Bodily surveillance: Singapore’s COVID-19 app and technological opportunism

ABSTRACT

Singapore won early kudos for its ‘gold standard’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic back in February 2020. It was praised globally for its ability to activate an effective contact tracing system. Riding on this success, the government introduced ‘TraceTogether’, a mobile phone app to enhance contact tracing efforts, using a technology that leverages the Bluetooth feature on smartphones to track proximity between users and record their physical encounters. This paper contends that the roll-out of the app is a form of ‘technological opportunism’ to enhance greater bodily surveillance over its citizens during a time of crisis. The low number of downloads of the app initially (at 20%), before persuasion-coercion strategies were applied to lift the take-up rate to 90%, belies the assumption that surveillance is genuinely widely accepted. This paper details key responses to the app in Singapore, and the government’s decision to make it mandatory during the heart of the pandemic between 2020 to 2022. It considers the implications of technological opportunism, taking advantage of a pandemic to continue in the journey of turning citizens into what Michel Foucault would refer to as ‘subjectified bodies’ to be traced, tracked and codified.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• tracing app
• technological optimism
• surveillance
• docile bodies
• governmentality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. GovTech: https://www.tech.gov.sg/

2. Little India is a district in Singapore where South Asian migrant workers frequent during their leisure hours. On the night of 8 December 2013, Sakthivel Kumarvelu, a 33-year-old Indian construction worker, was not permitted to board a private chartered bus that would take him back to his dormitory, as he was deemed intoxicated by the driver and conductor. He attempted to run after the bus but was instead run over.

by it when it rounded a corner. Kumarvelu was pinned under the bus and eventually died while trapped.

Attempts to free him were in vain and his fellow workers blamed the driver and conductor, leading to

violence on the streets and damage to vehicles. The unrest was eventually quelled by Special Operations Command police officers, but the incident brought to light tough working conditions faced by migrant

workers in Singapore and the undercurrents of discrimination they face.