The current outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic may be seen as a litmus test for different institutions of contemporary society – the viability of production structures based on global value chains, the solidity of health systems built (or, rather, dismantled) in the period of neoliberalism, and, more generally, the ability of the ‘nightwatchman’ neoliberal state to ensure the security and survival of the population.
One of the things that the Covid-19 outbreak is increasingly revealing is how pervasive the surveillance mechanisms, developed in the last decade or so, have become. In an effort to contain the spread of the virus, governments all over the world are adopting various surveillance and monitoring technologies: tracking those who have been tested positive and informing the public about their movements with ‘travel logs’ (as, for example, in South Korea); monitoring the movements of individuals to ensure their compliance with the policies of quarantine or confinement (as, for instance, in China, Israel and Singapore, as well as in Italy, Germany and Austria); or using such technologies to optimize the use of resources in hospitals (as in the UK).
As has always been the case with modern surveillance – and with technology more generally, which, as Melvin Kranzberg famously observed, “is neither good or bad, nor is it neutral” – it may produce positive and socially beneficial outcomes, and in the current context the adoption of such measures seems justified. However, digital surveillance has always carried with a risk of doing more harm than good – to undermine various individual rights (privacy, freedom of speech, labour rights, freedom from gender or racial discrimination, etc.) and to threaten the existence of democratic institutions and politics.
