Mark Twain is rumored to have said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Of late, much press has been spent on uncovering those rhymes, focusing on the similarities between the current epidemic and past ones. These stories underscore the lesson that progress hasn't allowed us to escape the suffering of earlier generations, for the persistence of plagues roots us more to the past than we initially thought. While technology promised to let us escape history, our biology—our bodies and their pestilences—has kept us shackled to it.
These accounts are to some degree true. But they are by no means the whole story. If history rhymes as a result of biology, it also rhymes as a result of (rather than in spite of) technology.
Consider the conspiracy theorists who believe 5G Networks transmit the COVID-19 virus. Acting on their suspicions, they've burned and vandalized cell phone towers across Europe. In England alone, there have been 30 attacks on towers. As Amy Davidson Sorkin observes in the New Yorker, they suspect the towers of harming humans’ immune systems, emitting dangerous radiation, or perhaps even transmitting coronavirus. One might ask what quirk of our present culture would lead to such outlandish theories about COVID-19 and communications. Yet dismaying as the rumors and vandalism are, they closely resemble past fears about disease and communications technology.
In 1849, a cholera epidemic swept the globe, and as many people struggled to understand its causes, some pointed the finger at the telegraph (created 5 years before), believing there was a connection between electricity and the deadly illness. According to Alvin Harlow, an early historian of the telegraph, East Coast newspapers “began whispering the rumor that the telegraph might be responsible for the spread of the great cholera epidemic of 1849.” In its early years, Southern preachers suspected the telegraph also brought other ailments—like bad weather. After listening to their minister blame the telegraph for drought conditions, Kentucky Baptists rushed out of their church and “collectively cut down several miles of poles and [carried]… off the wires.”
If current anxieties about COVID-19 and communication technologies rhyme with past worries, so does the gratitude that so many feel about being connected in the midst of the pandemic…
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