xenophobia and fear, proliferating more quickly than the disease itself.
Virality is neither good nor bad. Every doctor will tell you that there are good viruses and bad ones. It is simply the ability of a thing to replicate itself, the way a biological virus propagates. But lately, it has been difficult to distinguish the good from the bad. In an age of seamless and constant exchange — of information, fluids, currencies, germs — how do we ensure that we are not simply passive incubators, spitting out uglier, more malicious, more superficial iterations of the things we absorb?
Last week, I found myself on a flight from Hong Kong to New York City. Like everybody else on the flight, I was wearing a mask. It was surreal, because only a month ago, on New Year’s Day, I was marching down the streets of Causeway Bay, alongside hundreds of thousands of others, also wearing a mask. But at the time, the masks were worn not in fear but in protest, not in response to the spread of a virus, but to the spread of a dream — for a free and democratic society.
Upon landing, I learned about the death of the whistle-blower doctor Li Wenliang, which sparked an outpouring of grief and anger on Chinese social media. Hundreds of thousands of posts appeared on Weibo, of the dead doctor’s masked face paired with the hashtag #WeDemandFreedomofSpeech — a phrase previously unthinkable on the Chinese internet. Freedom of expression, the people have come to realize the hard way, is not a lofty, high-minded luxury. It is a right to be demanded — the very thing that determines whether hundreds of people die from an outbreak, or hundreds of thousands. Virus and dream are inextricably bound. Which will be suppressed first? Which will spread faster?
SH:I have often been starting or ending the day by reading about coronavirus. Like many people around the world, I’m transfixed, from afar, by something that may or may not but is probably getting closer. There is something strange and not a little bit voyeuristic about experiencing a viral illness at incredible remove, with both fear and distance, through widely-shared stories on the internet, stories that may themselves be going viral.
The spread of illness and the spread of information online have become collapsed in our vocabulary. Of all the real life metaphors for internet phenomena, I had always thought this made most sense. “Going viral” on the internet is a supposedly desirable condition that often has devastating side effects: the total loss of control, misinformation, harassment, even physical danger. The wildfire spread of information has always seemed to me quite like a pernicious and unpredictable virus, a permanent condition of contemporary life, lived online.
But consuming made-to-go-viral content about coronavirus has made me cautious about the limits of the metaphor. Viral new stories are not the same as a virus; watching something happen is not the same as living through it; having the sense that doom is snowballing toward you is not the same as having a sickness arrive in your body or your home.
YL: On the fiction shelf — Severance by Ling Ma (crazy novel to read at the moment given that the story, set in New York City in 2011, is about an epidemic called Shen Fever that has befallen the globe,) On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi. On the nonfiction shelf: Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener, Wild Grass by Ian Johnson and Between Two Fires, by Joshua Yaffa. In the final stages of wrapping up two longform pieces, that somehow, in a twist of fate, are getting fact-checked at the same time. Keep your eyes peeled.
SH: I’ve been re-reading things this month: Ben Lerner’s 10:04, which I love as much as ever, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which somehow I had forgotten and which seems very alive to me now. I wrote a piece for The Nation about the challenges and potential of rewriting Ovid from a feminist point of view. For The New York Times, I wrote about the scientists who are trying to figure out how and why “The Scream” is fading.