The enforcement of governance by numbers (Supiot Citation2017) has been accelerated, accompanied by the utopian faith in smart technology and data analytics to solve our problems, predict the future, and optimize ourselves out of the crisis. As with 9/11, COVID-19 has led to the intensification of data-sharing across governmental and private–public infrastructures, now in the name of the war on the virus. Our health and behaviours have become the target of “regulatory capitalism” (Levi-Faur Citation2017) reliant on technocratic expert systems. New rules, prohibitions, regulation, laws, measures, and penalties have been introduced, eased, and reintroduced in response to predictive statistical and epidemiological models, graphs, charts, indicators, and aesthetically powerful data visualizations – seductive for their simplicity, elegantly removing context and ambiguity.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across the globe rapidly developed new intelligent surveillance technologies and embraced near-real-time data-driven governance – in close collaboration with private tech companies – relying on lockdowns, behavioural engineering, vaccine and immunity passports, building on pre-existing digital surveillance infrastructures. Some of us are actually sitting in the fucking middle of it and we may never learn to care in time. You see it and shiver but it’s also kind of fun because it’s happening somewhere else, to someone else, you know? It requires distance.
And yet it appears in recent postcolonial dystopian literature from India, Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits and Prayaag Akbar’s Leila, which this article reads as illuminating the extreme endpoint of this delirious governance.ĭystopia is pornographic, Olamina. While the rise of technocratic autocracy and security regimes has been remarked upon, the simultaneous return of bonds of allegiance has been to a large degree overlooked. In his analysis of governance by numbers, Alain Supiot shows how this form of governance ushers in a return of ties of allegiance and the re-emergence of feudalism in new guises. The real has come to mirror the structure of dystopian fiction. Pandemic governance has enforced an extreme governance by numbers. Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technocratic near-real-time data-driven governance, in that new rules, measures, and prohibitions have been introduced and revoked in response to predictive statistical and epidemiological models, graphs, charts, and aesthetically powerful data visualizations.
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