Darwinism in full play as the pandemic rages

The Digital Alarmist

If you are, like most people, anxiously awaiting the good news that the lockdown has finally been lifted, in all likelihood you missed out on all the other news that have been making the headlines recently. Here is a sample of those headlines: “How data can aid the fight against COVID-19”; “Facebook invests $5.7 billion in Indian internet giant Jio”; “Chile will issue ‘immunity cards’ to people who have recovered from the virus”; “Why the wealthy fear pandemics”; “Miami’s rich-poor divide is exposed by flawed Covid-19 testing”; “With selective coronavirus coverage, China builds a culture of hate”; “In India, a pandemic of prejudice and repression.”

I find the above disconcerting because the overall theme of the articles’ contents reflects social Darwinism or ‘survival of the fittest’. It is hard not to miss the pivotal roles played by social media, e-commerce and money in setting the parameters of coronavirus testing, which is crucial to containing the pandemic.

Now that Facebook has acquired a 9.9% stake in Reliance Jio, it is only a matter of time before FB ends up owning Jio, whose assets of $26 billion pale in comparison to FB’s $133 billion. If you think it won’t happen, think again. Walmart’s attempt to enter the Indian market in a big way was initially rebuffed, but it found a backdoor by buying up Flipkart, India’s e-commerce ‘giant’. At the time of the takeover, Flipkart had assets worth $2 billion versus Walmart’s $236 billion. FB’s first attempt to enter the India market by offering ‘Free Basics’ was strongly rebuffed. It has since found a backdoor by zeroing in on Jio. All of this does not bode well for the public.

In an incredibly self-serving op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg opined that Facebook was in a unique position to help researchers and health authorities get the information they would need to respond to the pandemic since it knew the identities of large numbers of people. Quoting from the op-ed piece, “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.” Note the use of the words ‘we’ and ‘superpower’.

While we lost the war on privacy a long time ago, I think there is still time to contain its fallout.

When a successful vaccine is developed, I presume FB will be in a unique position to identify aggrieved communities to whom the vaccine should be made available. Just as effectively as it did in the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

In two recent coronavirus testing studies done in California, one set of volunteer participants was drawn from a random sample of email addresses and telephone. The second set of participants was obtained through advertising on Facebook. The first people to volunteer came from wealthy neighbourhoods.

Even though the population of New York State is 19.4 million (55% white, 15% black) and that of the State of Nebraska is 1.93 million (86% white, 4% black), NY received a paltry $12,000 in federal aid per infected case while Nebraska received more than $380,000. Likewise, in Europe, Hungary and Poland (both countries have been actively gutting democratic institutions over the past two years) which have recorded around 1,143 and 545 coronavirus deaths respectively, received 48 million Euros in assistance, whereas Italy and Spain, which have more than 60,000 deaths between them, received 6.5 million Euros.

As an article in the Guardian newspaper nicely put it, “Using Big Tech to tackle coronavirus risks swapping one lockdown for another.” To which I might add, physical lockdown is only temporary and will end, sooner or later, but the virtual lockdown never will.