Bruce Sterling on Tue, 9 Oct 2001 09:23:23 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Thanks for that Robust Speculation, Brad... |
*E-Commerce: Your New Economy Solution to A Planet Quarantined by Anthrax Attacks -- bruces Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 23:33:09 -0700 From: Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com To: dave@farber.net Subject: Could the failed e-commerce plans be the end of epidemics? Organization: http://www.templetons.com/brad Could the failed dot-com infrastructure be the answer to a biowarfare epidemic? Even before the threat of bio-terrorism, people worried about what our mobile world might mean to the next serious epidemic. The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed as many as 40,000,000 people, and some blamed its quick spread to the unprecedented global movement caused by the end of WW1. In our modern world of air travel, epidemiologists have made dire predictions of how fast a truly infectious disease might spread. Now we also fear it being spread deliberately. Smallpox somehow dispersed in the air at O'Hare airport would spread all over the world, though it would not be known until after the 10 day incubation period. Fortunately patients are not very infectious during that period. But it came to me in thinking about this that just as travel technology might aid the spread of an infectious agent, for the first time in history, we have the ability to shut down travel and public gathering for a short period without entirely shutting down our economy. Oh, it would be sorely hit, particularly the factories and physical plants with large workforces, which would have to shut down in such circumstances, allowing workers to return only after they have been cleared or vaccinated. But a lot of the rest of the economy could actually still take place. The internet, fax machine and telephone could allow many businesses to operate, just as many of the companies in the WTC got restored backups, loaner computers and other facilities to get back on the air quickly. In order to build the e-commerce economy that we thought was coming, billions was invested and lost in building up a delivery based economy, with dead companies like webvan set to take online grocery orders and deliver them. Even with malls and stores closed, the software designed for this, modified slightly to fax orders to the existing stores where they could be packaged and left out for delivery, could keep up a lot of the shopping infrastructure. There's very little for which people didn't build tools designed to make it easy to remotely order by internet or phone and efficiently schedule delivery. The fools, thinking they would take over the retail world in a few years, overbuilt to make sure they could scale up. An epidemic might give them their scaling problem in an ironic way. The delivery folks would drop the stuff at the door -- no need to sign and have physical contact. Billing by credit card, or to be done later for those without cards in the emergency. Many companies have tech in place for telecommuting employees. Modern class 5 switches are all able to transfer calls outside company PBXs if people have the software for it. Picking up the old slow computers we now throw away, there are more than enough computers in the USA to equip every worker with one, if simply to do E-mail and web shopping. We aren't ready to do this now, but we could be if we wanted it. In the epidemics they closed the movie houses and theatres. We would have to do that too, but we might not notice, with our bewildering array of TV channels and home cinemas. Yes, we would miss the sporting events and the parties. Of course hospitals would be swamped, and dangerous places to boot, but there's no easy solution to that yet. Perhaps in the future medical telepresence and automated sample taking and analysis could help that profession practice without exposure in high risk circumstances. But for how long would we need to shut down the factories? Today we have DNA sequencers and the ability to build tests for diseases before symptoms appear. We would work feverishly to test and/or vaccinate people to clear them to work in essential functions, including utilities, delivery, and of course food production and distribution. Those things might be staffed again in very short order. After that the disease, whatever it is, would be isolated, and barring violations of quarantine and further enemy attack, wiped out. The factories that closed would go on double shifts to make up production and only some few thousands, sad as it would be, would have died. In 1918, sending everybody home meant they could do no work at all, see or hear no news (radios had been banned during the war!), do little but read and live in fear. Food delivery could have been arranged, but logistics would have been difficult without having people interact with one another heavily, and thus spreading disease. Today we might barely notice being shut in our homes. I work at home, and as such often find days may go by where I don't leave it. Today we even have the dawn of decent videoconferencing. Of course, this is not true for the non-developed world, or indeed even for some developed countries that are not highly networked, and did not build up for e-commerce dreams that evaporated. There they might face the horns of a true dilemma, between a ruined economy and a high death toll. Of course, none of this is an issue if the attack is something non-infectious, like Anthrax. But with all the musing on biowar epidemics on TV today, I had these contrarian thoughts and wondered what others felt. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net