The Flat Plain of Informal Neutrality Squashes the Pyramid of State Sovereignty

By Philippa Hetherington

15 July 2020

In March 2020, as the world convulsed with paroxysms of sudden and systematic lockdown, epidemiologists and politicians turned to the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) to try to understand Covid19. The GPHIN is an alert and response system set up in 1997 and developed and funded by the Canadian government in collaboration with the WHO. The latter organisation calls it ‘one of the most important sources of informal information related to outbreaks’, praising the GPHIN’s system of scouring the internet for media reports of disease and operating as a ‘tripwire’ for pandemic preparedness. While observers have credited the GPHIN with playing a vital role in early warnings of SARS and H1N1, its success in 2020 has been more muted. Recent Canadian reports suggest that, right as Covid-19 was taking off, the system was undergoing a ‘technical upgrade’, in an effort to correct its outdated, 1990s understanding of the world’s Big Data landscape.

Why do health experts and government officials think the world needs a GPHIN? Obtaining and rapidly sharing information about local health crisis that may quickly turn into global pandemics seems an obvious necessity in our coronavirus times. But ‘information’ is not politically neutral. The way that information about disease is produced, interpreted, and acted upon is embedded within complex social, cultural and political environments. By extracting and collating such information from global media sources, the GPHIN presents a model of data’s ‘neutrality’ that works to obfuscate the operation of power working within and through it.

This projected neutrality is reflected in the GPHIN’s claims to ‘openness’, ‘transparency’ and ‘informality’. Such assertions rest on the idea that the method of ‘scraping the internet’ for advance warning of infectious disease ‘events’ allows the GPHIN to bypass state governments as information-producers. It further relies on the incorporation of unverified and informal information as well as government-preferred data. This ‘informal’ information is then incorporated by the WHO and analogous bodies, adding a new dimension to the global ‘surveillance-industrial complex.’ Sociologists Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy interviewed GPHIN officials in 2004, citing one as declaring confidently:

‘We were squashing the pyramid down to a flat plain in which information could come from any particular place at any time’ (italics mine).(2)

The flat plain of GPHIN stands in for the allegedly democratised international flow of information across borders; a flow supposedly unhindered by the territorialised sovereignty of the nation state. State information about pandemics is typified by a power vertical. Information produced and collated by an inter-governmental organisation (IGO) like the GPHIN is framed as horizontal and predicated on agent-less networks and unstoppable flows (mirroring the disease itself).

The notion that disease, and the information necessary to fight it, are and must be ‘cross-border’ or even ‘borderless’ figures the sovereign nation state as an uncomfortable barrier to the maintenance of the health of the global population. In this figuring, metaphors of pyramids become mixed with and collapsed into those of borders; just as the pyramid must be flattened, the border must be overcome.

Such pronouncements, however, belie two crucial modalities through which global health data, pandemic preparedness and biosecurity continue to operate. In the first place, as evidenced by the position of the GPHIN within the Canadian government health ecosystem and its reliance on (apparently insufficient) Canadian governmental funding, avowedly ‘neutral’ IGOs continue to be deeply implicated in state-driven data pyramids. The visuals produced by the GPHIN attempt to get around this is diverse ways. Thus, for example, in a diagram supposedly representing the operation of the GPHIN from the government’s 2015 ‘Canada Communicable Disease Report’, we see not the flat plain of the 2004 official’s utopia but an inverted pyramid (Fig 1.). This pyramid represents a simplified model presenting the inchoate world of health data as the base, and the slimmed-down, de-contextualized health ‘alerts’ as the pyramid’s tip (on which global biosecurity would precariously balance). This visual language is recapitulated in the diagram the Canadian government uses to represent the scalar relationship within their own health infrastructure between Federal, Provincial and Territorial bureaucracies, which also operate as data-producing entities (Figure 2).(4)

The entanglement of the GPHIN with regimes of global biosecurity points to the other wrinkle in the metaphor of a neutral flat plain. The information procured by the network operates to alert certain state governments of the presence of disease within the borders of other sovereign states and attempt to keep potential carriers of this disease out. As a result, this information is used to bolster one of the most direct applications of sovereign power by individual states: the repulsion of those who may bring disease. Such activities result not only in the operation of sovereign power on ‘diseased’ bodies but also on those perceived to be ‘potentially’ diseased, perceptions that are deeply gendered, raced and sexualised. Thus the ‘flat plain’ of information serves to balloon rather than to squash the vertically-integrated biopolitical regimes of modernity.