Page 130 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

angry. It is crucial to remember that anger, joy, boredom and
love are biological phenomena just like fever and a cough.

The same technology that identifies coughs could also
identify laughs. If corporations and governments start
harvesting our biometric data en masse, they can get to know
us far better than we know ourselves, and they can then not

just predict our feelings but also manipulate our feelings and
sell us anything they want — be it a product or a politician.
Biometric monitoring would make Cambridge Analytica’s data
hacking tactics look like something from the Stone Age.

Imagine North Korea in 2030, when every citizen has to wear
a biometric bracelet 24 hours a day. If you listen to a speech
by the Great Leader and the bracelet picks up the tell-tale
signs of anger, you are done for. [128]

We will have been warned! Some social commentators like
Evgeny Morozov go even further, convinced that the pandemic
heralds a dark future of techno-totalitarian state surveillance. His
argument, premised upon the concept of “technological

solutionism” put forward in a book written in 2012, posits that the
tech “solutions” offered to contain the pandemic will necessarily
take the surveillance state to the next level. He sees evidence of
this in two distinct strands of “solutionism” in government

responses to the pandemic that he has identified. On the one
hand, there are “progressive solutionists” who believe that the
appropriate exposure through an app to the right information
about infection could make people behave in the public interest.

On the other hand, there are “punitive solutionists” determined to
use the vast digital surveillance infrastructure to curb our daily
activities and punish any transgressions. What Morozov perceives
as the greatest and ultimate danger to our political systems and

liberties is that the “successful” example of tech in monitoring and
containing the pandemic will then “entrench the solutionist toolkit
as the default option for addressing all other existential problems
– from inequality to climate change. After all, it is much easier to

deploy solutionist tech to influence individual behaviour than it is
to ask difficult political questions about the root causes of these
crises”. [129]

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