This article is written by Dr Igor Calzada, Senior Research Fellow, and Policy Adviser position at the University of Oxford. He writes here in a personal capacity.

Over the last decades, globalisation has led to a new class of global citizens. While the access to this global citizenship is still not spread evenly, many have enjoyed the freedom to move, work, and travel with no limits.

However, this cosmopolitan globalisation rhetoric of a borderless world has been drastically slowed down by Covid-19. This pandemic has introduced a new level of uncertainty in global affairs and led many to question whether citizens will be able to continue enjoying the freedom of movement once the crisis is over. Ironically, this resonates with the former UK prime minister Theresa May’s popular quote in reference to the de facto Brexit, "If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere".

Actually, we are now pandemic citizens, increasingly stuck inside closed nation-states surrounded by contradictory new walls and old borders.

A new world

Against this backdrop, it can be argued that borders still matter — at least as much as nations do.

But the significance of nations and citizenship might be rapidly shifting through a sort of pandemic adjustment, with different consequences for citizens depending on which country they call home and their living conditions. In other words, and bluntly speaking, it seems borders are making a  temporary comeback affecting everyone directly but not all equally. We are in the transition heading towards a new world order.

How should public servants and public authorities face this novel scenario?

What we might call a shared pandemic citizenship — where citizens worldwide share exactly the same fear, uncertainty, and risks — is here to stay. This has different levels of techno-political implications, as it intersects with another global trend — how algorithms are increasingly shaping our lives.

In other words, I argue that the current pandemic crisis is pervasively related to data governance issues, which exposes citizens’ vulnerability in a potential surveillance state

The responses to this pandemic emergency have been extremely different from case to case: from the drastic lockdowns first seen in China, which were eventually followed by several European countries including Italy and Spain, to more targeted measures like those implemented by South Korea, Singapore, and Israel. Several governments have, in an attempt to tackle the spread of the virus, begun operating, whether consciously or unwittingly, as algorithmic nations_._ Algorithmic nations are driven by a new mode of governance where algorithms such as blockchain, facial recognition, or data mining, and other technological tools are a cornerstone. The downside is that these algorithms may negatively affect the ethical and the democratic life of citizens.

We must therefore ask what are the democratic trade-offs of such algorithmic strategies? And what are the consequences for citizens?

A pandemic and a data crisis converge

It appears that this pandemic crisis is forcing us towards an algorithmic crisis, in which the data of citizens could be used for unfair or unethical purposes by governments or other organisations.

In other words, I argue that the current pandemic crisis is pervasively related to data governance issues, which exposes citizens’ vulnerability in a potential surveillance state. Do we have a good understanding of how China has implemented its Social Credit Systems, or South Korea the app to track and treat citizens? Why has Singapore had very few deaths and been able to control so quickly the spread of infection? How will Israel use the data that people are providing to the government to control the pandemic spread? Are all means justified to fight the pandemic? Should governments protect citizens from being infected even if this might mean establishing a new digital non-privacy norm? Will this pandemic crisis become an algorithmic crisis, with serious side-effects for governments worldwide?

To be clear, there is no evidence yet of governments misusing data collected to fight the coronavirus for nefarious aims. But it is a systemic risk that we must not be blind to, as these new data tools are incredibly potent.

Scientists worldwide are working continuously to experiment and design unprecedented AI systems to (hopefully) detect the virus without violating democratic norms and while protecting our fellow citizens. It is a massive mobilisation of knowledge that we cannot easily dismiss

Global thinkers, such as the philosophers Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Innerarity, constantly advocate for transnational cooperation among algorithmic nations. According to them, the real antidote to an epidemic is not segregation, but political leadership and cooperation.

In the near future, governments and civil servants may take different techno-political approaches to how data could be used and exploited to tackle such an unprecedented situation. Algorithmic nations of various political ideologies are already carving out different futures for their citizens. Among the resilience strategies adopted by various governments, collective intelligence should be considered to further avoid dystopian measures that could exacerbate existing social inequalities and techno-political vulnerabilities among pandemic citizens. Collective intelligence is created when people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise a wider range of information, ideas, and insights to address a social innovation challenge.

Surprisingly positive though, scientists worldwide are working continuously to experiment and design unprecedented AI systems to (hopefully) detect the virus without violating democratic norms and while protecting our fellow citizens. It is a massive mobilisation of knowledge that we cannot easily dismiss.

Among the various resilience strategies stemming from social innovation that are worth considering are predicting and modelling AI systems, citizens science projects with real-time data, social media mining, open-source do-it-yourself (DIY) coronavirus detection tests, and most importantly, sharing policies and strategies among algorithmic nations.

Ultimately, algorithmic nations should strive to manage this extraordinary situation by taking advantage of the unprecedented masses of data now available, but without using it as a shortcut to undermine democracy and the rights of our fellow pandemic citizens, wherever they are located on the planet. — Igor Calzada

(Picture credit: Unsplash)