Melbourne has been in lockdown since about March. It’s been a tough year. Once the pandemic threat was real, the political reality of COVID set in. I believe social media, mostly Facebook, has made us all so polarised, so politically-affiliated, so mistrustful of anyone of a different opinion, that when COVID reaffirmed physical reality (don’t jump to conclusions about this term just yet, I’ll get to that in a bit) as still being an apolitical thing of non-trivial import, the response to it by us humans was to get even further polarised politically. Thanks Facebook, or COVID, or “capitalism”, or globalisation, or “insert your grievance of choice here”.

We’re humans, we know the right response would be to focus on finding a solution to the problem, but goddam we will to find someone to blame for this as well. The scapegoat honours so far have been China, then eating meat, then it was those people disobeying lockdown rules, the mask refusers, then the federal government, then the state government for being racist, then stuffing up hotel lockdown, then not having adequate contact tracing, then back to the federal government for the aged care fiasco, then back to dumb Dan Andrews for the harsh, blunt lockdown. Mostly that last one.

I had to take a break from Facebook for a while, social media seems to thrive on keeping its users in a constant state of outrage. I admit I was a sucker, got swept up in all the general furore over everything lockdown related. Turns out that’s a feature, not a bug, of Facebook’s algos. Keeping us hooked by keeping us constantly outraged and whipped into a partisan frenzy: policing our virtual communities, caricaturing the enemies, and signalling our own good intentions. I don’t blame us humans for these all too human responses, we’ve been gamed by these platforms.

The sad truth is, we need to respect reality more than ever. And by reality I mean cold, hard, physical reality. No amount of political posturing can get around facts like the gravitational constant, the Planck length, energy density, or laws of supply & demand. Politics should more fact-driven and dispassionate than ever. We live in a closed, highly interconnected system with finite resources. COVID and climate change should remind us of that. Politics should be about how to operate sustainably & effectively within those constraints..on long time scales. It should be primarily about debating means, not ends, and about communicating complexity and specialist knowledge (and its limitations) transparently so the public can make informed choices: “this is what we know” “this is what we don’t know” “here’s the thinking and assumptions that informed the options being presented, and here are the big unknowns”.

On one hand, we have the old school, big personality-driven politics of Trump, on the other end, here in Australia, state Victoria in particular, we have specialist expertise presented as over-simplified fact dictating policy decisions. I think the role of specialist expertise in politics merits further examination. I’ve written in the past of our very human desire for certainty, objectivity and our desire for algorithmic judgement. We do the same now with COVID and expert advice. We expect to be able to trot out a supercomputer and a team of epidemiologists who do their modelling, and make their predictions, which we treat as gospel in order to derive the perfect lockdown policies.

But, models are just that, models. Models will never reflect an infinitely more complex and inherently unknowable future reality. The experts themselves know this, they also know that the models are only as good the underlying assumptions and data. The model, to be relevant, has to constantly updated with new data. The same goes for policy and risk management. There will always be a level of uncertainty and risk, which must be tolerated and adapted to.

But Victorian bureaucrats aren’t subtle thinkers, career politicians rarely are. Most have a legal background, and law is not one of those knowledge domains known for being uncomfortable with risk, uncertainty and consistent ambiguity. To say in legalese in Italian that something is forbidden or legally not possible the term “previsto” is used, which translates literally as “predicted”. Law literally “predicts” the realm of the possible. Funny though physical reality never really had much regard for human law.

And there isn’t even one consistent human law, what is permissible or even imaginable legally differs wildly by state, territory or country. So I find it quite funny when perusing heated discussions on Facebook, where many well-meaning Victorians tend to mistake Victorian lockdown laws for personal morality. The general target of outrage has tended to centre on “other people” who flout a lockdown rule and thus make themselves morally responsible for the entire outbreak. That’s how Facebook-fuelled outrage works: let’s ignore the historic systemic underfunding of aged care and contact tracing capabilities, and let’s all get angry at that one person from that one viral video who is personally responsible for keeping us in lockdown.

Whilst not being feasible now, wouldn’t it have been nice if instead of yet more arbitrary rules, we had effective contact tracing (Japan, Taiwan)? In Cybersecurity, static, rigid preventative controls are viewed as the bottom rung of effective protection. They’re considered low value truisms, basic house-keeping, like, don’t leave your front door open, or only let people you know and trust inside your home. The best controls are adaptive and predicated on rapid anomaly detection and tailored responses to a known or unknown threat. These are incredibly hard to get right but are exponentially more useful than rigid preventative controls.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our approach to mitigating the risks of this pandemic were focused on the ability to rapidly detect, respond and contain outbreaks, rather than to impose onerous and blunt preventative lockdown controls, and all the concomitant policing, enforcing, punishing, and Facebook morality mobs? Nuanced and flexible intelligence instead of rigid bureaucracy.

A boy can dream…