COVID-19 is the first global pandemic to emerge on such a wide scale and to such grave effect in an advanced phase of so-called “datafied society”. We find ourselves at a turning point in our understanding of what it means to live in an era dominated by digital data transformation in nearly every field of human activity. A situation as extreme as the one we are experiencing in these weeks of variably strict lockdown, inevitably exposes the nuances of this phenomenon, from its most beneficial to its most potentially disturbing aspects.
To find a comparable moment – such an all-encompassing stress-test of the cultural assumptions and foundations of society as a whole – one has to go back to the 9/11 attacks. But 2001 and 2020 have little in common in terms of technological ecosystems and digital infrastructure; consequently the social and political impacts are equally dissimilar.
At the core of a datafied society is the production of data and their use to create added value, from traffic management to the improvement of the state output, from targeted advertising on digital platforms to the contact tracing apps designed to fight COVID-19. Even in normal circumstances, we generate most of this data ourselves, through our smartphones, our interactions on social media, online banking and shopping. The large-scale monetisation of data regarding our preferences and behaviour strengthens the monopoly of corporations like Google and Amazon, their analyses and predictions.
