Bio or Zoe?: dilemmas of biopolitics and data governmentality during COVID-19

Abstract

ABSTRACT Heralding the self-brand of ‘K-prevention’ (nuanced with nationalistic pride in line with K-wave, K-pop, etc.), Korea has operated within two methods of articulation against COVID-19. One method involves granting the population relative freedom within the actual, physical realm, while the other method involves strengthening data surveillance within the virtual realm. This articulation of the actual and the virtual, and of freedom and surveillance, is at the core of Korea’s biopolitical governmentality, which is currently intertwined not only with an infectious virus, but also with data technology. I would like to suggest a slight silver lining with respect to the possibility of overcoming this dilemma: a dilemma that involves physical survival under data colonialism on the one hand, and freedom from data colonialism on the other – both elements complicated by the potential risk of transmission. This may be a starting point toward digital democracy in the age of pandemics: social equality for life instead of augmenting the thanapolitical database; respect toward vulnerable singularities instead of deceitful exclusion; and sensitivity toward redressing embedded inequality instead of reinforcing stigmatization. We must, in other words, reinvent an ethics of vulnerability and a politics of dependency as guiding principles for living together in pandemic times.