COVID-19 pandemic management strategies brought to light the inadequacy of neoliberal political-economic systems to effectively or equitably manage public health emergencies.
Economic growth imperatives made ‘essential workers’ in manufacturing and service provision vulnerable, while counterfactual news and social media provided context for accelerationist and conspiratorial narratives about the origins of the disease. Digital technologies with surveillance applications used in healthcare and law enforcement pandemic responses also, at times, exacerbated marginalised communities’ experience of precarity and inequality. Taken together, these effects contributed toward a culturally and socioeconomically exclusivist ‘far-right’ social turn in the context of COVID-19.
Understanding the pandemic from a holistic perspective requires first recognising how the zoonotic virus itself took hold in human populations from late 2019 due to human activity destabilising natural ecosystems, through animal agriculture, deforestation and global heating. During the course of the pandemic, residents of less wealthy states, which had often developed extractive essential resource and labour models under the neoliberal policy guidance of multinational corporations, nation states and international financial institutions, experienced scarcity and a lack of access to virus treatments or patented vaccines.
While pandemic management strategies adopted within neoliberal societies were sometimes based on unscientific ‘herd immunity’ approaches, these approaches also exposed communities without the requisite resources for living and working from home to disproportionate suffering from privation and illness, impacting, in particular, migrants, essential workers, women and people living with a disability. At times, health policies and wider political rhetoric explicitly scapegoated disenfranchised communities for the spread of the disease. As I elaborated in a Justice, Power and Resistance COVID-19 special issue, these conditions provided ideological context for a rise of accelerationist and conspiratorial narratives about COVID-19, communicated among far-right cross-institutional political networks, within economically driven environments of counterfactual mass news and social media.
The far-right social turn during COVID-19 was technically facilitated largely by news and social media targeting diasporic peoples, China or an alleged cabal of ‘globalist’ elites. These informational environments were often characterised by Nietzschean perspectivist influences on the far right, combined with a neoliberal commodification of knowledge, to the effect that ‘truth’ was seen as valuable only to the extent of its political–material use. Popular media was also leveraged in these environments by extreme right actors advocating eugenicist or misanthropy pandemic responses, and by accelerationist actors seeking the breakdown of societal institutions, or the bloody rebirth of states along racial–national lines.
Social and new media also sometimes featured as a part of technologised surveillance responses to the pandemic, which themselves facilitated repressive forms of governance negatively impacting already disadvantaged peoples. Digital technologies proliferating during the pandemic, for example, saw a privatised aggregation of personal information throughout COVID-19, while consolidating economic inequality, commodity fetishism and historically continuous forms of sociocultural exclusivism and supremacy. Although surveillant media did have relatively unavoidable if not benign uses during the pandemic, they were also variously used in support of repressive, securitising measures of pandemic response, such as predictive policing. Controversial uses of Clearview AI facial recognition software, for example, related to far-right actors involved in its public–private commercial partnerships, and the software’s co-occurrent uses for pandemic management and commercial surveillance, and allegedly against Black Lives Matter protestors in 2020.
While surveillance capitalism theory has some utility for explaining the social and economic impacts of pandemic response technologies, as this article has sought to show, it is also important to recognise that these effects transcend the national (or transnational) contexts in which these media were designed. Informational and instrumental surveillance technologies are both rooted in histories of power, discipline and control constituted via historically and geopolitically contingent capitalist and global social relations. Surveillance systems that provided for the biopolitical governance of individuals in neoliberal societies, including those with intra-pandemic uses, were first made possible by a colonial frontier of digital technologies and services. The fomentation of exclusivist and supremacist far-right political attitudes through social and news media, then, recursively serves to further disenfranchise populations marginalised internationally, particularly when social discrimination became instantiated as electoral support for racist, ableist, gendered or classist crisis policies promoted by powerful heads of state.
Conspiratorial and accelerationist communications during the pandemic were often seen as oppositional to government strategies of pandemic response, given various far-right actors’ portrayal of vaccines and other public–private measures as tyrannical or authoritarian. In the context of COVID-19, these arguments did find purchase among an audience recently sensitised by their experience of state intervention, and enabled the wider growth in prevalence of far- and extreme-right social movements. As I have shown, however, both government and extra-institutional responses to the pandemic operated in mediatised environments amenable to counterfactual news campaigns, and in global political–economic environments constrained in their provisions for health and wellbeing by neoliberal structures and settings.
When looking at various interconnected pandemic responses in relation to one another, we can see that concerns about commercial industry often took precedence over the lives and livelihoods of individuals, while mass death from the pandemic was understood in actuarial terms as teleologically both natural and inevitable. Through the combined effects of technologised, environmental and socioeconomic responses, the intra-pandemic suffering of those targeted by the far-right social turn was often reinforced. By way of news and social media, these forms of structural inequality were, in effect, normalised, consented to, and socially reproduced; in Gramscian terms, they were constructed via discriminatory and hyper-nationalistic political messaging as ‘common sense’.
Imogen Richards is a lecturer in criminology at Deakin University and a research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute.
Neoliberalism, COVID-19 and conspiracy: pandemic management strategies and the far-right social turn by Imoge Richards is available on Bristol University Press Digital. Read here.
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