Pandemic Time
The Clockless Clock, Chapter 1
Part of the The Clockless Clock book project.
In early February, 2020, even as Covid19 was spreading rapidly across the world, a far more dramatic phenomenon in absolute terms was playing out in the skies: the sudden dimming of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse is what is known as a variable star — a natural clock in the sky that exhibits a complex, imperfectly predictable pattern of dimming and brightening driven by multiple loosely related stellar phenomena, much like the seasonal flu here on Earth. Was the dimming an anomalous phenomenon, or a regular part of the variation, astronomers wondered? Was Betelgeuse perhaps about to go supernova, as theories of stellar physics predict it eventually must?
Variable stars with unsteady rhythms are commonplace, but supernovas are rare enough, and consequential enough, that they count as historic events even at a cosmic scale, much as pandemics do on a terrestrial scale. Among other things, they scatter heavier nuclei around, seeding planets and life itself, inspiring the poetic observation that we are all made of stardust. Only eight supernovas visible to the naked eye appear in the historical record, the most recent one being SN 104, also known as Kepler’s star, observed by Johannes Kepler in 1604, a few years before the invention of the telescope.
Betelgeuse is among the prominent candidates for number nine.
The simultaneous dimming of Betelgeuse and the global emergence of Covid19 in February, 2020 were curiously rhyming phenomena: anomalous disruptions of familiar, reassuring rhythms, both with latent apocalyptic potential. Had two such events coincided in antiquity, our more astrologically inclined ancestors would have been very worried. Were light capable of traveling instantaneously, events would have coincided in an interesting way. Betelgeuse is somewhere between 550 to 800 light years away, according to the most recent distance estimates. The dimming we observed in February actually occurred somewhere around the time the Black Death was making its way around the world.
Whether or not the stars foretold our present condition, we will be living, for the curiously foreseeable future, in a distorted temporality shaped by the progress of Covid19 across the globe. Like the distorted time around a supergiant star going supernova and collapsing into a black hole, Pandemic Time is anything but normal.
Globally Local
Pandemic Time is an experience of time whose principal feature, for the majority of us, is its radically decentralized and atomized nature. Most of us are experiencing it in the splendid isolation of enforced domesticity, our temporal connections to shared patterns of life having been surgically severed by civic authorities. Absent the homogenizing forces of communal life, our individual experiences of Pandemic Time are being shaped by the particularities of wildly variable individual situations.
This is what makes Covid19 so different from other global crises within living memory. The local experience everywhere is that of a consequential and highly personal participation that goes far beyond mere spectatorship.
During the 444-day Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, for instance, Walter Cronkite memorably ended every broadcast with a reminder of the number of days the hostages had spent in captivity. Iran Crisis Time was a globally shared, but non-disruptive spectacle for all but the handful of individuals actually caught up in the situation in Tehran. The global salience of events in Iran was driven not by the idea that the crisis might literally arrive at one’s doorstep, but by the shared narrative backdrop of the Cold War.
Covid19, unlike the Iran hostage crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, or even SARS, is a story happening to 7.5 billion people almost simultaneously, in their homes (except of course, for the homeless). We are all being forced to do what Eighties management gurus urged CEOs to do: think global, act local.
So almost every one of us is experiencing Pandemic Time differently.
Even within a single apartment building, neighbors experience very different temporalities. In one unit we have a single extrovert experiencing the acute trauma of being forced to work alone from home. Next door we have parents suddenly juggling childcare responsibilities and work. At the end of the hallway is an immigrant tracking the fate of family members on the other side of the globe, suddenly rendered physically unreachable due to travel bans, via WhatsApp.
Arguably, even members of a single household experience Pandemic Time differently. For my wife, it is shaped by the rhythms of televised daily briefings by political leaders. For me, it is shaped by the latest focus of attention on Twitter. Whether news on Twitter or TV is “ahead” on any given day has been a running argument for us.
We are learning that time as a shared global experience — whether tracked by the Greenwich Observatory, the World Health Organization, or Walter Cronkite — is only as useful as the coordination of local experiences it enables. For materially altered life in the shadow of Covid19, the marking of time on a global calendar of significant events seems like meaningless spectatorship at best, and a dangerous distraction from more urgent local events at worst.
But there is a different mode of global temporal coordination that has emerged to take the place of the kind that has unraveled: one based neither on longitudes, nor the pageantry of events like the Olympics, but the flow of meaningful information from hotspot to hotspot, older outbreak hotspots serving as time machines for newer ones. Hotspot time machines around the world form what mathematicians call a directed acyclic graph: a skinny web of arrows pointing from current events in some places, to future events in other places.
A Pandemic Time-Machine Web
In the early weeks of the pandemic, amid the dad jokes about forgetting the day of the week, and precious poetic musings on the warped experience of time, one idea spread particularly rapidly across the West: the metaphor of Italy as a time machine, showing us our future. Instead of GMT plus or minus so many hours, or the countdown to the Olympics, the timeline that mattered was Lombardy plus or minus so many weeks.
For the time machine metaphor to make sense, two conditions must hold.
First, events at every hotspot must unfold with the kind of overwhelming doomsday certainty that allows us to clearly see our own inevitable future through the present of the time-machine hotspot. There is, as it happens, a word for this: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity. Pandemic Time is suffused with zemblanity; it is a temporality shaped by a sense of certain doom, foreseen and amenable to some mitigation, but not entirely avertable.
Second, we must identify subjectively with the humans inhabiting the hotspot cast in the role of time machine. Pandemic Time is a subjectively colored time. The empathy evoked, in the West, by images of exhausted Italian doctors and nurses, their faces bruised by too-tight masks, proved to be an important driver of the broader Western response.
Cultural distance matters in the network of hotspot time-machines that is currently driving global time consciousness. In the United States, the fact that the pandemic broke out in culturally distant China marked it initially as a story happening to Other People, which arguably played a role in shaping the responses. Italy by contrast, is both ethnically European and a liberal democracy, with patterns of governance and life familiar to Americans. Images streaming out of Italy served as a view of the future for the average American in a way images streaming out of Wuhan did not.
Individual experience need not match geography of course. My own experience, as a recent migrant to Los Angeles from Seattle, the first American hotspot, with family in India living weeks in my past, and a Korean mother-in-law getting news from an alternate future via Korean television, is best described as a kind of temporal schizophrenia.
From wherever you stood in February, and through whatever time machines you viewed possible futures, you could see that when Covid19 arrived at your doorstep it would necessarily overwhelm normal life to greater or lesser degree, and in an entirely predictable way, by straining healthcare resources past their limits. And absent sufficient surveillance infrastructure, treatments, or vaccines, there was only one significant knob you could turn in response to what the time machine revealed of your future: social distancing, a mechanism guaranteed to create the domestic-siege conditions that characterize Pandemic Time.
A Distributed Doomsday Clock
During the early weeks of the pandemic, the future, normally so hard to predict, began to unfold with the wonderfully simple logic of a doomsday countdown. The virus could not be bullied, argued with, negotiated with, or stopped. Hand-washing and border-closing would not suffice. The only mode of agency available was the one created by the manner of its spread: social distancing.
Every nascent hotspot in the world faced the same choice as it joined the global web of time machines. Either you “flattened the curve” by socially distancing as much as possible, or you suffered the fate of Italy, possibly many times over.
That fork in the road split the world into multiple parades of hotspots, divided by varying distancing protocols, and connected by time-machine links. Each path of descent into the future, into the dark heart of Pandemic Time, was marked by a particular administrative approach to social distancing. If Pandemic Time has global time zones, each is marked by a shared pattern of containment and mitigation. Instead of your longitude east or west of Greenwich, your local experience of Pandemic Time is determined by the strength and effectiveness of the containment and mitigation model chosen by your local government.
Your future is revealed by hotspots with similar models, and similar local conditions, that have progressed deeper into Pandemic Time than you have.
The predictability of the zemblanitous future, and the simplicity of the only control scheme available, meant that all available futures could be modeled with mathematical precision, based on how much you managed to turn the one available knob. Models could be updated as new data came in, allowing the predictions to be refined further. The future could not just be predicted, it could be altered by design. The web of time machines did not just allow viewing of different futures, it allowed for selection.
As many political leaders discovered to their horror around the world, you were faced with the sort of choice no sane person ever wants to make: turn a knob to decide how many people to kill, and at what economic cost. The distributed doomsday clock is also a distributed doomsday machine.
Time Under Siege
Social distancing, the unavoidable response to an inescapable threat, is what has created the siege-like experience of Pandemic Time. The increased physical distance that slows the ability of the virus to jump from person to person also results in a dramatically reduced rate of social collisions on streets, in coffee shops, and around office water coolers. Collisions we rely on, as a deeply social species, to create and maintain our sense of time. If it weren’t for the palliative social effects of online interactions and video conferences, Pandemic Time would be as traumatizing as solitary confinement.
In Pandemic Time, individual streams of consciousness that anchor subjective experiences of time cannot converge and diverge freely, shaped by shared social experiences in shared physical spaces. They can only draw on shared digital experiences, punctuated by rare away missions to grocery stores. Missions undertaken in the newly hostile outdoors of a planet whose M-class status is now in doubt. Instead of space-suits, we wear masks and regard fellow humans with suspicion. In lieu of being beamed back up by Scotty, we put ourselves through elaborate decontamination rituals upon our return to the home base, to rid ourselves of invisible tribbles. And then (having first sanitized our phones), we post pictures of the strange sights we have seen on social media: the downed shutters of a comatose economy, masked aliens, strange sidewalk-markings six feet apart, and above all, the emptiness.
Individual experiences so far have been as varied as personal situations. For me, the hours go by slowly, but the days go by quickly. Last week seems like ancient history, and next month feels like the far future. February, of course, is now prehistory. For friends with young children, the experience has been very different. For them, Pandemic Time has been something of a return to nineteenth century work-life rhythms, shaped by the collocation of childcare activities and economic production.
For those whose service labor is deemed “essential” — grocery store workers, delivery drivers, cops — Pandemic Time has been a period of exhausting, thankless, labor, serving the more privileged in their virus-resistant redoubts. And for the most essential minority — cleaning crews, nurses, doctors, and morticians on the healthcare frontlines — Pandemic Time has meant a frenzy of woefully inadequate and under-resourced preparations in the calm before the storm, followed by the predictably overwhelming experience of the storm surge itself.
But as with war, the effort against the virus has been shaped primarily by the larger-scale experiences and perceptions of the majority, hiding out in relative safety far from the frontlines. The experience of civilians in London during World War 2 was one shaped by air raid sirens and sheltering underground. For us, living through Covid19, the experience is one shaped by stay-at-home orders, and the anxiety ratchet of gradually tightening financial situations.
Perhaps no aspect of normal time experience has been more disrupted by social distancing measures than those based on religious life. Religious congregations, with their deep attachment to shared communal rhythms and contact rituals that go far beyond shaking hands, have proved both particularly resistant to distancing measures, and particularly potent as seeds of hot-spots.
The Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Korea, the Tablighi Jamaat conference in India, the Christian Open Door Church in France, the Young Israel Congregation in New Rochelle. The list grows longer with the emergence of every new hotspot.
On the more secular end of ceremonial congregations, a high-society birthday party (I imagine the birthday girl blew out candles on a cake) in Westport, Connecticut proved particularly critical in the New York area. Down south, a visiting Brazilian delegation brought the pandemic to Donald Trump’s doorstep at Mar-a-Lago. In less elite circles, in the early weeks, censorious television crews pursued spring-breakers unwilling to cut short long-planned (and paid for) rites of passage into adulthood, until they too, finally, retreated indoors.
In the United States, a notable episode marking the national shift into Pandemic Time revolved around Donald Trump airing aspirations to re-open the country by Easter, evoking images of packed churches. Images that gladdened the hearts of a few religious conservatives, prompted despair among public health officials, and provoked Maryland Governor Larry Hogan into accusing him of operating by an “imaginary clock.”
But for once, even Donald Trump could not distort reality to suit his narrative and hew to his preferred timeline. The virus would not respect his imaginary clock, or be nicknamed and shamed into submission and retreat. It would not just “wash through” simply because he hoped it would.
As Anthony Fauci, the ever-diplomatic foil to Trump, observed with his characteristic low-key realism: "You don't make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline."
By the following week, Trump too, had accepted Pandemic Time.
Exponential Time
What sort of timeline, we might ask, does the virus make? The answer is already clear: life within the siege that is Pandemic Time is governed by an exponential clock, at least at first.
Thanks to a narrative consensus created by a widely circulated Financial Times graphic, the local story of the pandemic begins when the number of detected cases or fatalities in a new hotspot crosses a threshold. That marks arrival on the global case-count graph, and puts the local government of notice: time is no longer linear; contain and mitigate now or suffer the consequences.
Once exponential time kicks in, we think not in terms of days in the past or future, but in terms of doubling periods of case numbers. Instead of being governed by the steady ticking of a regular clock, local life in a hotspot becomes governed by the accelerating geiger-counter-like ticking of the local case-count clock. And unlike the theatrical global doomsday clock that became a familiar motif of impending doom during the Cold War, the local case-count clocks are very real, counting down to a real local crisis that does in fact arrive, rather than gesturing vaguely at a rhetorical horizon of prophesied doom.
The case-count clock has other weird features. First, like light from Betelgeuse, the case-count clock is a delayed clock signal.
Thanks to incubation delays and testing backlogs, testing data in an exponentially unfolding pandemic reaches public health planners long after the underlying events have progressed to the next meaningful horizon. Today’s data reflects the local state of the pandemic a week or two ago. By the time you learn the number, it is already history. We may never be able to accurately determine the global T=0 moment, when the number of cases in Wuhan crossed the threshold of absolute containment.
Second, around the world, the local T=0 is an uncertain function of testing capabilities and official narratives. The tests themselves are unreliable, plagued by high false-negative rates. As of this writing, in much of the world, outside of a few places like South Korea and Germany, case-count clocks still mostly measure the growth of testing capability rather than the progress of the pandemic. Weak surveillance capacities are strengthening even as the pandemic itself is advancing, making the Pandemic Time clock a curiously convoluted one in both mathematical and narrative terms. It is an instrument much like modern astronomical telescopes, which must make complex adjustments and deconvolution computations to reconstruct meaningful images of Betelgeuse.
The clocks at the other end of the healthcare pipeline — bed counts, mask counts, ventilator counts, ICU admission rates, and of course, fatalities and recoveries— are equally unreliable. People are dying at home, or on streets. Covid19 deaths are being misattributed to other causes, and vice versa. Supposedly recovered people are getting reinfected. Antibody tests, it turns out, have their own reliability problems.
Different parts of the world, we are discovering, vary wildly in their abilities to track Pandemic Time, and no region is particularly good at it. Pandemic Time, as measured by positive tests in 2020, is something like clock time in the 17th century — an artistic opinion about the output of primitive technology rather than a stream of uncontroversial facts. An opinion that is only as good as your understanding of the underlying technologies and statistical models. Beyond the very coarse fact that opening phase of Pandemic Time can be measured by an approximately exponential curve that eventually bends past an inflection point into a logistic, or S-curve, nothing much is certain.
But we can do a good deal with that one coarse fact.
Garcetti’s Koan
Exponential dynamics are why Fauci’s idea that “the virus makes the timeline” has proved particularly hard to come to terms with.
Among the few political leaders who appeared to have mastered exponential times in the early days was Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, who took to repeating a koan-like incantation as justification for his early and strong measures: “when it feels like the wrong time, that’s the right time to act, when it feels like the right time, it is too late.”
Garcetti’s koan, as it happens, is an excellent heuristic for navigating exponential temporalities, where the best clocks can only reveal an imperfect and incomplete view of the local state of the pandemic two doublings ago. Under such conditions, well-timed proportionate action will necessarily seem like premature over-reaction. By mid-March, Garcetti had already locked-on to the accelerating ticking of Covid19 case counts, locked down the city, and settled in for the long-haul challenge of flattening the curve over months.
Already by late March, when Trump unveiled his imaginary clock, it was clear that Los Angeles at least was not going to reopen by Easter. To those who had already entered the warp field of Pandemic Time sensibilities, Garcetti’s actions struck exactly the right note. It was Trump who was behind and under-reacting.
The idea that we must consciously act against our ordinary temporal instincts is one of the few ways we can gain some agency within an exponential temporality. One can contrast Garcetti’s koan to a heuristic derived from a more linear sort of military time: “wait until you see the whites of their eyes.” For events that unfold at the fixed charging pace of an oncoming army of fixed size, with responses determined by the accuracy of projectile weapons arrayed in defense against it, a cue like “whites of their eyes” is meaningful.
For an invading virus that is multiplying even as it is invisibly advancing, by the time equivalent visible cues appear — say a hundred positive cases or a spike of ER visits — it is already too late for actions in reasonable-seeming proportion to those cues. You are living several doublings into the future of those visible cues. You must react to the invisible current state of the pandemic, estimated through exponential or logistic extrapolations. Extrapolations that include assumptions about human behavior in the last two weeks.
That’s a core feature of Pandemic Time. Time intervals don’t mean the same thing anymore. When the base event streams shaping the experience of time — what I call the log level of a temporality — are being driven by an exponential process, the definitions of short, medium, and long term change. With a doubling period of around 4 days, short term is a week, medium term is two weeks, and long term is three weeks. By contrast, in normal business planning, short term is typical a quarter, medium term around a year, and long term around five years.
Beyond the horizon of a few doublings lies eternity.
As I write this in April 2020, with the case count in Los Angeles county at over 7000, the genesis events in Wuhan already seem like ancient history. The fates of the American interior and India, which are both just beginning their systemic responses as I write, seem like the temporally distant province of science fiction.
Everything of import is happening here in a now book-ended by half and double. Our ordinary temporal instincts, the kind shaped by communal festivals like Easter, large-scale events like the Olympics, and small-scale patterns of ordinary daily life with their default expectations of social collision rates, are guaranteed to lead us astray.
A temporality driven by an exponential process is not a domesticated, civilized temporality. It is governed neither by clocks, nor by myth and ceremony, nor by historicist narratives of progress or decline. It is a wild, unbridled temporality that is, to a first approximation, not governed at all, but during which a great deal happens.
As Lenin once observed, there are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.
Pandemic Time is perhaps best understood as a relentless series of decadal weeks that will last months on end around the world, forcing reconciliations in historical ledgers of karmic debts and credits, accumulated over centuries, in ways we can only begin to guess at.
This is not a condition we humans are capable of enduring indefinitely. And fortunately for our sanity, physical exponential processes in nature inevitably hit boundaries and collapse. One way or another, every exponential dynamic, be it a pandemic or an exploding star, hits a boundary. The earth is an extraordinarily large petri dish, containing 7.5 billion potential Covid19 victims, but it is a bounded one nevertheless.
As the time machines have already revealed, Pandemic Time must end as surely as it must begin. The process of getting ourselves out of Pandemic Time though, is a little more involved than getting ourselves into it has been.
Continue to Part 2 of Chapter 1.
Apologies 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.