By Forrest Robinson

“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

– Desiderius Erasmus

After beating Covid-19, attention is shifting toward the next public health epidemic—the mental health crisis. Read any mainstream newspaper, and you’ll inevitably come across articles talking about high suicide rates, depression, increased anxiety levels, etc. Much of this mental distress, so evident now, can be attributed to pandemic policies, and the social unrest they caused. Before the 2020 pandemic, public health officials were aware of the harm lockdowns might cause, but they were enforced regardless. This carelessness should be a warning sign for what’s to come, as we approach this new outbreak of mental disorders. The future remains to be seen, but the pandemic and its consequences might offer us a glimpse into what lies ahead.

During the pandemic, our elites laid the foundation for a new form of political control—swarm governance. Benjamin Bratton, who has done his best at articulating this idea, argues in his book, Revenge of the Real, that governance is the ability of a society to become aware of problems as they occur, and to produce models that might offer solutions. Societal awareness of problems requires a “sensing layer” — ubiquitous technologies and institutions that function like nerves within the body-politic. During the pandemic, testing and tracing were the societal nerves that helped us detect Covid, that were used to help ‘stop the spread’. These methods of detection enabled us to sense what was occurring on both a granular and holistic level.

Do we have a sensing layer that can produce models of one’s mind, which can detect mental health problems as they occur in real-time? The government already utilizes predict­ive poli­cing — the utilization of computer systems to analyze large sets of data, includ­ing histor­ical crime data, to decide where to deploy police, and to help identify indi­vidu­als likely to commit a crime. What other techniques might be used to predict human behavior in the future?

Smart technologies offer tech companies a plentitude of data, which can then be used to create psychological profiles of our mental states. In Daniel Barron’s book, Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry, he discusses the way in which machine intelligence can benefit clinical analysis. In one study, for example, it was found “that relative to self-reported measures of suicide risk, Google search data was better at estimating the number of completed suicide deaths over a two-year period.”

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