“The coronavirus panic is dumb,” tweeted Elon Musk in early March 2020, his first public comment on COVID-19. (It was also his first tweet to earn more than one million likes.) To him, the true virus was informational. The cybernetic collective of social media functioned like a communal id, where posts spread not because of their truth but their “limbic resonance.” “You can’t talk people out of a good panic,” Musk told Joe Rogan, “They sure love it.” By late March, he had landed on a new phrase for the phenomenon: a “mind virus.” Article continues after advertisement It was an interesting choice of words. Social media virality had been Musk’s great asset, the mechanism through which he converted attention into value. But here, virality was being invoked in a negative sense: it wasn’t just about circulation but sickness.…