Wear your digital mask, fight this virus like it’s the enemy: pandemic user-citizenship as platform-infrastructure entanglements

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper articulates the emergence of the user-citizen as a result of techno-solutionist approaches to pandemic management by tracing the rapid infrastructuralisation of surveillance in and through the platformisation of pandemic governance in Vietnam. Coinciding with Vietnam’s rollout of chip-based national identification cards for citizens over the age of 14, the development of a one-stop ‘super-app’ solution that streamlines data flows across different domains of authority happened in a context where platforms were increasingly discussed alongside, and understood on the same terms as, infrastructure. By conducting situational analysis of publicly available policy documents and official government communication, the paper traces how pandemic platforms contract and expand in response to evolving pandemic management needs, and gives an account of the evolution of institutional dependency across different domains of authority and technology development. Using Vietnam as a case study, this paper contributes to ongoing theorisation at the intersection of platformisation and infrastructuralisation in pandemic social service provision. The paper is an invitation to examine the increasing entanglements of technology and citizenship performances around the world as they unfold throughout the course of the pandemic and beyond.