Alondra Nelson and Kate Crawford discuss how the Covid-19 pandemic has served as a pretext for tech companies and governmental institutions to push for a centralized set of surveillance tools despite their troubling legacies. The authors beg the question: as technological solutionism becomes normalized, what will be the legacy of our compliance? How can we engage in the politics of refusal?
Technology as panacea
The first keynote of the Association of Internet Researchers’s (AoIR) Conference 2020 comprised of a broadcast featuring Kate Crawford and Alondra Nelson in a spirited discussion over “The Pandemic as Pretext: The Politics after Covid 19.” The keynote began with a proposition that technological infrastructures have been ushered in at this time of crisis to detangle the plethora of issues engendered or heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic. For instance, the WHO reports that contact tracing “will break the chains of transmission of an infectious disease and is thus an essential public health tool for controlling infectious disease outbreaks” (2020). However, Crawford argued that policy around contact tracing apps threatens to undermine public trust. She brought up that, in the UK, the Department of Health and Social Care was to grant law enforcement access to test-and-trace data in order to better enforce isolation regulation. Who can access the backend of test-and-trace applications? What channels do these data flow through? How long are they kept for? There appears to be minimal supervision over the infrastructuralisation of these technologies.
Long-term effects and the digital divide
Nelson challenges the notion that a state of emergency should call for the increased use of surveillance technologies. When analog solutions like social distancing and face masks have proven to be effective, why is there a need for full-scale surveillance technology? The author heralds the long-term consequences of the centralization of policing power around technology companies and recalls that many still live with the “terrorist” infrastructures established after 9/11 such as facial recognition algorithms. Crawford complements that “coming out of this period, we will have set up these infrastructures to keep.” In other words, not only should we question the necessity of implementing widespread surveillance practices before examining analog alternatives, but we should remain vigilant because history suggests that technological surveillance will follow us out of the crisis period.
In addition, we need to look at the effects of the pandemic from an intersectional angle. Surveillance measures are bound to affect different populations asymmetrically. For instance, the proposal to make tracker applications mandatory on smartphones presupposes the ownership of a smartphone. For those who cannot afford the luxury of an app-tracker, it is likely that they will be supplied with wearable technologies such as bracelets in order to effectuate technocratic control. However, Crawford underlines that the experience of these wearables is akin to that of incarceration. This digital divide prompts us to consider how marginalized communities have previously been the targets of state violence. After all, as Nelson points out, our health systems are ‘politics made material’ and as such, they reveal the contempt and dehumanization of the marginalized. The author continues that it is for this reason that movements like the Black Panthers expressed a profound and tragic distrust of the state, positing that black bodies are the center of dialectics of both hyper surveillance and neglect at once.
The seductive power of the promise of normalcy
Yet, people are not blind to the acceleration of totalizing surveillance. Nevertheless, Crawford suggests that people are eager to accept whatever regulations are on the table for a chance at a return to normalcy. We are happy to accept biometric surveillance and tracking technologies should that mean that we will be able to inhabit public spaces, return to workplaces and schools, go out for dinner. However, the two authors remind us that any return to normalcy ‘requires a return to care and humanization of our lives.’ In other words, we need to make room for public debate on these issues and question how technocratic control implemented through surveillance technologies will affect, now and in the long
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