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Jeudi 11 juin, Zeynep Tufekci invitée des Matins de France Culture

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Zeynep Tufekci, l’autrice de « Twitter & les gaz lacrymogènes » sera ce jeudi 11 juin l’invitée exceptionnelle des Matins de France Culture. Elle sera interviewée par Guillaume Erner de 7h45 à 8h45.

L’occasion, en direct ou en podcast, de mieux connaître cette « technosociologue » dont nous avons publié la traduction française (par Anne Lemoine, qui a fait un excellent travail).

Twitter & les gaz lacrymogènes
Forces et fragilités de la contestation connectée
Zeynep Tufekci
ISBN 978-2-915825-95-4 - 430 p. - 29 €
►https://cfeditions.com/lacrymo

Zeynep Tufekci est de plus en plus remarquée aux États-Unis et partout dans le monde pour les suites qu’elle a donné à son livre, en particulier dans des éditoriaux dans The Atlantic ou The New York Times. Elle a été, dès le mois de janvier, une des premières à promouvoir la « distanciation sociale » et le port du masque, quand son pays ne croyais pas au virus. Elle revenait de Hong Kong et avait pu comprendre la situation. De même, elle est en pointe sur les questions des médias sociaux et de l’élection de Trump (notamment le débat actuel entre Twitter et Facebook). Elle est enfin partie prenante des mobilisations anti-racistes qui secouent les États-Unis (et qui s’étendent, notamment chez nous). Le bon moment pour une interview.

Je vous mets ci-après pour celles et ceux qui lisent l’anglais une liste de référence de ses articles récents sur ces sujets.

Nous avons également produit un petit livre numérique autour de Zeynep Tufekci, intitulé « Le monde révolté ». Celui-ci comporte la traduction d’un texte autobiographique de Zeynep et un long article de Gus Massiah. Il est gratuit (complètement, on ne demande même pas de mail ou autre, cadeau on vous dit). Vous pouvez l’obtenir à :
►https://cfeditions.com/monde-revolte

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Bonne écoute et bonne lecture,

Hervé Le Crosnier

Voici quelques références récentes sur les publications de Zeynep Tufekci en anglais pour celles et ceux qui lisent la langue de Shakespeare.

Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S. - Scientific American Blog Network
►https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/preparing-for-coronavirus-to-strike-the-u-s

Opinion | Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired - The New York Times
►https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html

What Really Doomed America’s Coronavirus Response - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-really-doomed-americas-coronavirus-response/608596

Closing the Parks Is Ineffective Pandemic Theater - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/closing-parks-ineffective-pandemic-theater/609580

Don’t Wear a Mask for Yourself - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/dont-wear-mask-yourself/610336

Trump’s Executive Order Isn’t About Twitter - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/trumps-executive-order-isnt-about-twitter/612349

The Case for Social Media Mobs - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/case-social-media-mobs/612202

How a Bad App—Not the Russians—Plunged Iowa Into Chaos - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/bad-app-not-russians-plunged-iowa-into-chaos/606052

Hong Kong Protests : Inside the Chaos - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/escalating-violence-hong-kong-protests/601804

#Zeynep_Tufekci #France_Culture

What Really Doomed America’s Coronavirus Response - The Atlantic
►https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-really-doomed-americas-coronavirus-response/608596

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par Zeynep Tufekci

Many will be tempted to see the tragic coronavirus pandemic through a solely partisan lens: The Trump administration spectacularly failed in its response, by cutting funding from essential health services and research before the crisis, and later by denying its existence and its severity. Those are both true, but they don’t fully explain the current global crisis that has engulfed countries of varying political persuasions.

As it turns out, the reality-based, science-friendly communities and information sources many of us depend on also largely failed. We had time to prepare for this pandemic at the state, local, and household level, even if the government was terribly lagging, but we squandered it because of widespread asystemic thinking: the inability to think about complex systems and their dynamics. We faltered because of our failure to consider risk in its full context, especially when dealing with coupled risk—when multiple things can go wrong together. We were hampered by our inability to think about second- and third-order effects and by our susceptibility to scientism—the false comfort of assuming that numbers and percentages give us a solid empirical basis. We failed to understand that complex systems defy simplistic reductionism.

These pieces were neither exceptional nor exceptionally bad. In fact, they were routine examples of the common sentiment among mainstream media. There was coverage of the coronavirus, but we did not have what we desperately needed: the clear and loud warning that a tsunami was about to land on our shores, and that we needed to start getting ready, immediately. The appropriate message for a tsunami headed our way isn’t that it’s not a threat “for now” or that we should worry about falling in the tub instead. A massive reaction would not have been an overreaction at all; it would have been appropriate. If nothing else, that China’s efficient top-down regime, which highly values its own survival, was willing to take such drastic steps was a sign that the coronavirus was a profound threat.

This complacency went on until about early March, when the severity of the crisis finally sunk in, seemingly only after Italy started suffering the same kind of crisis that had hit Wuhan months earlier.

Many pieces with these flu comparisons usually included discussions of R0 and case-fatality rate, but numbers alone do not make science or sensible risk calculation in complex systems. We needed instead to think about these numbers and measurements in the context of the global system, including how epidemics and the health-care infrastructure work, and consider the trade-offs between resilience, efficiency, and redundancy within the system, and how the second- and third-order impacts can reverberate.

Health systems are prone to nonlinear dynamics exactly because hospitals are resource-limited entities that necessarily strive for efficiency. Hospitals in wealthy nations have some slack built in for surge capacity, but not that much. As a result, they can treat only so many people at once, and they have particular bottlenecks for their most expensive parts, such as ventilators and ICUs. The flu season may be tragic for its victims; however, an additional, unexpected viral illness in the same season isn’t merely twice as tragic as the flu, even if it has a similar R0 or CFR: It is potentially catastrophic.

Worse, COVID-19 wasn’t even just another flu-like illness. By January 29, it was clear that COVID-19 caused severe primary pneumonia in its victims, unlike the flu, which tends to leave patients susceptible to opportunistic, secondary pneumonia. That’s like the difference between a disease that drops you in the dangerous part of town late at night and one that does the mugging itself. COVID-19’s characteristics made it clear that the patients would need a lot of intensive, expensive resources, as severe pneumonia patients do: ICU beds, ventilators, negative-pressure rooms, critical-care nurses.

This is why the case-fatality rate for COVID-19 was never a sufficient indicator of its threat. If emergency rooms and ICUs are overloaded from COVID-19, we will see more deaths from everything else: from traffic accidents, heart attacks, infections, seasonal influenza, falls and traumas—basically anything that requires an emergency-room response to survive. If COVID-19 causes a shortage of masks for emergency-room workers, hospitals will stop everything that looks “elective” or nonurgent to fight that fire, but that means people will then suffer and die from things that those surgeries were intended to treat or improve. An angioplasty may not be urgent that week, but it is still a lifesaving intervention without which more people will die. This is true for even seemingly optional health interventions: If people can’t get knee-replacement surgeries, for example, they will be less active, which will increase their health risks.

The phrase flatten the curve is an example of systems thinking. It calls for isolation and distancing not because one is necessarily at great risk from COVID-19, but because we need to not overwhelm hospitals with infections in the aggregate. Also, R0 is not a fixed number: If we isolate ourselves, infectiousness decreases. If we keep traveling and congregating, it increases. Flattening the curve is a system’s response to try to avoid a cascading failure, by decreasing R0 as well as the case-fatality rate by understanding how systems work.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Coronavirus #Approche_systémique