Shutting Down versus Locking Down
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread against the backdrop of an unprecedented global systems crisis, business as usual is already over and Aotearoa is socially preparing for a shutdown that is now imminent. Long predicted in the abstract, the crisis has become utterly unpredictable in the complex ways it’s playing out in reality as the distance between global and local is simultaneously collapsing and being pushed apart.
As more alarming news comes in from around the world, a chorus of media figures and Dunning-Krugerites have invented a new genre of shouting at the government about lockdowns. Instead of encouraging everyone to self isolate and practice physical distancing (and modelling this behaviour themselves) they have chosen to advocate for authoritarian and punitive measures without moderation. Be careful what you wish for.
Many of us share the motivating concern here and recognise the need for an immediate large-scale shutdown of movement and close contact between people to prevent the spread of the virus overwhelming our capacity to keep people safe. And a huge amount of invisible work is already being done by hundreds of thousands of people to transition to a shutdown without panic and disorder. It’s not going to be perfect, but this is not an instantaneous action like Thanos snapping his fingers and suddenly millions of people spread out across the islands of Aotearoa are all safe in isolation. There’s no actual off switch for society. We have to work together in order to be apart.
There is a major substantive difference between shutting down and locking down, a difference elided by much of the debate about going to Level 4. The police and defence force have an important role to play in all this, as they do in any emergency and disaster situation. But some level of restraint, structure and care in how they’re deployed is absolutely necessary. Such nuance seems absent from much of the ranting.
Long-term Christchurch residents have the clearest understanding of what a lockdown really is. With reports of sporadic looting in the aftermath of the devastating 2011 earthquakes, the government moved quickly to create cordons and restrict movement across large parts of the central city with armed soldiers, armored vehicles and roadblocks. Lockdowns are not a matter of comms messaging, they are the government deploying its monopoly on violence. In all our actions we should be aiming to minimise this in any way we can.
The people who benefit from a sudden and abrupt transition into military cordons and surveillance of neighbourhoods are the same people who benefit from the predatory status quo that brought us to the brink here. A disorganised, frightened population who aren’t working together are set up to be pushed towards accepting whatever self-interested elites decide is the way forward. There’s already potential evidence of external political interference via hashtags and propaganda bot campaigns trying to seed this message.
Arguing vehemently for a lockdown is only a few clicks short of full-blown authoritarian accelerationism. Don’t we already have enough acceleration to deal with?
Instead, pursuing a distributed collective shutdown response based on shared values of nonviolence, manaakitanga, social justice and prioritising the health and wellbeing of the most vulnerable in our society is a pathway available to us.
Mark Rickerby is a writer, designer and programmer working at the intersection of software architecture and storytelling. He lives in Ōtautahi–Christchurch