Transparency and Sovereignty in Contact-tracing Networks

Threaded through Jean Baudrillard’s writings on society, politics, and technology is the notion of transparency. Transparency features in several works critiquing the digital era: by rendering everything overexposed and proximate, media technology has facilitated a frictionless or, using Baudrillard’s term, ecstatic flow of information. As transparency aligns itself semantically with frictionlessness and ecstasy, the question concerning the preconditions of transparency becomes pertinent. By advancing a reading of Singapore’s TraceTogether application, this article proposes that embedded within Baudrillard’s notion of transparency is the paradigm of friction: sovereignty. The TraceTogether team purports a non-invasive and privacy-preserving contact-tracing protocol. Circumventing the use of geo-location tracking, TraceTogether formulates a network of infected bodies based on proximity data by using Bluetooth Relative Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) readings between devices with the application installed. The reduction of all markers of identification and differentiation—or, points of friction—into the same frictionless code belies an imperative invocation of sovereignty. Drawing on a range of thought that obliquely confronts the question of sovereignty and friction, this article frames the inquiry within the parameters of Jean Baudrillard and other theorists whose deliberations on infrastructure like architecture and networks are wrought upon the concept of transparency. The sovereign power to suspend or collapse the friction/frictionless binary calls into question the right to retain one’s friction in this frictionless digital era. This article proposes a critical reading of topological transparency with a view to the political and bio-philosophical implications of what is at stake in proximity-tracing technologies.