Pandemic Time: II

Concluding Chapter 1 of The Clockless Clock

This is a rough draft of the second half of Chapter 1 of my book project, The Clockless Clock. You can read the first half here. Obviously, since it is based on live events, the final version of this chapter that appears in the book will be tense-shifted and hindsight-adjusted.

The Virus Quadrille

If the advent of the pandemic has been marked by a short period of exponential time, and the emergence of a remarkable web of time machines (see Part I), its departure will be marked by a longer period of oscillatory disengagement from the virus. Together they form a two-act Pandemic Time narrative arc that Tomas Pueyo evocatively labeled the hammer and the dance. 

The hammer is the first act, marked by aggressive social distancing measures across large geographies, leading up to a first peak of cases and fatalities. The dance is the second act, which has already commenced in parts of Asia. If Italy served as the lead time machine for the first act, Singapore is serving as the lead time machine for the second act: a period marked by repeated loosening and tightening of mitigation measures.

Time in the second act is marked neither by the steady ticking of ordinary clocks, nor by the accelerating ticking of the exponential case-count clock that marks the first act. Instead it is marked by the tempo of the dance with the virus, reminiscent of the Lobster Quadrille in Alice in Wonderland. 

'—you advance twice—'

'Each with a lobster as a partner!' cried the Gryphon.

'Of course,' the Mock Turtle said: 'advance twice, set to partners—'

'—change lobsters, and retire in same order,' continued the Gryphon.

'Then, you know,' the Mock Turtle went on, 'you throw the—'

'The lobsters!' shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air.

'—as far out to sea as you can—'

'Swim after them!' screamed the Gryphon.

The dance, which I’ve labeled the Virus Quadrille, is designed to gradually drive R0 below 1 and cast the virus into the ocean of endemic microbial hostility all around us, while ramping up surveillance capabilities to govern the endemic state. The dance is likely how most hotspots will exit Pandemic Time. We will trade an acute stressor, lasting a few weeks to months, for a lower-grade chronic stressor that might last as long as several years, depending on progress made in finding treatments and vaccines.

Like the explosive exponential entrance into Pandemic Time, the exit pathway, via the Virus Quadrille will neither be normal, nor indefinitely sustainable. 

The landscape of the reopened world we will dance back into, as we exit Pandemic Time, will be a permanently altered one.

We will have left a world governed by Chronos, the Greek god of linear, global, objective time measured by clocks, and arrived into a world governed by Kairos, the Greek god of nonlinear, local, subjective time, measured by the ebb and flow of local patterns of risk and opportunity. The Virus Quadrille is not just the concluding act of Pandemic Time, but the opening act of an entire extended future. 

The world we are headed towards is one that demands many dances with the many large-scale forces being unleashed by the Anthropcene. The Virus Quadrille is merely the first of many dances that the a world ruled by Kairos will require us to dance.

Kairos Rising

Chronos was the primary Greek god of time, ancestor of the modern figure of Father Time, or Death, in the West, lord of clocks, corpses, and the twentieth century. Father Time, notably, carries a scythe, with which he harvests souls when their time comes. 

Kairos on the other hand, is usually associated with the fullness of life, and a Carpe Diem! spirit. 

Kairos is often represented carrying a pair of scales, and was regarded by the Greeks as the personification of particular critical moments in time marked by risk and opportunity hanging in the balance. Kairos is the god of winning and losing, of pivotal moments seized or not seized, of decision cycles cohering or collapsing, of agile adaptation. He personifies the kind of time evoked by one of Shakespeare’s most famous verses (Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 2):

There is a tide in the affairs of men, 
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. 
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
is bound in shallows and in miseries. 
On such a full sea are we now afloat. 
And we must take the current when it serves, 
or lose our ventures.

Kairos, as embodied by tides, is a rhythm in patterns of risk and opportunity. The ebb and flow of tides ordinarily drives a very localized and predictable pattern of risk and opportunity, but it is also capable of manifesting, on occasion, powerful and anomalous global risks and opportunities, in the form of tsunamis or storm surges. 

Tides represent the sum of diverse forces — the gravitational tug of the sun and the moon, local weather patterns, and planetary tectonic activity — combining through the medium of the ocean lapping at a particular shore, to imbue the local sense of time with a very specific meaning. Unlike the rhythms of global, objective time, whether marked by clocks or variations in the brightness of Betelgeuse, tidal rhythms mark out a time that is local, subjective, and about you and your choices.

Ordinarily those choices are about when to go surfing or fishing. But sometimes they are about running from tsunamis.

In April, a very specific tsunami loomed for mayors and governors around the world: a tidal wave of cases overwhelming ERs. A tidal wave that would create specific hard choices for specific individuals as it arrived at specific shores. A tidal wave that would translate a global news event into a local life event. 

Every mayor is faced with a hard choice as pandemic arrives at the shores of their city: clamp down at just the right moment, and prepare to dance the Virus Quadrille gracefully out of the crisis, or risk one or more large fatality spikes in a desperate attempt to either hold on to an old normalcy too long, or to return to it too soon, and too perfectly. 

It is perhaps the latter temptation that presents the greatest risk, because arguably, a return to an old normal is simply not possible. Past the Virus Quadrille, and past the inevitable long period of reconstruction to follow, lies a future that is not like the past. Though cathedrals to Chronos will still exist — Easter, the Olympics, football season — every part of the world will be entering, each at its own pace, a new epoch ruled by Kairos. 

The only questions are how willingly they do so, and how large of a final harvest of souls they will offer up to Chronos as an exit tax, as they pass from his century-long realm. 

Aion’s Doorway

Willingly or unwillingly, and whatever their success or failure at navigating the opening challenge of the age of Kairos, every part of the world will eventually emerge, stumbling and blinking, into a radically transformed landscape.

Perhaps it will be a cyberpunk landscape of city-states governed by mayors who earned the favor of Kairos through Pandemic Time. Or perhaps a deglobalizing world full of empires warring with each other, and striking back at pesky regionalists. Or perhaps it will be something else entirely, that no futurist has yet imagined. The only way to find out what lies at the other end of the liminal passage is to go through it. 

A third Greek personification of time, Aion, often represented by an ouroboros (a snake eating its own tail) or by a two-faced figure with a young man on one side and an old one on the other, personifies this liminal aspect of Pandemic Time as a passage between major historical epochs. Aion rules over time outside of time, time in escrow, even as Chronos and Kairos struggle for ascendancy. The weeks and months spent in Pandemic Time will be weeks and months spent outside of time itself, in Aion’s Doorway.

In the here-and-now, for me, as I write this in Los Angeles with the case count at over 10,000 (up from 7000 a week ago when I wrote the first draft of this chapter), Aion’s doorway looks like a passage that extends from February 2020, to perhaps August 2021, the threshold of the flu season after next. By which time hopefully, a vaccine will be ready.

But on a larger temporal canvas, Pandemic Time marks the waning of a cycle that began waxing approximately a century ago at another of Aion’s doorways: the Spanish Flu. 

Just over a century ago, as World War I and the Spanish Flu raged, Chronos waxed, and Kairos waned. Today, as Covid19 rages, Kairos waxes, and Chronos wanes. Between these two doorways lies the familiar world of industrial modernity, the source of the normal some hope to return to, and others have already written off as an irrecoverable dream.

The liminal passage at the start of this century-long cycle was perhaps most carefully observed by Virginia Woolf in a remarkable 1924 essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, in which she famously noted: “On or about December 1910, human character changed.” The essay, which laid down the artistic principles underlying stream of consciousness fiction, the literary genre she helped pioneer, was above all, a declaration that the nature of time itself had changed, and with it, human nature. 

The new reality principle governing the human condition was not an empire on which the sun never set, but a device that never stopped ticking. The Victorian human, ruled by human monarchs, had given way to the modern human, ruled by the emissary of Chronos, the clock.

Woolf, born in 1882, wrote her essay at the age of 42, in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Flu and World War I. Electricity, automobiles, telephones, and airplanes were as new then as iPhones and videoconferencing are today. But it was the mechanical clock, above all, then at the peak of its evolution, that looms large in Woolf’s imagination. In her first novel, Mrs. Dalloway, for example, the narrative features a recurring motif of the striking of Big Ben interrupting the streams of consciousness of the various characters. 

Clocks of course, had been ubiquitous for decades at that point, and wrist-watches had become popular during World War I. Greenwich Mean Time, introduced at the International Meridian Conference in 1884, was within living memory for Woolf, much as the IBM PC is for us today. The remarkable wave of new technology unleashed by the second industrial revolution had created radical new patterns of connectivity characterized by deep, clock-based synchronization. Through the rest of her literary career, Woolf continued to grapple with the growing ascendance of Chronos, which she and her Modernist contemporaries experienced as an increasingly intolerable siege of subjectivity.

At our end of the century-long era of Chronos ascendant, Pandemic Time can be understood as a liminal passage between the end of the industrial era and the beginning of the digital era. It is a transition that began early 80s with the introduction of the personal computer, and the introduction of the Network Time Protocol (NTP, which governs time on the internet) in 1985. It accelerated sharply with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, which catalyzed a change in human nature comparable to the one observed by Woolf in 1910, and has arrived at its final stage with the changes being wrought by Covid-19. 

Our remarkable wave of new technology has also created radical new patterns of connectivity, but unlike those introduced in the run-up to the Spanish Flu, they are characterized by deep de-synchronization. Where Woolf and her contemporaries lived in a world getting on the clock, we are living in one getting off the clock. Where watches were appearing on wrists in Woolf’s time, they are disappearing from wrists in ours.

At a prosaic level, the before/after changes being established via the shock of Pandemic Time are already obvious. The most iconic feature of industrial life — 9-5 schedules for workers engaged in specialized production activity at a location designated a “workplace” and kids sent away to daycare centers designated “schools”— has been temporarily torn apart. It has been replaced, almost wholesale, by a condition of digitally mediated remote work and home-based schooling, for an astonishingly large fraction of humanity.

Many in that fraction, I suspect, having discovered the affordances of a desynchronized new world, will not be going back to the clockwork grind of offices and schools. The will seek instead to remain off the clock for good, as permanent migrants to the realm of Kairos.

The experience of consumption has been transformed as well, as we switch en masse to online shopping over offline, take-out over dine-in, and home entertainment over movie theaters and theme parks.

The era of factory and school schedules, and consumer culture built around retail shopping, is drawing to a close. The era of essential service workers resisting automation is also drawing to a close as the phrase. The next pandemic — and there will be a next pandemic — will likely see essential robots outnumbering essential humans in what are sometimes referred to as “dull, dirty, and dangerous” jobs. 

Those jobs, like the atomic-precision clocks that drive them, will increasingly be for machines.

Pandemic Time heralds, in some ways, a return to pre-industrial patterns of life, when the home was a robust locus of domestic activities, child-rearing, schooling, and collocated production and consumption. But in other ways, we are in uncharted waters. Workers returning home does not equal economic production returning to a domestic scale and generalist, localized principles of organization. Children learning at home does not necessarily mean schooling returning to the domestic sphere, transformed wholesale into home-schooling or unschooling as some hope. More people indulging in stress-relieving baking experiments does not mean a sustained turn away from a century-old infrastructure of consumerism, convenience, and economic specialization.

It is the presence of digital media and automation in the calculus that makes this  a liminal passage into a fundamentally new human condition rather than a backsliding into a repackaged old one. Grim though the metaphor might be, Pandemic Time represents the dessert course for software eating the world.

Dessert for Software

Beyond video conferencing and Instacart deliveries, at the leading edge of technologies making their mainstream debut in Pandemic Time, there is already a sudden uptick of interest in virtual reality.

For me personally, a highlight of Pandemic Time has been the acquisition of an Oculus Quest, perhaps the iPhone of VR devices. From the confines of enforced domesticity, I am finding, I can hitch a virtual ride on the New Horizons spacecraft all the way to Pluto, or to a game world set in the 1920s. My low-resolution adventures in VR are already altering my experience of time, and my expectations of the future, in significant ways.

Virtual Reality’s less escapist cousin, augmented reality (AR) is waiting in the wings, poised to drive even more radical transformations. The idea of “Green Zones” — provably virus-free zones, policed digitally with apps, AI-based facial recognition, quick-turnaround Covid19 antibody tests, and thermometers — is already undergoing rapid development and refinement. For the next pandemic, you might be able to go about your business in public places with AR goggles that reveal the infection state of people near you.

The resolution of social distancing governance will go from city-scale to sidewalk-scale.

Inevitably, the adjective smart will attach itself to a technology-fueled version of social distancing the next time this happens. The Virus Quadrille, instead of being a dance orchestrated at the scale of a city, will be one orchestrated at the scale of a sidewalk.

And for those wary of Big Brother, technologists are already dreaming of a Little Brother version. A world of digitally managed peer-to-peer certificates of freedom from infection, serving as the instruments of a decentralized, libertarian approach to social distancing. We may have finally discovered an actual use for blockchain technology: constructing a global participatory panopticon with which to police the global microbial boundary.

Even with technology we already possess, social distancing, as a flexible, permanently installed collective global habit, for a world with a growing number of heightened risks, is well within reach. It will likely emerge as a permanent feature of the transformed human condition at the other end of the liminal passage of Pandemic Time. It is a condition that is already being constructed, with wartime urgency. 

Love it or hate it, the world you will dance the Virus Quadrille into, 6 to 18 months from now, will not be the world you left behind in February, 2020.

When Betelgeuse Blinked

In an earlier part of Julius Caesar, a play pregnant with temporal symbolism (and drilled into my head by the sort of Industrial schooling that may be a thing of the past), Caesar’s wife Calpurnia remarks upon a comet in the sky to her as-yet-unassasinated husband:

When beggars die there are no comets seen. 
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

Caesar’s comet, as it happens, was not a Shakespearean invention. C/-43 K1, as it is now known by astronomers, actually appeared in 44 BC, and was likely one of the brightest comets in recorded history. It was regarded by the Romans as a sign of the deification of Julius Caesar. 

In our own time, even as Covid19 began its rampage (making little distinction between beggars and princes), the dimming of Betelgeuse attracted little attention outside of scientific circles.

In antiquity, it would have been taken as a cosmic sign of historic events about to unfold. As above, so below, believed the hermetic philosophers of antiquity. We moderns are perhaps too sophisticated for our own good. We generally lack the appreciation for the power of the vast, wild forces of nature that astrology, for all its codified crackpottery, provides, and the contemplation of deep time — time on geological rather than human scales — that it encourages.

That is perhaps, in some ways, a pity. Perhaps world leaders might have taken news of a new disease brewing in China more seriously had they been in the habit of regarding rare cosmic events as foreshadowings of rare historic events on earth.

But perhaps we can recover a version of the temporal sensibilities of the ancients in our time, armed with a participatory microbial panopticon that defends us against at least one kind of existential risk that, at the moment, seems beyond our ability to contain.

As it turned out, Betelgeuse, which lies about 700 light years away, did not explode in 1320. Whether or not it has exploded in the centuries since, we will have to wait to find out. As best as we can tell right now, the unusual dimming observed on earth in 2020 was caused by dust clouds. One day, perhaps next year, perhaps a hundred million years in the future, Betelgeuse will explode for real, whether or not we are around to watch.

But not today.

One day, perhaps next year, perhaps a few thousand years in the future, an apocalyptic threat will loom here on earth that we will not be able to survive. Perhaps we will have already left for the stars, or perhaps we will simply blink out of existence, as yet another civilizational victim of the Great Filter, a cosmic statistic.

But not today.

Today, we continue dancing our way through the liminal passage of Pandemic Time, waiting to exit the other side of Aion’s doorway into a transformed new world.

Whether you navigate by Easter, the Olympics, the football season, the Whig narrative of endless progress, the reactionary narrative of rediscovered historical greatness, or the Accelerationist narrative of embracing unbridled change in the hope that it embraces you back, you are not in charge. 

For now virus is in charge, inviting us to make it past our local surge and dance the Virus Quadrille for a while, pay our exit taxes to Chronos, and earn our visas to a new era ruled by Kairos. Even as we retreat to the most intense period of domesticity most of us will likely ever experience, SARS-CoV2 is taking us on a wild, traumatizing ride, one that will dump us with scarred, partially rewilded frontier psyches, into a new aeon. 

But that new aeon lies many doublings and dances away. An eternity in Pandemic Time. 

So for the moment, welcome to Pandemic Time, population you.

This concludes Chapter 1. Continue to Chapter 2.

Apologies again for the rough edges. This really is an actual working chapter draft that will evolve significantly before it is done, not a polished marketing “beta” version.