COVID-19 and techno-solutionism: responsibilization without contextualization?

We are delighted to act as the Special Section Editors for a subsection of the papers in this Special Issue on public health and COVID-19. The three papers in question emanate from the same large, multinational research project – Solidarity in Times of Pandemics or SolPan – a project that has sought to study the motivations and values underpinning people’s practices as they cope with and reflect on the political, economic, and sociocultural impacts of the pandemic. Putting the participants’ voices at the centre, the three papers in this Special Section highlight different and complementary citizens’ perspectives on the implementation of technologies to alleviate the spread of COVID-19.

Since the onset of the pandemic, and underpinned by often promissory undertones in policy discourse, an array of technological solutions have come to be regarded as privileged modes of intervention to curb the spread of COVID-19. Yet all too often the policies around COVID technologies have suffered from a spectrum of shortcomings or ‘fallacies’ (Jasanoff et al., 2021), which, notwithstanding the distinctiveness of each country’s policies, have characterized the pandemic response of most (liberal) democracies globally. In particular, the rollout of COVID interventions in many countries has tended to replicate a mode of intervention based on ‘technological fixes’ and ‘silver-bullet solutions’, which tend to erase contextual factors and marginalize other rationales, values, and social functions that do not explicitly support technology-based innovation efforts (Jasanoff et al., 2021). As Hill et al. (2022) in this Special Section argue, driving public health policy through such techno-solutionism only risks exacerbating existing social inequalities and mistrust in governments.

In two of this Special Section’s papers, digital contact tracing emerges as a revealing test case for how public health and policy approaches governing the pandemic across large swathes of the globe have been approached (Lucivero et al., 2021; Samuel et al., 2022). Digital contact-tracing systems and exposure-notification technologies were envisaged to play a particularly prominent role in containing the spread of the virus. And it is in these specific digital solutions that many governments’ techno-solutionism approach can be most easily discerned.

For one, COVID-19 techno-solutionism relies on an often obscure mix of public-private partnerships. In Europe, as early as March 2020, Austria and Germany were frontrunners in deploying digital solutions for contact tracing (Zimmermann et al., 2021), with several other European countries following suit, through the launch of tender procedures and public calls for potential app developers as well as ‘appathons’ to assess the possibilities of these proposed technological interventions (Lanzing et al., 2021). Notwithstanding critical voices noting the heavy reliance on private companies, the opacity of the decision-making process, and the top-down governance procedures adopted, these developments resulted in the swift rollout of digital contact-tracing systems: so-called ‘Covid apps’ are now in use in 19 out of 27 EU Member States plus Switzerland (Blasimme et al., 2021). In parallel, national and European institutions started to develop the attending technical and legal infrastructure. For instance, after the approval of the relevant framework for cross-border transfers of personal data in July (EC, 2020), the EU interoperability gateway went live in October, ensuring the interconnection of the mobile contact-tracing applications developed throughout the Union.

All the while, Google and Apple threw their digital might behind these national and European efforts, announcing, on April 10, the launch of a collaborative Application Program Interface (API), based on low-energy Bluetooth and decentralized data gathering (Lanzing et al., 2021). Despite concerns as to Big Tech’s dominance, the lack of public accountability and control, and the surreptitious privatization of public health functions (French et al., 2020; Floridi, 2020; Sharon, 2021), the majority of European apps have been running on Google and Apple’s API (Lanzing et al., 2021). Similar concerns have been voiced regarding the sole reliance on private pharmaceutical manufacturers for the production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations, despite substantial public investment in the vaccines’ development and despite increasing mobilization against mounting global vaccine inequity (Geiger & McMahon, 2021).

Almost two years since their initial rollout, the rate of uptake of mobile applications has been rather limited, largely stagnating below the 50% threshold with regard to downloads and actual usage for most European countries (liberties.eu, 2021). This figure appears to be a somewhat meager return, particularly when factoring in the number of more recent downloads that owe app usage solely to the EU digital COVID certificate. It is also far less than the rate of active users initially targeted by public health authorities to prop up the effectiveness of the system – 60%, according to a widely cited (yet often misrepresented) epidemiological model from Oxford University’s Big Data Institute released in April 2020 (O’Neill, 2020; Oxford University, 2020). Again, the sluggish uptake of this public health intervention, in many countries, is emblematic of the ambivalence (and sometimes downright opposition) toward other Covid-19 technologies, including vaccines.

As the papers in this Special Section indicate, the motives for people’s tepid response to COVID-19 technologies and policies are manifold and highly context-specific, ranging from concerns over additional layers of digital control and practices of surveillance, to skepticism around the value of interventions, the perceived lack of both adequate governance and infrastructural capacity, and an unwillingness to engage with this type of sociotechnical ‘experiment’ (see also, Lucivero et al., 2020).

The deployment of many COVID-19 related interventions has been premised on a perceived linear progression from science to applications to ethics, which entails delegating decisions about potentially sweeping social reconfigurations to innovation experts and scientists, with scant attention paid to the views, expectations, and normative-contextual stances articulated by publics and citizens. Yet, as the papers in this Special Section contend, forward-looking, anticipatory strategies for public engagement are vital even in time-pressured situations if new pandemic-containment technologies are to be effectively weaved within existing social fabrics.

Relatedly, the framing of public health interventions on the part of governments and public health authorities has tended to systematically downplay epistemic uncertainties, while attempting to neutralize moral disagreement and to erase scientific conflict. Epistemically, the evidence underpinning modes of intervention and the design of technological solutions to contain the pandemic has inevitably been probabilistic, especially in the early stages of their deployment. Consider, for instance, the heated debates around the (contested) evidence supporting claims as to the effectiveness of COVID vaccines in preventing onward transmission of the virus. Yet, this inherent limitation has not often been recognized and adequately accounted for in the policy discourse, which can lead to an erosion of public trust, interruption of use, or lack of uptake.

In addition, a sizeable portion of the pandemic containment measures has been centered on soft law provisions and governance tools entailing a delegation of agency and responsibility to citizens, who have been called upon to assess, interpret, and tailor the rules with their attending scientific evidence (regarding e.g. physical distancing, or safety protocols in businesses) to the specific contexts of their application. Moreover, even when enforced by sanctions, the success of these measures – with COVID apps being a conspicuous case in point – has hinged on citizens’ proactive and voluntary engagement, in a system of interlinked, shared responsibilities between public health authorities and the citizenry (Tallacchini, 2020). Yet, as the papers in this Special Section attest, such a prominent role played by the citizenry has not often been accompanied by extensive public engagement nor by efforts at contextualizing policies to people’s lived experiences, fears, and beliefs.

Not wishing to abstract from the pain and devastation that COVID-19 has brought upon so many, we see the current pandemic as a priceless opportunity for governments across the globe to become citizen-centric in their public health responses in the best sense of the word: engaging with citizens from the outset in an effort to insert public health solutions into their lifeworlds rather than erasing differences through technological silver bullets. Citizen responsibilization has to go hand in glove with broad citizen engagement and contextualization. The alternative, as the papers in this Special Section demonstrate, is an outright rejection of public health measures at worst and ‘muted adherence’ at best (Hill et al., 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work has been funded by Fondazione Cariplo (Social Science Research Grant 2020-1314) (LM).