Abstract
Over the past decades, digital technologies have been exploited to supply traditional measures employed to trace people’s behavior. This chapter aims to discuss the current field of actual surveillance and the age of surveillance capitalism with its contradictions. The main focus is on the Italian technology solutions deployed to tackle the spread of COVID-19. This chapter analyzes the interaction between the procedures shaped by the Italian surveillance technologies implemented to discipline (e.g., social distancing) and control (e.g., prescribing spatial behavior) forms of governmentality. Another aspect of this research explores the very complex stratification of public and private spaces producing new spatiality during the pandemic. A preliminary analysis of surveillance technologies deployed to struggle COVID-19 is reviewed and their biopolitical power in the current exceptional state discussed in the specific case of Italy. Two perspectives, a biopolitical one and data justice, provide an essential lens of reading to understand the effects of surveillance technologies in the Italian society during the pandemic, leading to a further progress in the phenomenon of surveillance capitalism to which we have all been subjected for a long time.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, “carbonare” lessons were organized in public gardens in Milan, every Sunday afternoon in parks, in green spaces of neighborhoods, until the schools of all types and levels are back in presence and safety. They consist in itinerant lessons to guarantee the right to study for those who, due to the digital divide, could not deal with distance learning. The purpose of carbonare lessons was also to protest against the closure of schools during the peak of the pandemic (https://video.repubblica.it/edizione/milano/lezioni-carbonare-a-milano-gli-studenti-and-8220disposti-a-tutto-pur-di-tornare-in-classe-and-8221/371606/372211?ref=vd-auto&cnt=1&fbclid=IwAR0UbVaRDTPbG9bKBkZcDw6ooco24PxxKzf5wbkcP2L3spQW5JkPFSLdy3s)
- 2.
Internet of things and digital technologies, recently, have been turned more and more into tools for behavioral manipulation and exploitation. This is the definition of Zuboff (2019) on the surveillance capitalism.
- 3.
Foucaultian heterotopias are spaces that have the particular characteristic of being connected to all other spaces, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they themselves designate. Classic examples of heterotopies are prisons and cemeteries.
- 4.
The document from which the basic choices underlying the DPCM and the “colors” ordinance derive was drawn up by a working group including the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, INAIL, the Spallanzani Institute and the Conference of Regions. The data based on the surveys were uploaded every week by the regions to the database of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità; the sources of the data, therefore, were the regions (https://documenti.camera.it/leg18/resoconti/assemblea/html/sed0424/stenografico.pdf)
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Albanese, V., Senesi, G.S. (2022). Digital Geographies and Digital Surveillance Technologies: Power and Space in the Italian Society Under Control for Public Health. In: Laituri, M., Richardson, R.B., Kim, J. (eds) The Geographies of COVID-19. Global Perspectives on Health Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11775-6_18
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