Pandemic Press is an NLP (natural language processing) and social science research effort about techno-solutionism in COVID-19 responses. The project members are Karina Halevy, Bekah Agwunobi, Salma Kamni, and Kat Huang, undergraduates across several colleges.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an influx of technologies in the public health sphere. While many of these technologies are broadcasted as seemingly benign, innovative, and public health-focused, some are derivations of controversial surveillance or carceral technologies that have existed for years. In order to rebrand these technologies as public health solutions, companies and researchers have shifted their rhetoric and messaging.
For example, apps to automate contact tracing have already revealed issues that may disproportionately affect marginalized people. Some apps are adapted from post-9/11 domestic surveillance programs and can sell data to map crime in gentrified areas, violate privacy, and misuse data in other ways. A large contributor to the positive framing of these products is the prevalence of solutionism: using “apolitical” technology shortcuts to patch problems.
Increasingly, solutionism threatens to become society’s default toolkit for handling issues, even those too complex to be fixed by technology alone. Solutionism has paved the way for executives and engineers across both academia and industry to build solutions in the name of “public good” without considering the broader implications of their work. Unfailingly optimistic rhetoric often omits or indicates an ignorance of their creations’ detrimental impacts and injustices.
We aim to analyze the rhetorical shifts that various actors are using to frame public health solutions, especially those derived from existing surveillance and carceral technologies. We plan to compare current messaging with previous narratives, relate these shifts to impacts on marginalized people, and place these technologies within the broader context of techno-solutionism.
On this site, we’ll share our thoughts and findings through journalistic, academic, and experimental pieces, including elements like visualizations.