Optimal virulence and the Android lockdown

When you get a cold, the virus hijacks your cells and uses them to make copies of itself, destroying the cells in the process. The virus does not care about you. And yet, if you get a cold, your body doesn’t dissolve into a pile of virus-enriched goo as a result of all your cells disregarding survival to focus on virus manufacturing. Why? Well, you have an immune system. But also, if that did happen, other people would say, “Oh no, Alice has dissolved into a pile of virus-enriched goo; we should stay away lest we also become goo piles.” Better to just hijack some of your cells, so you can walk around and spread the virus to other people. Thus, the theory of optimal virulence says that a more laid-back cold virus will be more successful in the long run, which is why the cold viruses that thrive today are the non-goo-pile-converting kind. Anyway. Most people reading this have paid Apple $400-$1600 for a phone on which you can’t do anything without Apple’s permission and monitoring. That…

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