Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff at Literary Hub:
“The coronavirus panic is dumb,” tweeted Elon Musk in early March 2020, his first public comment on COVID-19. (It was also his first tweet to earn more than one million likes.) To him, the true virus was informational. The cybernetic collective of social media functioned like a communal id, where posts spread not because of their truth but their “limbic resonance.” “You can’t talk people out of a good panic,” Musk told Joe Rogan, “They sure love it.” By late March, he had landed on a new phrase for the phenomenon: a “mind virus.”
It was an interesting choice of words. Social media virality had been Musk’s great asset, the mechanism through which he converted attention into value. But here, virality was being invoked in a negative sense: it wasn’t just about circulation but sickness. The phrase reached back to Richard Dawkins, whose 1993 article “Viruses of the Mind” argued that human consciousness was susceptible to infection by irrational ideas like religion and superstition the way malware infected a computer. For Musk, social media was now the superspreader of such contagions.
More here.
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