Coming away from Saturday’s discussion, I couldn’t shake my fascination at the potential quarantine has to shape novel economies within existing systems – a line of thinking drawn from Front Studio’s project.  They investigate the spatial and social implications of having a quarantined city-within-a-city.  Proposed are a variety of tactics for segregating populations in an integrated environment, including appropriating under-utilized city and building infrastructure (such as fire escapes and phone booths) for a quarantined population’s circulation and disinfection; and color-coding portions of building facades (and scenting the infected population) as stay-away signifiers for the healthy population.

As is brilliantly communicated to the citizens of New York in Amanda Spielman’s project, NYCQ, disease spreads on virtually everything.  Because goods are equally (along with people, and, apparently, pets) disease vectors, the simultaneous integration and bifurcation of contaminated / non-contaminated populations proposed by Front Studio challenges us to consider the exchange of goods between them.  The system must enable the quarantine of people, as well as goods – inevitably establishing an economy of quarantine.

When good becomes vector, it still has value. But a fixed overall supply of goods combined with a leftward-shift in the demand curve (from an entire population to a contaminated population) must result in a lowered price for that good.

An instance of this exact phenomena is currently underway in New England.  The Asian Longhorned Beatle is causing the quarantine of trees in certain locations throughout Massachusetts and surrounding states.  Now, quarantining trees might not seem to be such a big deal, considering that trees don’t move – but, regulations on the transportation of trees into and out of the area are having a significant impact on the resale value of firewood.  The areas under quarantine have an over-saturation of wood, and nowhere to send it.  The fact that non-quarantined wood from nearby areas needs a permit (an arduous process) to be transported through or near quarantined areas only serves to further exacerbate the issue.

What is so fascinating about this is that is incentivizes breaking into quarantine.  A family living in suburban Natick with a camper shell on their pickup truck can’t resist the dirt-cheap firewood in Worcester because of the extra-cold New England winter.  A poor family living in the Bronx decides to buy their cereal for 75% off (after it had been scanned, flagged, and sent for resale in a quarantine-only store during an outbreak of mutated H1N1 in NYC) because they can’t afford the now premium-priced, ‘guaranteed H1N1 free’ supply; so they sneak into a quarantine store, or perhaps buy it from illicit Q-market goods smugglers. To make matters worse, the incentive would be greatest at the beginning of an outbreak, during the most critical moments for containment, because that is also when the disparity between markets is greatest (resulting in the largest possible leftward shift in the demand curve, and consequent drop in price of the good. Another way to think about this is realizing that if everyone was quarantined, the price differential would disappear.)

Does incentivizing entry into quarantine encourage or restrict the spread of disease?  If the success of a quarantine has less to do with its comprehensiveness than its imporosity, incentivizing entry would likely pose a big problem.  If nothing else, a comprehensive quarantine response which included goods would probably over-emphasize the affect of an outbreak on the poor.   And I think it’s important to note that incentivisation could happen organically, not as result of any program.

Because the moment of incentive occurs when a good is flagged as quarantined, our choice is either 1) don’t mark goods, and have no quarantine or 2) mark goods, and incentivize entry into quarantine.  Which is worse? Too much quarantine, or not enough?

If you’d like an overview of the work, BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography have written posts on the topic; I’d like to talk about Daniel Perlin’s project.  Perlin, a New York-based DJ and sound artist, derived the inspiration for his project from a recent visit to China, where he saw systems set up (if I recall correctly, in a hotel lobby) that use infrared technology to screen for humans with abnormally high body temperatures (i.e. the sick).  The system is composed of a camera, an automated interpretative computer system, a screen on which the computer displays a live feed from the camera overlaid with data points tagging people in view with temperature readings, an attendant, and an alarm (heard by the attendant through an ear piece), all of which appears senseable at first pass, as it seems reasonable that one could use an infrared camera to measure body temperatures and thereby locate (and quarantine) those running fevers.   But Perlin noted a variety of ways in which the system can and does malfunction, from operator error (Perlin noted that the attendant was not, in fact, wearing the warning ear bud and so would have missed any warning tones the system generated) to mis-measurement.  This sets the system up for two kinds of failure: the inappropriate extension of quarantine (the system mistakenly identifies healthy people as sick and so actually participates in spreading disease, which Perlin, with good cause, described as the most horrific consequence of quarantine he could imagine) and a failure to protect the population (the system fails to identify and quarantine the sick).

Though Perlin’s project explores the former possibility, the latter fascinates me, as it reminds me of the concept of “security theater”, coined by Bruce Schneier to describe the ways in which the public apparatus of security (at airports, government buildings, schools, transit stations, etc.) exists primarily not to provide security, as those measures are demonstrably ineffective, but to provide a fearful public with the illusion of security.

Is there, then, a subset of quarantine practices that ought to be termed “quarantine theater”?  Practices which exist not to protect the public from contagion, but to illegitimately pacify the public?  As Schneier notes in a recent post on security theater, this has both sinister implications (the practices of quarantine theater might divert important resources away from effective quarantine practices, or produce a false sense of security leading the public to ignore simple but vital practices) and more benign implications (providing a sense of security is not necessarily a bad thing, even if it illusory, if it permits normal life to continue in the face of potential threat).

Of course, this raises the nasty possibility that some of the other participants’ projects or project topics (Front Studio’s fascinating quarantined city-within-a-city, for instance, or, more extremely, deep geological waste repositories such as Onkalo in Finland, which Smudge Studio’s project explores) are themselves instances of quarantine theater, perhaps necessarily subject to the same sorts of systemic breakdowns.  I’d love to see a project which explores what would happen if, for instance, one combined Front Studio’s key insight (that quarantine could be a distributed condition interspersed within the city) with Perlin’s key insight (that quarantine might be inherently failure-prone), and sought to design a quarantine that is both distributed and redundant.

[You'll find lots more on security theater in James Fallows's archives at the Atlantic, though you'll have to dig around within the "terrorism/security" tag]