Abstract
<jats:p>The COVID-19 pandemic will go down in history as a major crisis, with calls for debt moratoriums that are expected to have gruesome effects in the Global South. Another tale of this crisis that would come to dominate COVID-19 news across the world was a new technological application:
the contact tracing apps. In this article, we argue that both accounts ‐ economic implications for the Global South and the ideology of techno-solutionism ‐ are closely related. We map the phenomenon of the tracing app onto past and present wealth accumulations. To understand
these exploitative realities, we focus on the implications of contact tracing apps and their relation with extractive technologies as we build on the notion racial capitalism. By presenting themselves in isolation of capitalism and extractivism, contact tracing apps hide raw realities, concealing
the supply chains that allow the production of these technologies and the exploitative conditions of labour that make their computational magic manifest itself. As a result of this artificial separation, the technological solutionism of contract tracing apps is ultimately presented as a moral
choice between life and death. We regard our work as requiring continuous <jats:italic>undoing</jats:italic> ‐ a necessary but unfinished formal dismantling of colonial structures through decolonial resistance.</jats:p>
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 9.1-9.9 |
Number of pages | 0 |
Journal | Journal of Environmental Media |
Volume | 1 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Aug 2020 |