The Commodification of the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)
One of the hallmarks of our late-capitalist society is commodification, with salability being the driving force. Nowhere has this been more evident than during the recent coronavirus pandemic, during which it seems that nearly every company I have ever done business with is sending out an email informing me that the company is prepared to handle the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
Some of the emails I have received are truly laughable. For example, I received one such email from our cable internet provider, informing me that they are prepared for the coronavirus pandemic. I’m not sure what exactly my cable company can do about the pandemic, short of keeping the lights on and staying staffed enough to keep their systems up and running (which ironically takes people actually going to work instead of staying home—thereby undercutting the company’s own message). I received a similar email from a company specializing in online content development tools. Likewise with banks, florists, online shops, and many other categories of COVID-19-preparedness marketing emails, the majority of which have approximately zero ability to do anything whatsoever to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Naturally companies are keen to exploit any latest trend from a marketing standpoint, finding every possible angle for salability and marketability, and undoubtedly COVID-19 is the hot topic du jour, as indicated also by the run on basic goods I observed in our local grocery store here in Idaho Falls this morning. Reality is clearly bowing to the absurd in this case. While the coronavirus pandemic is unquestionably cause for concern from a public health standpoint, there is no reason for my internet provider to let me know that they are COVID-19 prepared—except maybe to reassure me that my internet access will remain on so I can order toilet paper online if necessary—which it may end up being, judging from the lack of toilet paper in stock at the grocery store today as well!
So that is the state of affairs: a pandemic can’t just be a good, old-fashioned pandemic in this day and age, in these postmodern, late-capitalist times; a pandemic must also be a commodity—it must be packaged, marketed, advertised, politicized, complete with the soundbites and marketing messages made possible by our 21st-century communication methods (itself an interesting technological twist on commodification worth considering at another time).
I can’t really blame people for being reactive to the messages they are hearing about the pandemic. After all, most people are like the prisoners staring at shadows on the wall of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Republic, Book VII) anyway, mistaking illusions for reality. But in these postmodern, 21st-century times, it’s not obviously-false shadows that we mistake for illusions; it’s marketing messages, branding, advertising, social media, and the relentless commodification of what should instead, if reality had its quiet way, be a steady and serious stream of reliable information about a growing coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the masses cry out, “Give us our internet access and our toilet paper and let us know when it’s over!”
An interesting side-effect of the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic may just be that it lays bare the extent to which reality has had its time in the sun, now setting and bowing in favor of commodification, the hyperreal conglomeration of reality, and made-up marketing messages, nearly impossible to distinguish, must less to disentangle, from each other. As the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard might have said, the map of commodification laid over the territory of reality has begun to fade and break apart, such that it’s no longer possible to tell what’s real in itself and which parts of reality are made up by marketing executives and content developers. The COVID-19 email marketing messages, for all their laughability, do have real effects, as I found today when searching for toilet paper on rows of empty grocery store shelves, a scene playing out today again and again throughout the United States and around the world.
I’m fully aware that my own desire to write a blog post about the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is likewise fueled for my own latent desire to commodify and monetize current events, perhaps in secret hope that someone will click an ad or two and make me a few bucks along the way. These are postmodern times indeed, and we are indeed creating our own reality, a hyperreality, with pandemics or otherwise.
For Further Reading:
Republic by Plato
Simulations by Jean Baudrillard
