On Digital Models: Responding to Viral Metaphors in Pandemic Times

Abstract

COVID-19 has been a crisis represented and interpreted through models. Models are metaphors that illustrate one phenomenon in and through another that is better understood or seemingly more transparent. In this article, we consider digitally driven COVID-19 models that draw on the certainty of data from smartphones and social networks to make predictions about a poorly understood virus. Network data normally used to model information spread drive models of an actually existing biological virus. A return to HIV network models of the 1980s helps map the social implications of this latest turn to modeling. These earlier models were used to hone stigmatizing viral metaphors about behavior, risk, and exposure, in the shadow of an emerging digital culture. Thinking across COVID-19 and HIV modeling demonstrates how models can support personal responsibilization, be used to blame “bad” actors, and justify the creep of new surveillance practices under the rubric of “Data for Good” programs. Drawing on critical HIV and queer studies, we argue that the people and behaviors that are opaque to viral models and their methods of capture present potential avenues for speaking back to digital virality’s terms. We highlight these exceptions, which show how certain lives make trouble for models and their sensibilities, telling of queer forms of life, desire, and contact that evade modeling altogether.