Re: <nettime> Bifo: Beyond the Breakdown. Three Meditations on a,

[Frédéric Neyrat <fneyrat@gmail.com>]

One thing for me seems pretty clear: the agent of the current collapse is
not a non-human agent as such! Arguing that Covid-19 is a powerful critter
that, on its own, waking up one morning and after having taken a look on
its immunological agenda, decided to kill human beings, is meaningless.
It's easy to find articles about Covid-19 as a "zoonosis"/"zoonotic
disease" and zoonosis are produced because of the Plantacionocene (see the
crucial work of Anna Tsing on that topic). And the Plantacioniocene is not
the effect of a non-human agent. And if Black people die *more* than white
people (
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/its-a-racial-justice-issue-black-americans-are-dying-in-greater-numbers-from-covid-19)
it's also not because of Covid-19 *as such*, right?


"African Americans face a higher risk
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/government-urged-to-release-race-ethnicity-data-on-covid-19-cases/2020/04/06/7891aba0-7827-11ea-b6ff-597f170df8f8_story.html>
of
exposure to the virus, mostly on account of concentrating in urban areas
and working in essential industries. Only 20% of black workers reported
being eligible to work
<https://www.epi.org/blog/black-and-hispanic-workers-are-much-less-likely-to-be-able-to-work-from-home/>
 from
<https://www.epi.org/blog/black-and-hispanic-workers-are-much-less-likely-to-be-able-to-work-from-home/>
 home
<https://www.epi.org/blog/black-and-hispanic-workers-are-much-less-likely-to-be-able-to-work-from-home/>,
compared with about 30% of their white counterparts, according to the
Economic Policy Institute."


Time to wake up from our immunological slumber dear friends: Covid-19 is
the non-human agent that conceals the human, social, political,
technological agent! That conceals what we did *and what we did not do *(and
what we will not do?).

My best,

Frederic Neyrat




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