This point made by Benjamin Bratton, in a personal conversation quoted by Zizek in Pandemic!, makes an important point about how we categorise state action in a crisis like this. From loc 523:
China introduced measures that Western Europe and the USA are unlikely to tolerate, perhaps to their own detriment. Put bluntly, it is a mistake to reflexively interpret all forms of sensing and modelling as “surveillance” and active governance as “social control.” We need a different and more nuanced vocabulary of intervention.
It reminded me of Morozov’s argument about digital socialism. In a platformised society, the politics of the ‘feedback infrastructure’ become crucial i.e. how data generated about social action is used to coordinate future social action. I think Bratton correctly identifies how imprecise our current vocabularies are and how they must be expanded and made richer in order to cope with this conjuncture.
Mark Carrigan 