The developing narratives of pandemic surveillance

Abstract

Narratives about surveillance are techno-social affordances, or features of the technology itself. We have insufficiently theorized how these loops between narrative and technology occur and how to leverage them to "authoritarian proof" pandemic surveillance technologies. This chapter examines why the path of pandemic surveillance narratives has been so hard to chart and predict, and why digital apps that help a population fight a deadly disease have been so difficult to deploy without contributing to democratic decline. Technology works well given some narratives, works poorly given others, and the narratives change and iterate. A well-designed app within a privacy-compromised technological, political, and social framework is rightfully discarded by recipients - trust is a technological resource, and the technological design of an app has very little to do with its effectiveness as a disease-combating tool. We should consider how technological narratives around pandemic surveillance develop and what they are likely to mean, particularly for the affordances of the technology itself. These narratives have two primary characteristics: they are contingent and incommensurable. We can't predict the exact path of these narratives, but we can anticipate that they will develop within incommensurable linguistic communities rather than progress by logical extension from present narratives. And we can develop the kinds of linguistic communities that can combat misinformation and power grabs that harm citizen freedoms. We can address the generation of toxic narratives by building more robust and diverse communities of meaning, ones that focus on common values, diverse perspectives, and the inclusion of historically suppressed voices.