Control, Again: Further Thoughts from the Pandemic

Abstract

Goodman asserts that the virus reveals very old ideas about control and about power The increase in reported domestic violence against women is no surprise, nor is the closure of women's health clinics that administer abortion-services labeled "non-essential" health services It is also not surprising that government-bought food is disappearing and price-gauged in the process of being distributed to stricken communities in Colombia and Bangladesh by contractors with no-bid deals, or that stock prices are rising at the same time as unemployment The virus reveals that control has been exercised not just through algorithms, media saturation, and the Internet, but, familiarly, as well, through dispossession, accumulation, imperialism, and their technologies and systems, which include the media In an economy that demands deskilling, automation, increasing contracting, and privatization, such forms of control have made "disposable" or "exchangeable" workers also "essential workers," the ones who must take the most risk to deliver basic needs The virus reveals control activated in the basic insecurities that most people confront navigating an economic system based on producing and reproducing inequalities