Tracing the smart virus in a smart city: a discursive analysis of Singapore’s early pandemic surveillance response

Abstract

ABSTRACT What happened to the smart city’s seductive promises of technological solutionism during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic? This paper traces the discursive circulation of the smart city in Singapore during the pandemic, based on a critical corpus-based analysis of 361 newspaper articles and 8 speeches from April to May 2020. Drawing from a discourse analysis, smart technological solutions were paired with a moral mandate of public health with little initial attention to privacy. The “smart” label creates a discursive path toward a technical frame, in which a smart virus is constructed to be necessarily solved by a smart solution. Further, the state legitimizes surveillance through a specific “will to combat,” limiting other paths of causality and co-opting civil liberties into its surveillance mechanisms. Newer technologies and ever-growing data collection mechanisms require continued conversations about privacy and civil liberties both with and among key stakeholders.