Nishant Shah
…for transformation of an identified current state into another
Pandemics are so overwhelming in their unfolding that they don’t allow us to recognize the multiple structures of safety and harms that intersect when pandemics unfold. In my own personal life, I was diagnosed with and receiving treatment for a rare form of cancer while undergoing the lockdown of the COVID19 pandemic. This meant that long after the lockdown measures were lifted and the Dutch government was pushing us to get things to normal in a post-vaccination world, I still had to manage my distance from people. My doctors had warned me that getting infected by the virus in the middle of the treatment might result in disruption of my life-saving treatment. At some point, their own recommendation was that I can meet people who have had 2 doses of the vaccines.
However, I had no idea of how to ask people about their vaccine status. Like in many parts of the world, the vaccines had become political ideological inflection points in The Netherlands. I had people in my immediate networks of kinship who were vaccine conspiracists and refused to vaccinate themselves. While there was a majority uptick of vaccination, there was no way of knowing whether somebody was vaccinated and whether they would be safe for me to share physical space and intimacy with. How do you ask family and friends to first declare their vaccine status and second to prove it, because people were not being honest for fear of backlash, about their vaccination status.
Image by Thirdman from Pexels
The restaurants and shops in Netherlands and many parts of Europe, were using a QR code based application which would show that you have received the suggested vaccine doses without revealing any other personal information. The QR code was connected to the government based database and used the state medical records as verification that marked you as safe from infecting others. Because this app was built for use by small and medium enterprises, anybody could download the app to both present and verify the QR code.
My medical practitioners suggested that I use this app as a way of managing my sociality and intimacy.
At the entrance to my home, was an industrial sized bottle of hand sanitizer, a stand to put your shoes in, and a digital tablet which would scan your QR code and let you enter if it was green. For the last part of my treatment I tried this. It allowed me to share physical space and intimacy with people who I had been completely cut off from.
But it also transformed my domestic space, my relationships of trust and intimacy, by a technological management of verification and authenticity. The presence of these technological devices, harmless as they might sound, completely transformed the ways in which I connect with others and how I relate to them.