Paper short abstract:

From “viral vaccine conspiracies” to “vaccine mind-viruses,” analogies to viruses have grown very common in accounts of (mis-)information diffusion. Situating these analogies ethnographically, they come to indicate a “partially shared” concept of political disagreement, here named “capto-politics”.

Paper long abstract:

Analogies to viruses have become commonplace explanations in accounts of online (mis-)information diffusion: “it went viral”, we say, to describe content that circulates widely among many users. In particular, from “viral vaccine conspiracies” to “woke vaccine mind-viruses,” in the aftermath of the pandemic they have become omnipresent in discussions of vaccine politics. This research turns to these analogies as an object of investigation, recovering an under-analyzed connection between people that do not trust vaccine-based immunology, and people that “stand for” it: the use of analogies to viruses and viral diffusion as explanations of vaccine controversies. By situating this thought-practice ethnographically through both vaccine hesitant and pro-vaccine thinkers, it surfaces as a style of explanation that designates disagreement within controversies as the result of programmed, captured actors whose collective capacity to reason has been trapped and taken over by an external force — foreclosing analyses that see it as emergent from choices or decisions that are politically and epistemically meaningful in their own terms. In this light, vaccine hesitant and pro-vaccine thinkers appear linked by a partially shared concept of disagreement, which here I call “capto-political”: explanations of disagreement that hinge on appeals to heteronomous interests, whose presence subsumes its political purchase as uncoupled from those that populate it. Tracing this partially shared capto-politics through vaccine debates, vaccine hesitant and pro-vaccine thinkers surface as not only opposed, but also, following Heidi Larson (2020), as “stuck together” — or, like I suggest in this article, “co-captured.”