Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses how the platform companies have become the ecology of social life. It focuses on the tension between politics of poverty and that of biopolitics in populous countries like India. The book argues that a pathological continuum facing humanity from the common cold to cancer invests Covid with an added sense of dilemma when it comes to tackling it using biomedicine through methods of herd immunity or vaccination. The book explores the tenuous links between immunity and immunization in the pandemic discourse of power. It discusses the migrant labour as a political phenomenon; an instance of healing in the pandemic escaping the disciplinary practices of the lockdown. The book surveys the conceptualization of the formation of such phenomena as masses and multitudes that stand out as political or becoming political due to an inner dynamic of people turning into multiplicities.