The Island of the Day After: Digital Epidemiology, Artificial Intelligence and a Biopolitics of Future

As some commentators have observed, one of the major differences between the influenza pandemic of 1918 and the COVID-19 outbreak can be sought in the relatively faster response time in the latter case. For any other epidemic or pandemic in the past, the response from the medical professionals, researchers, pharmaceutical companies and the governments came only after the spread of the disease entered a critical stage. Even though the response time is quicker this time, it is certainly not because we know more about the virus or viruses that have caused the pandemic. We must note that the knowledge of the disease in the case of a global pandemic such as this assumes a seemingly loose, flexible form, which is different from other forms of knowledge that can afford meticulous reflection and offer conjectures. Once the speed of the circulation of knowledge becomes more important than the accuracy of its content, we enter the domain of logistics. In this paper, I am interested in exploring the logistics of knowledge production during the pandemic, which, I shall argue, springs from an intersection of economic rationality and epidemiological reason under the rubric of neoliberalism. I shall study this logistical imagination at the moments of the convergence between economics and epidemiology, both as epistemic constellations as well as technologies of intervention. Moreover, as we shall see, it inaugurates an era of digital epidemiology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning that reshapes some of the earlier notions and practices of governmentality.