ABSTRACT
It is by now a truism that the Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally transformed everyday life and has done so to the extent that the old normal is unlikely to ever return. While the current debate concerning such transformations mainly concerns matters of public health, economic practices, or politics, this chapter focuses on matters of technological governance in response to the pandemic, primarily in urban environments. The latter are of particular importance both due to their pandemic challenges (high population density that contributes to the spread of contagion) and due to greater commercial scalability of either the solutions themselves or of indirect rewards for such solutions (data, embeddedness in decision-making processes). The response to the pandemic is seen as structured around a paradox: on the one hand, the pandemic has clearly demonstrated human interrelatedness with and embeddedness in both their natural and technological environments – a condition that clearly answers the posthumanist field of concerns. Simultaneously, though, the ensuing disruption to the established ways of life and the trauma caused by the undermining of the anthropocentric fantasy have led to a techno-solutionist overdetermination – a doubling down on technology in order to regain (a semblance of) mastery. The crux of the matter is, however, that such techno-solutionism has only deepened exploitation through datafication, as opposed to reassertion of human primacy.
