Where does the legacy of a virus begin and end? December 1st, 2024, marks the 37th iteration of World AIDS Day, but in the aftermath of a recent pandemic, and an era of culture defined by virality, what does it mean to globally commemorate a virus? Do we even still know—or care—what a virus actually is? Do we even still know how to care—about anything?
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I spent six years of my life writing about viruses. Not from a biological or medical standpoint, but from a metaphorical one. Yes. You read that right. I devoted six years to dismantling a linguistic mechanism in hopes it might illuminate something about the wiring of the cultural psyche. “Was it a good use of time?” is a legitimate question. It is still hard to say, though remarkably and against all odds, much of that work was sealed into a book called The Observable Universe which was published in March of this year. It covers a variety of topics including shifting notions of corporeality in the age of cyberspace, the continued relevance of the term cyberspace, the nature of metaphor, the history of the internet, and the phrase “going viral.” It also talks about HIV/AIDS, which killed my parents in the early 90s when I was seven and ten years old.
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AIDS was first identified in 1981 through a cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia cases in Los Angeles. The patients, five gay men ranging in age from 29-36, all exhibited symptoms of immunodeficiency, as indicated by the pneumonia, without a known underlying cause. From this collection of facts, the CDC determined a new, sexually transmitted syndrome, had just emerged. The cause of the syndrome remained unknown until 1983 when a retrovirus, found in the lymph tissue of a patient suspected of having AIDS, was discovered at the Institute Pasteur by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier. In 1986 the retrovirus was named human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV by the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses.
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Viruses are structurally simple, consisting of a piece of genetic material encased in a protein shell. They are sharply delineated particles that somehow, despite their clarity, throw our own sense of physical boundaries into turmoil: we tend to think of ourselves as separate from our environment, but viruses are something from the outside (the environment) that take up residence inside our bodies, and for a duration of time, are part of us. This blurs our categorical distinctions of internal and external, personal and public, self and other, so it seems that viruses ultimately show how everything is entangled with everything else.
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Why should anyone care about a virus they’ve had no experience with, or even peripheral connection to? I ask this recognizing we are at a point in time where the idea of stretching open to hold one more story, one more life, one more atrocity, feels completely impossible. Yet to refrain from asking is to reject that the only thing that makes us human in 2024 is having feelings and showing them, is exercising our capacity to care.
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The foundation for World AIDS Day can be traced back to the 80s mediascape when the moral stigma surrounding the disease prevented unbiased information about it from reaching the mainstream. News outlets avoided covering AIDS from a position of neutrality, that’s if they covered it at all. Some regarded it as solely a gay issue, others couldn’t package the disease’s forms of transmission for their conservative audiences. Blood, sex, needles, perversion, liberation, desire, lust, love, there wasn’t yet a societal context that could accept a disease that so clearly exposed human nature in all its parts.
The tides shifted when a small local television station in San Francisco, KPIX, began covering AIDS as a developing crisis. This was largely due to the urgings of fledgling reporter Jim W. Bunn. On his first day on the job in 1983 he covered a press conference at the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank, which in the light of AIDS was hyper charged in both urgency and hysteria. This experience crystallized the reality of the disease within the San Francisco community and triggered an insight for Bunn: he realized television could become an instrumental force in positively shaping public response to the crisis.
In a 1988 New York Times article Bunn reflected, “[AIDS] was something that transcended our role as journalists… As broadcasters, we were in the business of providing information. We were in a position to help stop the spread of the disease.” Though public health services and AIDS activists directly lobbied media organizations, including KPIX, for airtime to broadcast information on AIDS prevention it wasn’t until Bunn and other journalists saw their profession through the lens of civic duty that educational programming began to emerge.
This coverage went beyond health care the stories of patients who were denied social security benefits or were evicted due to their diagnosis. These deeply personal profiles were woven into a four-part series called “AIDS Lifeline,” which garnered KPIX both a Peabody and an Emmy Award—the first national Emmy for a local news organization. For Bunn, this success ultimately brought him to Geneva where he was recruited by the World Health Organization to act as an information officer.
At the WHO, Bunn worked alongside Thomas Netter, for the Global Programme on AIDS. It was 1987, and part of their job was to screen all communications dealing with the disease because, “The politics of AIDS were electric, and even the slightest misstep or misstatement would lead to a bevy of reporters calling our office.” One afternoon, while scanning through an uninspired speech that called for global action to stop AIDS, Bunn offhandedly commented that there should be a “Cold Turkey Day” for AIDS. He was referencing the Great American Smokeout, an event sponsored by the American Cancer Society that encourages people to quit smoking for 24 hours. It was a eureka moment and Netter reacted viscerally by immediately scribbling a list of ideas on the office white board. This list became World AIDS Day. Using their combined media expertise, they selected December 1st as the day of observance, presuming the annual lull in the news calendar following Thanksgiving would force coverage towards the event. The first World AIDS Day, held in 1988, had the added benefit of falling in an election year, meaning: audiences would be hungry for new content.
Each year World AIDS Day is centered on a theme. This year the theme is, “Collective Action: Sustain and Accelerate HIV Progress.”
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I researched and wrote about virality from 2016 to 2021. During that period, a madman was elected to the White House, the UK voted to leave the European Union and then, couldn’t figure out how to do so, Kim Kardashian decided to become a lawyer, people found life purpose on Twitter, cryptocurrency was A Thing, before it wasn’t, AI ethicist Dr. Timnit Gebru was fired from Google due to a research report where she found some uses of AI to be… unethical, a gender reveal photo shoot caused a devastating forest fire that lasted 71 days, #MeToo happened, mass shootings occurred regularly, the last male northern white rhino died in Kenya, Notre Dame caught fire, China landed on the “dark side” of the moon, Grimes made 6 million dollars selling NFTs, there was apparently “no collusion” in the 2016 US Presidential Election, monuments were pulled to the ground, opioid use skyrocketed, and Brangelina filed for divorced. Each of these events—or at least their coverage, emerged from a desire to overwhelm, dominate, or subsume. Infect, in other words.
Each of these events—or at least their coverage, emerged from a desire to overwhelm, dominate, or subsume. Infect, in other words.
After a certain point of existing inside this, it was no longer clear if the world was slipping away from me, or I from it, and my attempts to crosscheck my disorientation with history always came up short because the measures of previous eras withered in the noxious light of this phantasmagoria. Even time itself seemed to destabilize: it left the chat and left us in a continuous stream of content where past and present smeared together in an unending NOW. Reflection was no longer an integral part of living. Instead, what we did was absorb the stream itself, mistaking the invigorating rush of its forward momentum for evolution.
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In accordance with the second observation of World AIDS Day in 1989, Visual AIDS, a New York City-based arts organization, launched Day Without Art, a call out to museums and galleries to disrupt their curatorial programming and draw attention to AIDS awareness. Founded in 1988 by curators William Olande, Gary Garrels, Thomas Soklowski, and by art critic Robert Atkins, Visual AIDS sought to harness the power of art to incite dialogue around the HIV/AIDS crisis, as well as preserve the archive of artists who died of AIDS.
The Guggenheim responded to this call by draping a swath of black fabric down its façade to invoke the feel of a burial shroud, the Met by handing out free condoms and removing Picasso’s Gertrude Stein from view. These actions implied the mortality not just of art, but of its industry. Overall, 800 institutions participated that first year, and planned actions have continued annually since then. In 1997, Visual AIDS renamed the event to Day With(out) Art, adding the parenthesis to symbolically emphasize a sense of resilience within the legacy of loss. In December 2020, when the world shutdown on account of another virus, Visual AIDS curated an online video series appropriately titled TRANSMISSIONS.
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I was looking into metaphor, in part, because I couldn’t say what I needed to say. I couldn’t say my heart was broken because I missed my parents. No language seemed to exist with which to convey this experience, so I grew fascinated with the concept of metaphor. The idea that an unarticulated series of emotions could be conjured into being through the discussion of something else entirely felt like sleight of hand magic. It worked through misdirection and a familiar sort of evasion; I recognized it in my nightly routine of typing random shit into Google, hoping to come across something of interest, something to take my mind off things. So much of what we do online is to avoid how bad we feel, the aimless scrolling, the vehicle for our nameless sorrow.
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“During the AIDS epidemic, every single person you covered died for the reason you were covering them. There was nothing before then, outside of combat, with anything even close to that kind of calculus.”
–Tim Bunn
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The red ribbon “debuted” at the 45th Annual Tony Awards and within a year, was as recognizable as the holy cross, at least according to a 1992 style report in the New York Times. It was created in 1991, “as a consciousness-raising symbol, not as a commercial or trademark tool,” by an anonymous group of artists known only as Visual AIDS Artists Caucus. The Caucus believed the ribbon should be inclusive and accessible in every respect, so its design has never been attributed to a single individual, nor has it been copyrighted in the US.
Ribbons were handmade by members of Visual AIDS, however rising demand sparked the development of volunteer run “ribbon bees.” The most visible of these, the Armory Ribbon Bee Project, hired women from the Park Avenue Shelter to fulfill large requests, paying them up to $30 a week according to a short piece in the New York Times from 1994. The article begins, “In the history of the AIDS epidemic in New York, the Armory Ribbon Bee Project was only a poignant footnote. For Jackie McLean and the others at the Park Avenue Shelter, it was something of a life saver.” McLean managed the Armory Bee after her apartment in the Bronx burned down; the number of narrative steps it takes to connect a pandemic, to an apartment fire, to a woman’s shelter, to an arts initiative, to project management, to finding a new life, is unfathomable, but this entanglement is precisely what a viral thread reveals.
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Pinpointing the origin is of a metaphor is not a straightforward process, particularly in the case of “going viral,” but an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books offers some insight. “The Viral Imagination” written by Elizabeth Winkler in 2014, proposes that, “we talk about virality not just because the world is interconnected or overpopulated; we talk about it—or, at least, we first talked about it—because of HIV.”
HIV erupted in public consciousness as the world was being actively networked by precursors to the internet. In the US, ARPANET, developed by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, was a network that facilitated node-to-node communications between universities and research institutions, particularly those committed to defense development. It launched in 1969 and grew exponentially until the mid-80s, when it was part absorbed and part overtaken by NSFNET, the network of the National Science Foundation.
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at CERN, proposed the idea for a World Wide Web, a graphical interface based on hypertext that would sit on top of the internet allowing users to explore content by clicking links. The Web ushered in the era of the commercial internet, and in 1992 Congress authorized the National Science Foundation to connect all educational and research networks to the burgeoning commercial ones, effectively creating one monster system.
Over the decades of these developments, geography contracted, and a new intimacy emerged; the circulation of information became seamless, instantaneous, and in many ways, not unlike the circulation of pathogens.
Over the decades of these developments, geography contracted, and a new intimacy emerged; the circulation of information became seamless, instantaneous, and in many ways, not unlike the circulation of pathogens. During the late 80s and early 90s, as information about HIV gained a foothold in the mainstream, it’s easy to see how the ideas of networks, transmissions, and contagion would superimpose in the cultural mind leading us to where we are now.
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Just before the phantasmagoria fully condensed into a permanent state of reality, it spun up a whole other magnitude. A novel virus erupted and killed approximately 7.1 people worldwide. It was if like the virality of online culture had somehow crackled through the screen and cascaded into the physical world, and considering the feverishness of the moment, you could (almost) be forgiven if you felt like this is how it went down. Except, of course, what transpired was much more disturbing and heartbreaking and awesome than this fracturing of a specific boundary; if you could take it, and not look away, what you really learned through the virus, is that everything is connected.
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“That’s why I love the ribbon. It ruins whatever you’re wearing, it doesn’t work compositionally, it’s the wrong color, it throws your hair off, and who cares, because you have human feelings and you’re showing them.”
–Isaac Mizrahi
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The most confounding instance of “going viral” appeared in a 2016 research paper titled “Explosive Contagion in Networks.” The paper detailed how synergistic mechanisms, or the online relationships between people, could trigger a viral explosion. It then described case studies in which epidemiological models for pathogens were applied to the spread of digital phenomena. However, at no point did it acknowledge how outrageously strange this is. After all, it is not a logical maneuver to apply mathematical formulations of biochemical matter to online trends, and yet: we do. We never even question the impulse, but what is even more strange is the fact that this works. Epidemic models work in the cyber realm, so: was ‘going viral’ ever a metaphor or just an evolutionary term?
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If you asked me how I was while writing The Observable Universe, I would have only been able respond with data: I could summarize the latest Game of Thrones episode or the New Yorker story of red honeybees and the “maraschino mogul,” but I could not have answered even the simplest question about myself because I had nothing inside. I felt like a ghost and quite often when I entered a room, I felt people pull away from me as if suddenly encountering a cold front. Maybe this fetishizes or romanticizes the situation, puts a metaphor on a state of being that quite possibly doesn’t deserve one, but how do we talk about pain in a world full of pain? We can’t. We don’t even try. We talk about culture instead. That’s why it spreads.
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World AIDS Day has been celebrated, observed, and honored by candlelight vigil, concerts, HIV testing and counseling events, and information sessions for disproportionally affected populations. In 2007, a giant red condom made of 2,000 square meters of vinyl mesh covered the iconic stone obelisk of Buenos Aires. That same year, the White House hung a 28ft red ribbon on the North Portico. More recently, in 2023, Los Angeles had several of its landmarks, including the LAX pylons, glow red on the evening of December 1st.
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In Madness, Rack and Honey, poet Mary Ruefle explains the nature of metaphor as going beyond “a mere literary term,” and into a certain philosophy: if metaphor is a means of describing one thing in terms of another, a link is formed between them, and this notion pulled to its most extreme end point means the underlying structure of our linguistic and expressive reality is a web.
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How much of collective history is engraved on our bodies? We tend to envision collective history as large experiences that “shape a generation.” But there is another kind of collective history recorded directly into our DNA. The human genome is 8% viral which means that every time viruses have penetrated our germline we have mutated in response to them. Our evolution has thus been driven in part by negotiating with viruses. They have changed us and we have changed them, and while nobody has any idea what any of this means, or where it will lead, our destinies spiral around each other, not unlike a double helix.
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You have a story and I have a story and they are not the same story. This is necessary – otherwise how else would we evolve?
