In a recent report on technology trends, Accenture states that “the pandemic has not slowed innovation — it’s amplifying it to historic levels.” Many technologies — what we call “indirect tech” — have either pivoted due to the pandemic or were created as a result of the pandemic but not primarily for public health purposes. Indirect solutions include video-conferencing technologies, virtual education initiatives, and contactless alternatives for food and package delivery. In our research to analyze and contextualize the rhetorical shifts around COVID-19 public health solutions, it may initially not be clear why we should focus on anything beyond “direct” solutions — those that directly solve a public health need such as contact tracing, symptom checking, and disease treatment.
To fully capture the problems of techno-solutionism — the problematic idea that technology can solve all of mankind’s problems, we deem it necessary to examine the rhetoric surrounding “indirect” solutions. Indirect technologies like Zoom can’t cure COVID-19, but they still have some stake in the pandemic and have affected and continue to affect people in a substantial way during these — cue eye roll — unprecedented times. One chief danger of solutionism and its associated rhetoric in indirect tech is that it glorifies the pandemic by putting “innovation” on a pedestal. For example, a recent Forbes article by Harvard Business School faculty describes innovation as “the one good thing caused by COVID-19”, completely ignoring the fact that the pandemic exacerbates systemic inequalities. We can and must contextualize indirect tech in techno-solutionism and the perpetuation of the carceral state, the same way we would for direct tech.
From telemedicine to education to plain old human contact, indirect technologies like Zoom are ubiquitous and inevitably impactful.
We would then be remiss to consider pandemic tech ethics without considering the ethics and solutionist issues present in indirect technologies. People are using these tools not just during, but also as a direct consequence of, the pandemic. We can’t talk about how COVID-19 disproportionately kills Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) while we ignore the way the lack of in-person schooling disproportionately hurts BIPOC. Zoom is a wholly inadequate replacement for all the other essentials that public schools offer, such as daily breakfasts. We can’t discuss the ethics of contact tracing apps while we ignore how large swaths of people, an overwhelming majority of whom are BIPOC, cannot use these apps or learn virtually because they have no internet access or cell reception. The novel coronavirus may just be a [very deadly] disease, but the pandemic has cascading effects that cannot be adequately captured by solely examining tech through the lens of public health.
Solutionist rhetoric appears to normalize — and even glorify — the pandemic as the new normal and as a catalyst for some sort of growth. The opening quote from Accenture’s June 2020 report is a prime example: “the pandemic has not slowed innovation — it’s amplifying it to historic levels.”
This rhetoric puts a toxically positive spin on coronavirus and exemplifies how tech industry growth is consistently privileged over the welfare of humanity. Despite the fact that the article vaguely acknowledges that the pandemic has “transformed people’s lives on an unprecedented scale” (though even the word “transformed” has a techno-business-centric connotation), it makes clear that the techno-business world couldn’t care less about actual people and just wants its solutionist fever dreams to be validated by stocks.
The article goes on to advise tech companies on how to seize this moment in a global health crisis: “Long-term, COVID-19 will enable us to see human-AI collaboration at its best, potentially easing people’s concerns about the technology.” They then make a case that the chief concern in the AI space is “lack of employee adoption” (read: not enough people are using it to see how wonderful it is). This is an attempt to gaslight people into adopting AI (for whose benefit?), with violent implications. AI is already being used by too many people and corporations in harmful ways, from predictive policing that is blatantly racist to facial recognition that is also blatantly racist, and we should be adopting more policies to regulate harmful autonomous systems. Blindly putting this technology in more people’s hands is a move that serves to benefit the unchecked growth of AI, with no consideration toward the nature and context of the problems it’s being applied to. In a system where oppression is the default, this move is an abusive perpetuation of capitalist delusion.
The message of prioritizing innovation and technological advancement above a baseline human condition serves to normalize and promote the pandemic, but being stuck in a fully controllable pandemic because of toxic capitalism and solutionism is not normal or good. People dying of fully preventable causes in a so-called “developed country” is not normal or good. Normalizing and glorifying COVID-19, poverty, death, and racism is dangerous and must stop. It’s time to put people over profit — we made the latter up anyway.