Nishant Shah
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The Technological Pandemic: Building a critical inquiry framework
by Nishant Shah
Pandemics Persist. They recede, are managed, resurface, mutate, and become endemic so that what was once seen as a threat, becomes a part of our viral and microbial ecosystems. And yet, the very beginning of the global experience of the COVID19 pandemic was marked by an imaginary of the post-pandemic. Multiple authorities responsible for the management of the pandemic, kept on reassuring us that if we did what was told, tried hard enough, and gave it our best, we will reach a post-pandemic future where things will be back to normal. The pandemic has multiple facets – biological, economical, social, political, and financial resilience and sustenance were all heavily impacted by the management of the pandemic.
Technological Management of Biological Pandemics
At the heart of all these different managements were technologies of different kinds: Biological technologies like the vaccine that involves the technologization of the viral protein, social technologies like distancing and contact, tangible technologies like the masks that became our ubiquitous accessories, digital technologies like stay-at-home apps and vaccine status QR codes, political technologies like interoperable standards and distribution of resources including the spread of the vaccine, financial technologies like subsidies, loans, and compensations for economic actors affected by the shutdowns and lockdowns, cultural technologies of communication and expression through remote presence platforms and interfaces, educational technologies that moved all education to online spaces, and labour technologies that made the distinction between front-line and remote workers, are all the different kinds of technologies that became evident and proliferated during the management of the COVID19 pandemic.
In making this list, I realise that these instances of management might not always fall under the traditional understanding of technologies. And yet, in making of this list, I expand my own understanding of what a technology is. Definitional projects of technology, and especially digital technologies, often focus on technologies as tools, devices, and platforms. Even critical technology studies that seek to unpack technologies as sociotechnical imaginaries, tend to attend to usage, intention, governance, regulation, and implementation of different technologies. However, this attempt at pinning down technologies to a form, a condition, or practice, narrows our understanding of technology, replaying the older framing of technologies as oppositional to natural or biological occurrences, and privileging technical analysis of technologies as forms of making meaning of the technologies.
A Working Theory of Technology(ies)
So, rather than trying to come up with yet another definition of technology, I am going to propose a working theory of technologies that we can hold on to, as long as it helps us think about the management of the COVID19 pandemic: A technology is a means of converging and separating different alive and life-making units for transformation of an identified current state into another.
By asserting that technology is a means, it immediately decenters the idea of the technology as device or tool and positions it an intention. A thing, when invested with intention, becomes a technology. Digitally speaking, a technology is like a computational hyperlink, where, by the very characteristic of connecting two different addresses, a thing becomes a link. To think of a technology as necessarily this kind of connectors or separators, that manages the relationship between two or more addresses, proposes that a technology is invoked by intention and by establishing a relational network. It also frees technology from being a material thing and recognizes that technologies can be abstract, intangible, imaginary, ideas, expressions, and imaginations as long as they are a means towards an intention.
In proposing that at a very meta level, the role of technologies is to converge of separate, I am proposing that we do not look at the content produced through technologies or even the deployment of technologies. Instead, we open up the idea of what brings us together and what separates us.
Thus, acts of writing can be seen as doing both. To write is to build a public around that writing, finding people who come together around the written word. To write is also to exclude those who do not have the resources, access, literacy, or fluency with the languages and registers of that writing. Writing is a technology. It converges and separates. Technologies then, have to be seen as a force. Borrowing from frameworks of physics, because force requires labour, energy, infrastructure, and direction. Technologies are not just pre-existing means but means that are constructed, and shaped through design and iteration.
This process of converging and separation is not merely an abstract or a neutral organizational practice. It is a process of radical reconfiguration. Who and how collectives and connections are made create new social, political, cultural and economic units of life, labour, language, and love. The reconfigurations have deep roots and become the rules by which we understand how we connect to ourselves, each other, and to multitudes – the I, we, and us. And thus, technologies shape but also transform the state of things. Technology is a verb, and not a noun, because they are always producing effects, transforming things, and changing the state of things as we understand them. Even when the intention of technologies is not transformation, they continue to transform, sometimes, even by just maintaining the status quo, and thus holding states of inertia.
Pandemic Technologies
This detour into proposing a working theory of technology is important to go back to the idea of pandemic technologies. Pandemic Technologies often give us the idea that we are looking at innovations, disruptions, novelties, experimentations that happened during the management of the pandemic.
And indeed, these are in our focus. But to understand the management of the COVID19 pandemic as the context within which to recognize the technology, gives us a better idea of what we are aiming for. Let me bring the working theory of technology back into conversation and unpack it through 3 personal vignettes of the pandemic.
A technology is a means….
… of converging and separating different alive and life-making units
…for transformation of an identified current state into another
During the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic, a friend living in Australia, sent me three small plants, delivered from a local farm in the Netherlands. I was horrified. I have famously not been a plant person. Plants in the past have given up on me and rushed to their early withering. I didn’t know if I had the capacity to take care of another life form while we were all so anxious about life and living. My friend assured me that these were plants that thrived on neglect and that they are self-soothing. ‘They are almost like the cats of the plant worlds’ she assured me. I conceded. And it was a huge surprise to me that she was right. Because I was so paranoid that the plants would die on me, and because there was nobody else in the house to look after them, I perhaps did pay more attention to their care and watering on a regular basis. And the plants thrived. They grew. They were optimistic on my window seal. I don’t remember when it happened but these plants became means of reflection for me. Every evening, I would look at the news of the day, listening to the recap of the global devastation, and look at the plants.
On the streets of Arnhem, when The Netherlands implemented an ‘intelligent shutdown’, which meant that we were arbitrarily allowed to be in small groups in public but nowhere else, Anushka Nair, a performing artist, set up a long durational performance art. She invited walkers by in the streets of Arnhem to sit down on the street with her, adequately masked and socially distanced, to take a grain of rice and write a name on it. She had a long list of names – names of migrant and unorganized laborers in India, who had died, during the COVID19 pandemic, not because of the virus, but because of the forced migration that led to tens of thousands of people walking back to their homes, because the infrastructure of mobility and migration had halted and the government regulation did not accommodate people who did not have a home to shelter in.
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.
These were pandemic technologies that were defined by the intentions, and means, the capacity for converging and separating alive and life-making units and transformed my capacity to come together with friends and strangers, in ways that I had never experienced before.
Pandemic Technologies do not just refer to new technologies of managing the pandemic but the ways in which the experience and the management of the pandemic produced new experiences, expressions, invocations, and presence of technologies in our life.
Pandemic Technologies attends to the ways in which we don’t just use or get used by technological regimes but we make technologies, and produce technological forms that we use to converge and separate different units with the intention to transform recognized states. Pandemic Technologies is an invitation to see ourselves more than users and as new subjects who, during the pandemic recognized our agency to make technologies of everyday life and living.
The Technological Pandemic
The pandemic, then, like many other transformative contexts, becomes an origin point to think about our understanding and engagement with technologies. Increasingly, these technologies are digital, but they are not always only digital. Even when digital, the technology is not equated to a device, a tool, or a platform, but the context within which it emerges.
And now, as the biological pandemic is better managed, and it is no longer perceived as a global threat – even though the reporting and focus on those who continue to live with sustained vulnerabilities due to the infection and its management is very limited and contained – the pandemic technologies remain.
The different technologies we created, were introduced to, were used upon us, persist. And as they persist, they reproduce the technological regime of the pandemic condition even though we have seemingly returned to a ‘normal’.
The Technological pandemic is a framework to think through three assertions:
- As we learn to live with the COVID19 pandemic, it becomes important to understand the pandemic as an origin context for our technologies and subjectivities. We will always be marked as pandemic subjects, and the relationship we developed with and through technologies during that period are going to persist, reproducing the pandemic conditions through this new subjectivity and technologization.
- Pandemics are not solitary. They are syndemic in nature – they intersect with other conditions and structures of everyday life. As we account for the changed relationship of technology and the transformed nature of our pandemic subjectivity, we need to think about how the technological pandemic reconfigures our social and political bodies and collectives. We need to account for the shifts that have happened, in the technological management of the pandemic, to see what else was managed, changed, transformed, and shaped in our social, political, and cultural spaces, that affects our capacity and imagination of ‘coming together’.
- Global Pandemics are locally experienced. The pandemic is by definition a global phenomenon. There was a sense of collective precarity built into it. And yet, the experience of the pandemic was severely localized. It was also experienced differently at different intersections of vulnerability, marginalization, risk, and resources. The fractured and local nature of the technological pandemic pays attention to the diverse and multiple origin stories of the technologies and subjectivities that emerged and continue to unfold into different trajectories.
With these 3 assertions, we seek to unpack the media, stories, archives, affects, emotions, experiences, memories, resistances, and restructuring of life at a personal, inter-personal, and a collective formation. The Technological Pandemic is an attempt to map the emergence, origin, and continuation of pandemic technologies and subjectivities, as they inform the present and future of coming together.
We seek to co-create this framework with multiple practitioners, scholars, change makers, artists, cultural producers, and community organisers across four different sites to mark the beginning of a media and technology studies inquiry that can mark this milestone as a new origin of media and technologies and the subjects who live with, through, and in them.