La governamentalità algoritmica nella pandemia da COVID-19

This essay examines the use of smartphone applications for contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic through the theory of algorithmic governmentality. It considers the drive toward personalization associated with contemporary technology as highly compatible with the biopolitics of these government-supported frameworks. The contact tracing applications operated according to proxy logics in which proximity to devices rather than personal identification was used to determine the possibility of connection and contagion. Such proxybased mechanisms are similar to the profiles constructed from the correlations of attributes used by big-data corporations and governmental organizations. The pandemic has intensified the thinking of the self and others as sets of attributes; what will be necessary in the aftermath is a reconstruction of alternative relational networks organized around not discrete attributes but rather potentialities.