COVID-19 brings a new biopolitics onto the agenda, turning surveillance into a porous procedure that enters bodies without touching them. Its engine—the mechanism that sets this surveillance in motion—is the administration of fear through the combination of public-security and public-health discourses. Its effectiveness depends on the convergence of traceability and identity, producing, in extreme situations such as coronavirus, another social hierarchy between immobile and mobile bodies, between those visible and invisible to the state and corporate algorithms.
Those who can stop, stay home—the immobile—are the ones who can be tracked, computed, watched and cured. In the “laboratory” context imposed by corona-life, where complicity with monitoring is also a prerogative of survival, the untracked person is the one the state had already turned its back on. In the spiral of “corona-surveillance,” the mobile subject is that visible invisible person whom our social violence stubbornly refuses to see.