Heidegger and the Technocratic Warping of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

In late 2021, central areas of major European Union (EU) cities that usually experience commerce and civic association were full of burning cars, looted shops, and scenes of masked protesters skirmishing from police tear gas. Two years removed from the onset of the most wide-reaching pandemic of the past century, reports and stories of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) continue to be headline news in major newspapers across much of the world. In the context of the EU, sharp divides have arisen in countries such as Austria, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Germany, Romania, among others, due to around restriction policies. At the height of the pandemic and into its later waves, thesepolicies have featured the enforcing of restrictions on shopping, movement, and curfews for an entire population, for unvaccinated adults and teenagers, or a mixture of both. Leading into what many have referred to as the fourth wave of the pandemic, the pendulum of COVID-19 regulations and restrictions continues to sway closer to the side of intensification rather than relaxation. Third vaccine shots (referred to as “boosters”) are now widely available across most EU states and recent legislation in most EU countries has been passed which instills a 9-month expiry date on first vaccine doses given to citizens. In Germany, widely implemented “2G” zones are now functioning across a variety of different independent and corporate shops. The 2G zone requires an individual to be of the following makeup: “Geimpft” (Vaccinated) or “Genesen” (Recovered). This renders anyone who has not had the virus or has not been vaccinated unable to enter a given 2G shop.

For civilians who are non-nationals of a given state and who have not been vaccinated or have not contracted the virus, many EU states require them to engage in a 5, 7, or even 10-day quarantine when they arrive. On the ground across cities and towns, restaurants, movie theaters, and other similar venues require either a 48-hr or newer negative COVID-19 PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test or proof of vaccination for entry into premises. On airplanes, trains, and public transport, masks are to be worn at all times apart from when eating food or drinking a beverage, and in the most extreme of cases, civilians are ordered to put masks on in between sipping their beverages, including children. On the surface, one can observe these policies and see that they symbolize an uncoordinated attempt at slowing the spread of a virus through a heterogeneous collection of means. Yet one can also potentially pick up that there is something bigger at play here—something that symbolizes a colossally important yet hard to decipher process of technologically based societal manipulation.

In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that social distancing measures did not stop or appear to reduce transmission in the 1918 pandemic. Similar findings have been attributed to the COVID pandemic—restrictions and lockdowns in the first wave (a wave that occurred before the availability of vaccines and during the most severe strains of the virus) were noneffective because they reduced mortality by only 0.2% in both Europe and the United States (Herby et al., 2022). Although quarantine policies, lockdowns, and similar regulatory attempts have not historically been able to stop the spread of viruses or lessen viruses’ impact(s) on mortality rates, during the COVID pandemic in liberal democratic contexts, policymakers and governments carried out the harshest and most wide-reaching restrictions on movement and human organization in their history. These restrictions were made possible through the fusion of private technological corporations’ data of consumer behavior that were utilized with GSM- and Bluetooth-based track-and-trace applications. This study asks what made such a response possible. Through drawing on Martin Heidegger’s lectures and essays on technology, this study explores the pandemic response in liberal democratic contexts (namely, the EU).

To date, variant aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy have been utilized to account for dynamics of the pandemic, including on technology and its influence on self-perception and being (Verhoef et al., 2020); on the influence of media and technology on human interactions (Iacob, 2020); on questions of psychical warfare (Wasser, 2021); on being and the meaning of social distancing (Rossolatos, 2021). While insightful in their respective focus, no study has thus far assessed the meaning of the concrete approaches that liberal democratic governments took in their response to the pandemic, specifically in carrying out quarantine policies; lockdowns; the shutting of businesses and economy activities, schools, and workplaces; and the usage of technology to engage in surveillance to enforce these policies. Heidegger’s suppositions about the nature of modern technology can enable us to understand the underlying character of these pandemic responses. The pandemic has revealed the profound entrenchment of our civilization into technological structures and how such structures shape the ways that the world is perceived and how problems (such as a public health crisis) can be dealt with. The pandemic constitutes a regression of social order and, in response, governments and policymakers assumed that the virus is a pathological force that was controllable through technological sorting and ordering. First, those whose nervous systems were infiltrated by the virus were treated as directly optimizable material. Second, societal tendencies that were identified as being potentially egregious (in increasing infection rates) were restricted and shut down. As contradictory as it may sound, unintended societal outcomes from these policies and processes have already arisen and will continue to arise in the years and decades ahead.

The order of this study is as follows. The section “Heidgger’s Ideas on Technology” introduces Heidegger’s framework and assumptions about modern society and technology . The subsequent section “The Meaning of COVID-19, Bodies as Objects, and Technocratic Responses” overviews recent scholarship on Heidegger’s philosophical contributions in the context of the current pandemic. The thirdsection, “Technology and Restrictions During the Pandemic” then draws on surveillance patterns and policies that were implemented throughout different waves of the pandemic by the EU and member states. The fourth section, “Humans as Geolocation Data Points” goes deeper into the particular role that restriction policies had on individuals’ behavior and the varying meanings associated with surveillance and tracking. The fifth section, “Unintended Outcomes” identifies a number of different adverse outcomes that arose (and will continue to arise) due to the overly technocratic approach taken to deal with the pandemic. The final section, “Conclusion” overviews the findings of this study and presents implications for knowledge of contemporary technology and the pandemic.

Heidegger’s Ideas on Technology

Among the important philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger is also probably the most controversial. His 1927 publication of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) changed the trajectory of existentialist philosophy. Throughout the course of the 1930s and 1940s, Heidegger engaged with the topic of technology and wrote an essay titled “The Question Concerning Technology” and then later summarized his different ideas about technology to publics in the Bremen and Freiburg Lectures (1949). Heidegger describes the etymological basis of the term technology as stemming to the Greek “technikon” which also belongs to techne. The latter is not only the name for the activities and skills possessed by what he refers to as handicraft, but is also representative of the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne is something poetic for Heidegger because it means to bring-forth (poiesis). Prior to Heidegger, most philosophers assumed technology to be used by humans as a simple or straightforward means to an end. Yet in his lectures on technology, a wide-reaching argument was presented in which Heidegger conceptualized technology as an ontological condition that humans are entrapped in. Old forms of creativity and techne such as those brought forth in the ancient Greek practice of fine arts are now hard to come by as modern industrial society is dictated by an entirely different essence of technology. Hence, the threat posed to humans by technology is not assumed by Heidegger to be a direct one but constitutes an ontological condition based around an unintended obsession with treating our world and ourselves as resources that can be ordered in a scientific way (Dreyfus, 1997). Heidegger introduced this topic of inquiry on technology in his essay as follows:

We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds. (Heidegger, 1977, p. 287)

Heidegger attempts to come to terms with what he believes the “essence” of technology to be by asking whether an end can actually precede a means? Through posing these questions, Heidegger problematized Aristotle’s framework on causality (the four causes) that at the time constituted the dominant understanding of causes in western philosophy for more than 2,000 years. Heidegger (1997) asked, “Why are there only four causes? In relation to the aforementioned four, what does ‘cause’ really mean?” (p. 290). He then incorporated a new dynamic into discussion of the four causes which he refers to the Greek concept of poiesis—a concept that he describes as “bringing forward into appearance,” and one that represents the creation of something that is separate or outside of a person and the creator of the object. As poiesis means bringing-forth, the four causes are at play within this process. Poiesis thus encompasses not only all four causes but is both cause and effect. This leads Heidegger to argue that technology is both a cause and an effect and that it is not simply a means to an end because it serves a principal function as a way of revealing (Heidegger, 1977).

Modern technology, through revealing and bringing-forth the value attached to techne, is conceived through scientific thought via a process of ordering. Heidegger refers to this as Gestell (positionality) which is a concept premised on the assumption that human beings reduce phenomena to resources that are waiting to be fit into some form of technological system. Gestell gathers different types of entities in a certain way and predispositions them into technological structures or systems (Wendland et al., 2018). This obscures human creativity and limits our possibilities to engage in other types of being and experience which brings us to the crucial historical fact that Heidegger believed set modern technology apart from forms of the past. He viewed technology as a reflection of human beings’ modern disposition to control and serve as masters of nature. For instance, in his description of manufacturing, Heidegger noted that

The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance—in Latin, an instrumentum. (p. 288)

There is no revealing or bringing-forth in modern technology in the same way as in technology of the past. Accordingly, as noted by Heidegger, “so long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it.”

The analogy given by Heidegger that enables him to operationalize the old versus new can be observed in his discussion of an windmill situated on a river: “Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 296). New forms of technology (e.g., a coal plant) arose with industrialized society and were integral to the historical emergence of such a society:

The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In sowing grain it places seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set up to yield atomic energy, which can be unleashed either for destructive or for peaceful purposes. (Heidegger, 1977, p. 296)

These new conceptions of technology differ from the old “handicraft” technology, argues Heidegger. Ultimately, Heidegger claimed that the essence of technology stems to the advent of modern physics (which arose in the 17th century) and its embedded processes of ordering. The conceptual ordering that underpinned the formation of modern physics enabled science to be used for the development and efficient implementation of modern technology to master the world’s resources. With a newfound ability to dominate and control nature through extracting resources, human beings in the modern era of history are now able to unlock nature’s sources of energy, transform it, store it, distribute it, and, fundamentally alter it. These processes of extraction, accumulation, and production all take place without any particular personal attachment of human beings to the resources that are being used during production. For this principal reason, modern technology isargued to be an adverse historical development which is why Heidegger believed reliance on technology subtracted away from human potential and creativity. Accordingly, the modern technological process no longer brings forward objects, but engages in production for simply the purpose of ordering. Basing our approach to life through technology results in us treating objects and phenomenaas resources which can be manipulated and controlled. Likewise, it results in us carrying out our day-to-day activities in a way that prevents us from getting deeply involved in the things that we are doing (Dreyfus, 1997).

The Meaning of COVID-19, Bodies as Objects, and Technocratic Responses

Heidegger is obviously not the only philosopher to have dealt with the grandiose question of technology. Yet Heidegger’s account is of particular importance because in my view, it does accomplish what it sets out to do—in capturing the “essence” of what technology is and through his analysis, Heidegger presents us with important implications that can enable us to understand societal wide tendencies in the context of a pandemic. Studies and essays that have been published on Heidegger’s philosophical contributions and applied to the pandemic in the last 2 years have been insightful, but none have touched on these overarching patterns on pandemic restriction responses taken by governments. Rossolatos (2021) draws on Heidegger’s ontology to examine how understandings of our existence (Dasein) changed and in response to spatialization policies and social distancing. Iacob (2020) offers a reflective view on Heidegger’s framework of technology and identifies the advantages and disadvantages of our usage of technological forms of communication during the pandemic. Wasser (2021) argues that Heidegger’s ideas are important to consider during a global catastrophe because of their relation to our understanding of self. For individuals to be authentic, they must always engage in a continual process of communication with the world and their own possibilities. Yet the usage of technology, argues Wasser (2021), can lead to avoidance of confronting the reality of death which constitutes an abdication of an existential obligation based around choosing authenticity or inauthenticity.

Perhaps the most directly relevant study published thus far on Heidegger and the pandemic is put forward by Verhoef et al. (2020) who engage with Heidegger’s ideas on technology and argue that the reliance on digital technology instilled on populations by pandemic policies drew people into a position that they could experience being due to constraints on their life experiences. Although technology brought about idle talk, ambiguity, and fallenness through forcing individuals to encounter the world through heavy (and even sole) reliance on technological platforms and a set of preprogrammed structures that dictated behavior, the authors nevertheless argue that the pandemic enabled people to “come to face with the possibility of being itself, as a freedom that has been released from the illusions of the ‘they’ and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious” (Verhoef et al., 2020, p. 163). Accordingly, the anxiousness brought about by the pandemic is interpreted as having a potential positive effect on society as well as restrictions on movement. The authors argue that restrictions have the “the potential to help us realise the authentic possibilities of our own being—a freedom we have in our Being-towards-death” (Verhoef et al., 2020, p. 163). Yet with these positive attributions of the pandemic on populaces, Verhoef et al.’s (2020) analysis also identifies the potential negative ailments associated with technological reliance during the pandemic:

Our immersion in technology makes us unaware of alternative ways of being in the world, because the technological attitude has become synonymous with sound or correct thinking and no alternatives are suggested. We become convinced that “this is the way things should be.” During lockdown, we recognise that, unlike face-to-face conversations, our use of technology renders us unfree to act in certain ways (such as touching another person). We forcefully had to adapt to being unfree—this is the extent of what our circumstances and technologies allow us—which is an approach to existence that is contrary to Heidegger’s call for deeper inquiry into Dasein. (Verhoef et al., 2020, p. 160)

The last 2 years of pandemic politics have demonstrated that governmental policies increased populations’ overall reliance on technology, especially in developed and post-industrialized countries. Restrictions on movement, quarantines, the shutting of workplaces and schools, and the tracking and tracing of infected individuals exemplify a technological approach to dealing with a virus. This approach is rooted in antecedent conditions that Heidegger associated with modern technology in terms of the constant need to rationalize, systematize, and measure phenomena that are encountered in the world (Blitz, 2014). Retrospectively, one can make a plausible claim that Heidegger’s worst fear or outcome arose during the pandemic as technologically oriented modes of thinking morphed into being the only way of thinking that policymakers, governments, and large percentages of populations experienced. Put differently, ordering phenomena and scientific understandings of the world took precedence during the pandemic and this, as subsequent sections of this study will reveal, had grave ramifications for individuals’ mental health and future social, economic, medical, and cultural outcomes. Heidegger argued that human beings in the era of modern technology are insnared in the process of enframing (Gestell) of technology even if we do not stand immediately in front of machines or operate machinery (Belu & Feenberg, 2010). The pandemic was dealt with throughactions from governments that resulted in outcomes which echo Heidegger’s identification of the dangers of modern technology—humans ended up being viewed and treated as fungible raw materials and resources that needed to be optimized through coercive systems of control and surveillance.

Technology and Restrictions During the Pandemic

In the era of modern technology, Heidegger argued that humans were at risk of being viewed and treated as fungible raw materials, as standing reserve (Bestand) that awaits optimization. In early 2020, a public health crisis arose for many countries across the world and turned into a pandemic. A regression of social order resulted in a profound desire to optimize societies through technological means through resolving this public health crisis. First, those whose nervous systems were infiltrated by the virus were treated as directly optimizable material. Second, societal tendencies that were identified as being potentially egregious (in increasing infection rates) were restricted and shut down. Throughout these processes, an all-encompassing mode of technologically based rationalization was carried out by governments, health institutions, and policymakers that was based on what Heidegger would describe as enframing. The pandemic response was premised on a representation of how people can be treated as resources and units that need to be reordered in a time of crises back into an optimized form. Governments across much of the world introduced digital contact tracing (DCT) systems in hope that these new digital technologies would contain the spread of the virus (Blasimme et al., 2021). These technologies were based on Bluetooth data exchange and global positioning system (GPS and local GSM) that kept track of the proximity between devices held by civilians.

This type of calculative thinking morphed into being the only type of thinking that was considered to be truthful—combating the newly arisen public health crisis took precedent over all other aspects of social organization and affairs. The pandemic resulted in liberal democratic polities restricting their populaces’ civil liberties, freedom of movement, and civic association to arguably the greatest extent in their respective histories (Anisin, 2022). This was made possible through technologically supported surveillance in which civilians were disaggregated according to their inner-biological characteristics (whether one has the virus or not), their vaccine statuses, their antibody statuses, or a mixture of all of the above. To accomplish this, a mixture of legal decrees, states of emergencies, and security institutional surveillance were implemented. Above all, the overly reliant technological approach to managing the pandemic failed to comprehend the basic fact that a contagious virus of an origin that was already known to scientists (i.e., SARS-CoV-2 is not the first coronavirus) cannot theoretically be stopped from spreading. As mentioned, in 2006, the WHO stated that the 1918 pandemic response demonstrated that social distancing measures did not stop or appear to reduce transmission (Herby et al., 2022).

Along similar lines, in a meta-analysis of 1,048 studies put out by scholars utilizing the OxCGRT stringency index (which is an aggregate of numerous types of restriction measures taken by governments), Herby et al. (2022) of the John Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise came across an unexpected result. Compulsory lockdowns in the first wave of the pandemic—a wave that occurred before vaccine rollouts and during the most severe strains of the virus—did not actually have a significant effect on mortality rates. The average lockdown in both Europe and the United States only reduced mortality from COVID by 0.2%. What’s more, specific restrictions, including facemasks, closing nonessential businesses, border closures, school closures, and gathering limitations, had “no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality.” Herby et al. (2022) offer a profound summary of the factual impact of pandemic restriction policies in that “They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy” (Herby et al., 2022, p. 40).

In the first wave of the pandemic, of the 27 EU member states, all but one (France) created then implemented mobile tracking applications that were interoperable for data exchange with the EU (European Commission, 2021b). Prior to the pandemic in the EU context, there was no conceptualization of a state-led digital platform or model that could monitor civilians’ movement and travel to different areas of their country or other countries. By February 2020, policies were made by national governments after receiving advice from the EU (who itself was advised by the WHO). For instance, the WHO set a benchmark for tracking and tracing infected civilians, which entailed that successful COVID contact-tracing operations have to account for 80% of close contacts within 3 days of a given case of the virus being confirmed (Lewis, 2020). Speeches by high-ranking EU officials in February of 2020 contained very specific language that was opportunistic in the sense of relying on technology in dealing with the virus. The first direct speech dealing with the topic of the virus was made by Commissioner Stella Kyriakides (who heads Health and Food Safety) on February 26, 2020, in Rome. Here, the commissioner stressed that cooperation between EU member states and the WHO was necessary. The commissioner noted, “as a follow-up to this meeting, the Commission will produce a model for information for travelers coming back from risk areas or traveling to them—information we see an increased need for within the EU” (European Commission, 2020c). By April, the Commission made a formal policy “toolbox” for how to use technology and data during the “COVID-19 crisis” (European Commission, 2020a). A report put out by the EU Commission in April of 2020 titled, “Guidance on Apps Supporting the Fight Against COVID-19 Pandemic in Relation to Data Protection” (European Commission, 2020a), reveals how digital technologies were used to deal with the virus:

Digital technologies and data have a valuable role to play in combating the COVID-19 crisis. Mobile applications typically installed on smartphones (apps) can support public health authorities at national and EU level in monitoring and containing the COVID-19 pandemic and are particularly relevant in the phase of lifting containment measures. They can provide direct guidance to citizens and support contact tracing efforts.

Here, attention must first be paid to the anticipatory nature of language used such as “have a valuable role to play,” or “can support public health authorities,” or “are relevant,” “they can provide.” This preliminary character of app-based tracking reveals how EU actors articulated ideas about both the availability and credibility of app-based surveillance. The words can and should are frequently used throughout the report. Second, the report notes that

The purpose of the Recommendation is, inter alia, to develop a common European approach (“Toolbox”) for the use of mobile applications, coordinated at EU level, for empowering citizens to take effective social distancing measures, and for warning, preventing and contact tracing to help limit the propagation of the COVID-19 disease.

Another regulatory document was put forward in April 2020 featuring very detailed rules on “epidemiological surveillance, monitoring, early warning of, and combating serious cross-border threats to health” (European Commission, 2020d). These rules encompassed Commission coordinating with member states “to ensure coordination and information exchange between the mechanisms and structures established.” What this resulted in was the following: telecommunication corporations such as Vodafone fused with the Italian government to track geolocation data of civilians’ movements. Alongside Vodafone, six other telecommunication companies (Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Telenor, Telia, and A1 Telekom) met with the EU commission to coordinate “measures tracking the spread of the virus” (Chee, 2020). An “eHealth Network” was created that featured representatives of digital health authorities from 27 EU member states plus Norway—tracking apps then were operationalized through Google and Apple programming interfaces on smartphones (both android and apple based; Blasimme et al., 2021). These apps enabled governments to gather “metrics data for public health surveillance, such as the day, time, and duration of a contact; whether the infected user is asymptomatic; the 1st day of illness; and the date of testing” (Blasimme et al., 2021). During these progressions of surveillance, human beings turned into data points and metrics that fell under the grander technologically based process of attempting to control and overcome a public health crisis.

Humans as Geolocation Data Points

The pandemic fostered state-led surveillance projects that saw big tech firms collaborate with governments that carried out executive actions, bypassing checks and balances to carry out that largest systematic quarantine and movement restriction in history. Previous pandemics did not see comparable policies in terms of lockdowns (which were not used to any comparable extent; Herby et al., 2022). During 2020–2021, however, data from people’s geolocation(s) were monitored by the state, which enabled authorities to identify whether public gatherings were taking place (against restrictions) and whether an infected individual left his or her place of residence. For example, an analysis of apps used in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and France reveals that exposure parameters that apps used to track civilians varied from 1.5 to 8m and such data were stored anywhere from 14 to 21 days (Blasimme et al., 2021). Croatia, Denmark, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain participated in the EU-created system called “getaway” that traced civilians who were moving across borders (Blasimme et al., 2021). These applications permitted governments to enforce quarantine orders according to digital methodologies. As noted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), such health surveillance applications “may well become a lasting and increasingly invasive feature of public life” (Lee, 2021).

One must consider that much of the track and trace technologies that were implemented by governments during the pandemic could not have been possible without aid of private corporate resources and tools that had already played an antecedent role in users’ lives. The pandemic, however, resulted in themerging of state and private-sector technological resources and those who recommended policies of societal control and surveillance did so through calculating human beings asparts of a greater whole (society) that must be optimized and fixed. In the Czech Republic for example, beginning in March of 2020, a 30-day state of emergency was declared on March 12 and then extended a month later until May 17, 2020. All educational institutions were closed as were events associated with education. On March 13, 2020, all private and public gatherings with more than 30 people were forbidden (apart from governmental meetings or funerals). On the subsequent day, March 14, all retail sales of services in business premises were forbidden, and then on March 16, free movement became limited by the government and only travel to and from work or to ensure basic human needs (food or pharmaceutical supplies). This meant that individuals literally could not go outside for any purpose other than to go to work or purchase an “essential” good. On March 30, a program called “smart quarantine” was enforced. Civilian movement was tracked through governments accessing personal data whether it be their usage of credit/debit cards (with cooperation from Banks) or through their mobile devices. In Greece, permission for movement was regulated through SMS (text message)—wherein individuals had to state their full names and identify a code number that captured their purpose of movement along with their residential address. This would result in an SMS permit, and if a civilian did not have such a permit during a random check, he or she would then be fined by authorities (Tsourdi & Vavoula, 2021). As Tsourdi and Vavoula describe in their assessment of Greek pandemic restrictions, processing personal data was not a decision that was adopted through governmental ministries, but rather, the General Secretariat for Civil Protection (a public law body) implemented this policy through releasing its “data protection policy” in the form of a soft law that had no prior “scrutiny, consultation or transparency” (Tsourdi & Vavoula, 2021).

Indeed, one has to acknowledge that vast swaths of the public use the internet with lack of knowledge about what it actually means to register their personal details on a given platform. Most people understand that their data get used for “marketing purposes,” and when signing up to a given social media platform, registering an email account, or simply searching for a term in a search engine, rarely does anyone take the monumental amount of time required to read through pages of small textand technical jargon that fill up user agreements that must be accepted to actually register an account on a given platform. On a daily basis, billions of users utilize surveillance capitalist platforms to access information, communicate information, and share their life with others. We were already engrossed into modern technology prior to the pandemic, yet the pandemic revealed how our entrapment to modern (and chiefly, digital technology) was exploited by governments through identifiable implementations of surveillance via quarantines, restrictions, and tracking of civilians through usage of telecommunication data as well as Apple and Google smartphone applications and technology.

By autumn of 2021, some EU countries began quarantining unvaccinated civilians while enabling the vaccinated to participate in social activities and gatherings through usage of digital QR codes. At the time of writing this study, QR codes are widely used in EU countries in shopping centers, restaurants, movie theaters, and sports facilities, among other frequently venues that people frequently visit. The QR code (or the lack of one having a QR code) is representative of the biological characteristics of individuals. In conjunction with other technologies, the usage of QR codes has fundamentally transformed the relation that human beings have to their societies because for the first time in contemporary history (post–World War II and post-Nazism), the inner-biological characteristics of individuals determined their ability to access different societal services. In Hungary, the incumbent Orban regime enforced up to 5 years prison to offenders who engaged in “misinformation” spreading regarding the pandemic. The most extreme of restrictions can be observed in varying Asian countries. In Myanmar, the state declared that not reporting an illness is a criminal offense and concurrently placed offenders into military bases that were specified according to COVID-related offenses. Similarly, in both China and Russia, large cities with public facial recognition technology used this Orwellian software to identify and track individuals who were not wearing masks or were not permitted to leave their designated area of quarantine (Vardi, 2020). In China as in Europe, drones (and in the most extreme cases, helicopter usage in Germany) were utilized to monitor the formation of groups that numbered above designated allowances on social gatherings.

Unintended Outcomes

As a result of restriction policies, a heterogeneous collection of adverse outcomes can already be observed to have arisen in the short term since the onset of the pandemic and into the first, second, third, and fourth waves . This section will identify and conceptualize a number of these outcomes through focusing on a stratification which is based on a temporal distinction of the (a) present and near future, and (b) the distant future. This distinction is underpinned by the assumption that the highly technological approach taken by policymakers in response to the pandemic was illustrative of the entrenchment of contemporary societies into technology. Because of this deeply rooted entrenchment, technologically based restrictions, quarantines, and regulations were implemented to deal with a public health crisis and simultaneously turned a blind eye to other aspects of individuals’ life, including their mental and physical health. Many adverse outcomes arose (and will arise) as a result of unintended consequences and processes . Due to space constraints, this section will emphasize the impact pandemic restrictions had on suicide and mental health. Alongside these factors, it is worth noting that restriction policies had a significant impact on physical activity and on the status of economies. In the former, restriction policies prevented social gatherings, sporting events, and general opportunities for exercise decreased, which had an adverse blowback effect as those segments that reduced their physical activity also were observed to have the highest rates of new mood disorders (Puccinelli et al., 2021). On the economic front, ascholarly article I wrote in 2020 at the height of the pandemic made a bold prediction that appears to be coming true right before our eyes if we consider ongoing increases in energy prices and global supply chain problems. In Anisin (2021), I predicted that

Above all, the concern is not driven by the virus itself, but due to the networks of trade and associated livelihoods of economic exchange. These catastrophic consequences are not random, but are directly attributed to the WHO and its COVID-19 policies. When all is said is done, the total number of people on earth that will die from starvation in 2020 as a result of these policies will far surpass the actual death-toll from COVID-19. According to Oxfam International, starvation levels (as measured via “crisis level hunger”) increased 82% (over 2020) when compared to 2019 (Oxfam 2020). Similar numbers were reported to the UN during November of 2020 by the Rome-based World Food Programme (WFP) who claimed that 130 million people are at risk of being pushed into starvation by the end of 2020 (Deen 2020). Less than 0.001% of these projected fatalities will be brought about by the actual virus of COVID-19, and instead, tens, if not hundreds of millions will die due to policies aimed at limiting COVID-19’s lethality for populations in the West. (Anisin, 2021)

What’s more, as a result of wide-reaching pandemic policies and regulations, some countries, such as Japan, actually experienced a decrease in all-cause mortality in 2020 by 20,982 total deaths, which is a 1.7% drop in relation to the historical baseline (Onozuka et al., 2021). Such findings may appear to be positive and lead one to ask, “How can a drop in overall fatality rates (from all causes) in a year be interpreted as a negative outcome?” The important dynamic to consider here is that within a quantitative societal process as wide reaching as a decrease in all-cause mortality, there also exist qualitative processes that can lead to adverse outcomes for specific segments of a population. As noted, restrictions that were carried out during the first and second waves of the pandemic were the most severe and included workplace closures, limitations on movement, civic association, and closure of all shops and businesses except those deemed as “essential.” Policy makers’immersion into technology was made evident because technocratic opportunities to regulate and restrict civilian life and social organization were quickly seized at the beginning of this public health crisis. These opportunities were made possible by new forms of technology and crucially, they coincided with an overall lack of consideration to other spheres and practices social and personal well being.

Conclusion

This study has utilized insights drawn from Heidegger’s philosophical works on technology to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Adding onto an array of recent scholarship on the pandemic, this study has traced the different types of technological responses that were carried out by governments and policymakers as observed largely in the context of the EU. The pandemic has thus far highlighted a massive shift in social affairs and human organization which have arisen across much of the world. Likewise, the last two years have demonstrated that the pandemic brought about dislocations which will be debated and discussed for decades to come. Governments’ usage of technological resources to track, trace, and monitor their citizens’ inner biological characteristics has fostered a new status quo in which biological parameters of citizens are gathered on a mass scale and stored as data. This study has argued that the enforcement of such policies was not a straightforward or one-shot process, but rather can be accounted for by antecedent configurations of modern technology and the nature of necessitated ordering oftechnology in our contemporary world.

The technological means with which governments used to deal with public health emergencies brought about by the virus will, to varying extent, remain prevelant in our lives once the pandemic ends. One particular factor here to consider is that QR code usage is likely to remain salient after the pandemic because of the technological efficiency through which such a scanning system can enable businesses to process customer requests. For example, a recent report put out by NBC News demonstrates that restaurant owners benefit from QR code usage for paying, identifying customers according to pandemic restrictions, and ultimately, for tracking customers’ behavior overtime—the report concludes that QR codes may mean the end of anonymously paying for goods and services without being tracked (“QR Codes Might Stick Around Post-Pandemic,” 2021). These “efficient” outcomes exemplify how our entrenchment into modern technology canresult in a perpetual reinforcing of its usage. QR codes and similar technologies can be across different industries and sectors, including higher education. For example, during 2020, Oakland University (Rochester, Michigan) handed out devices to students to track their body temperatures on a daily basis (1,400 times a day in total). A car rental employer in Texas tracked employees based on their contact with exposed or infected people. According to civil rights and privacy experts, such continuous-monitoring devices “could lead to new forms of surveillance that outlast the pandemic—ushering into the real world the same kind of extensive tracking that companies like Facebook and Google have instituted online” (Singer, 2020). There is no end in sight to such processes as very few people understand the essence of technology, and unfortunately, they are entrapped within it and its signs, similar to Plato’s cave. Albert Fox Cahn (who directs a nonprofit called Surveillance Technology Oversight Project) described these developments as follows: “It’s chilling that these invasive and unproven devices could become a condition for keeping our jobs, attending school or taking part in public life” (Singer, 2020).

Finally, I must admit that even though this article has erred more on the side of alarm than on hope or positivity, Heidegger did indeed offer a potential way out of our engulfment to modern technology through a concept that he described as subsisting within the danger of technology itself. Technological domination over the human being can be resolved by Gelassenheit. This term roughly translates into “tranquility” and was proposed as a form of releasing from the braces of technological structures. Gelassenheit has the potential to release us from our will to dominance and brings us closer to the possibility of encountering phenomena in a natural way—a way that people who used to engage in handicraft interacted with natural resources and the objects they produced. Gelassenheit renounces the necessity of technology through self-restraint and can possibly enable us to be free from it. Wendland etal., (2018) point out that the term is theological in its origin because it has roots in Meister Eckhart (a 13th-century German mystic). Unfortunately, the pandemic has revealed that we, as a collective species, have not been able to realize the essence of technology nor to even scratch the surface in terms of potentially attempting to overcome the concealment of it in our society. Instead of encountering the danger of technology, the pandemic provided an opportunity for governments to literally force and coerce hundreds of millions of people into greater usage of it at the expense of mental health, addiction, and short- and long-term economic sustenance.