The Great Disease War
In this article I want to discuss an emerging phenomenon that is a byproduct of two macro-phenomena
- Globalization
- Social networks
Both of these together will lead to The Great Disease War.
The Great Disease War (TGDW), as I like to call it, is a byproduct of these two phenomena.
Let’s discuss how these two phenomena are giving rise to TGDW.
- Globalization
Since the world is much more globalized now and people travel and move from country to country, and many people work remotely as digital nomads, and many multi-national organizations employ people all around the world, diseases travel much easier and faster across boarders and spread all around the world.
Just think how quickly Covid variants that emerge on one continent spread to other continents.
Our planet is a natural habitat for ever newly emerging viruses, but now these viruses spread all across the world much quicker and infect the global population.
In the past, if warm, equatorial climates in South America or South Asia or Central Africa, which are ideal climates for the emergence of new diseases, had any locally isolated diseases, now these diseases quickly spread all across the globe.
Just as culture is becoming globalized with global media channels, so are diseases becoming globalized through global transportation channels.
Hence globalization is quickly spreading all diseases to every place around the world and homogenizes global disease distribution.
2. Social Networks
Because of social networks people stay in touch and interact with many more people than in the past. An average person has over 1000 connections just on FB, then there are IG, LNKD, Snap and new ones emerging.
This is a much larger number than the Dunbar’s number of 150.
The current social graph is much denser and highly interconnected, and the degree of separation between any two people is becoming smaller.
So once these diseases spread across boarders and continents, they also quickly spread in each social graph, because everyone is interconnected and everyone becomes infected.
The next phenomenon that emerges on social networks is that people observe others being infected.
How will they react to it?
The phenomenon becomes quickly gamified, because some people start using it as a weapon to intentionally infect others and it is entertaining for the crowd to watch.
Especially the most primitive and least civilized humans and the most worthless part of society will start using it as an offensive tactic.
And interestingly once enough people start participating in this offensive tactic, from a game theoretic perspective that becomes a winning strategy, so more and more people will start participating in it.
This is an alarming development and initiates The Great Disease War.
The Great Disease War is just getting started and most of it is still ahead of us.
How far can it go?
People will start spitting in each others foods and drinks.
Delivery people will spit in their orders.
Hotel room cleaning will spit on toothbrushes of guests.
How will it all play out?
Will we be the sickest society ever?
Most likely!
