INTRODUCTION
1. MACRO RESET
1.6. Technological reset
1.6.3. The risk of dystopia
the same will now happen with the tech solutions put into place to contain the pandemic. They foresee a dystopian world ahead of us.
name of protecting public safety. Then, without realizing it, we will fall victims of new surveillance powers that will never recede and that could be repurposed as a political means for more sinister ends.
As the last few pages have exposed beyond a reasonable doubt, the
pandemic could open an era of active health surveillance made possible by location-detecting smartphones, facial-recognition cameras and other
technologies that identify sources of infection and track the spread of a disease in quasi real time.
Despite all the precautions certain countries take to control the power of tech and limit surveillance (others are not so concerned), some thinkers worry about how some of the quick choices we make today will influence our societies for years to come. The historian Yuval Noah Harari is one of them. In a recent article, he argues that we’ll have a fundamental choice to make between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. It’s worth exposing his argument in detail:
Surveillance technology is developing at breakneck speed, and what seemed science-fiction 10 years ago is today old news. As a thought experiment, consider a hypothetical government that demands that every citizen wears a biometric bracelet that monitors body temperature and heart-rate 24 hours a day. The resulting data is hoarded and analysed by government
algorithms. The algorithms will know that you are sick even before you know it, and they will also know where you have been, and who you have met. The chains of infection could be drastically shortened, and even cut altogether. Such a system could arguably stop the epidemic in its tracks within days.
Sounds wonderful, right? The downside is, of course, that this would give legitimacy to a terrifying new surveillance system. If you know, for example, that I clicked on a Fox News link rather than a CNN link, that can teach you something about my
political views and perhaps even my personality. But if you can monitor what happens to my body temperature, blood pressure and heart-rate as I watch the video clip, you can learn what makes me laugh, what makes me cry, and what makes me really, really angry. It is crucial to remember that anger, joy, boredom
and love are biological phenomena just like fever and a cough.
The same technology that identifies coughs could also identify laughs. If corporations and governments start harvesting our biometric data en masse, they can get to know us far better than we know ourselves, and they can then not just predict our
feelings but also manipulate our feelings and sell us anything they want — be it a product or a politician. Biometric
monitoring would make Cambridge Analytica’s data hacking tactics look like something from the Stone Age. Imagine North Korea in 2030, when every citizen has to wear a biometric bracelet 24 hours a day. If you listen to a speech by the Great Leader and the bracelet picks up the tell-tale signs of anger, you are done for. [128]
We will have been warned! Some social commentators like Evgeny
Morozov go even further, convinced that the pandemic heralds a dark future of techno-totalitarian state surveillance. His argument, premised upon the concept of “technological solutionism” put forward in a book written in 2012, posits that the tech “solutions” offered to contain the pandemic will necessarily take the surveillance state to the next level. He sees evidence of this in two distinct strands of “solutionism” in government responses to the pandemic that he has identified. On the one hand, there are “progressive solutionists” who believe that the appropriate exposure through an app to the right information about infection could make people behave in the public interest. On the other hand, there are “punitive solutionists”
determined to use the vast digital surveillance infrastructure to curb our daily activities and punish any transgressions. What Morozov perceives as the greatest and ultimate danger to our political systems and liberties is that the “successful” example of tech in monitoring and containing the
pandemic will then “entrench the solutionist toolkit as the default option for addressing all other existential problems – from inequality to climate
change. After all, it is much easier to deploy solutionist tech to influence individual behaviour than it is to ask difficult political questions about the root causes of these crises”. [129]
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Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher who resisted oppressive authority all his life, famously said: “Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.” This is a good guiding principle to conclude this chapter, along with the thought that nothing is inevitable and that we must be symmetrically aware of both good and bad outcomes. Dystopian scenarios are not a fatality. It is true that in the post-pandemic era, personal health and well- being will become a much greater priority for society, which is why the genie of tech surveillance will not be put back into the bottle. But it is for those who govern and each of us personally to control and harness the benefits of technology without sacrificing our individual and collective values and freedoms.