Where Technology Leads, the Problems Follow. Technosolutionism and the Dutch Contact Tracing App.

Abstract

In April 2020, in the midst of its first pandemic lockdown, the Dutch government announced plans to develop a contact tracing app to help contain the spread of the coronavirus - the Coronamelder. Originally intended to address the problem of the overburdening of manual contract tracers, by the time the app was released six months later, the problem it sought to solve had drastically changed, without the solution undergoing any modification, making it a prime example of technosolutionism. While numerous critics have mobilised the concept of technosolutionism, the questions of how technosolutionism works in practice and which specific harms it can provoke have been understudied. In this paper we advance a thick conception of technosolutionism which, drawing on Evgeny Morozov, distinguishes it from the notion of technological fix, and, drawing on constructivism, emphasizes its constructivist dimension. Using this concept, we closely follow the problem that the Coronamelder aimed to solve and how it shifted over time to fit the Coronamelder solution, rather than the other way around. We argue that, although problems are always constructed, technosolutionist problems are badly constructed, insofar as the careful and cautious deliberation which should accompany problem construction in public policy is absent in the case of technosolutionism. This can lead to three harms: a subversion of democratic decision-making; the presence of powerful new actors in the public policy context - here Big Tech; and the creation of "orphan problems", whereby the initial problems that triggered the need to develop a (techno)solution are left behind. We question whether the most popular form of technology ethics today, which focuses predominantly on the design of technology, is well-equipped to address these technosolutionist harms, insofar as such a focus may preclude critical thinking about whether or not technology should be the solution in the first place.