3.6. Transparent Bodies: The Birth of Digital Biopolitics

Hack: March 2020, Worldwide

In March 2020, the world—which as recently as January had seemed unshakable in its connectivity and openness—came to a halt. Borders that had been opening for decades to flows of goods, capital, and people slammed shut with such speed that thousands of travelers found themselves trapped in airport transit zones, in foreign countries with no possibility of returning home, in a legal and existential vacuum between states that had closed themselves off.
But the true symbol of the new era was not the closing of borders, but the manner of their subsequent reopening. Throughout 2020–2021, an infrastructure was deployed that had previously existed only in the laboratories of dystopian fiction: digital passes, QR codes, contact-tracing applications, vaccination status verification systems.
A scene that became mundane for millions: a person approaches the entrance to a restaurant, theater, stadium, or airport check-in counter. They take out their smartphone, open an application, and display the screen. Another person or a scanner reads the code. The machine makes a decision: green—allow entry; red—deny. The body becomes transparent, its medical history readable, its right to movement a function of the algorithm.
No violence. No police dragging away dissidents. Only a screen, only a code, only a quiet "I'm sorry, but the system won't let you through." Consent was given in advance—at the moment of installing the application, at the moment of accepting the condition that without a code, there is no access. Biopolitics, which Michel Foucault described as a power that "takes life under its care," has achieved its perfect form: power without a master, control without violence, governance through voluntary submission.

From the State of Exception to the New Normal

To adequately grasp the philosophical significance of the events that unfolded in 2020–2022, they must be placed within the context of the debate concerning the nature of the state of exception and its relationship to normal legal order.
The state of exception, according to Schmitt, is a situation in which law is suspended in the name of law itself, in the name of protecting the order that law is meant to safeguard. The sovereign manifests himself precisely in his capacity to go beyond positive law in order to preserve that law.
Giorgio Agamben, developing this intuition, showed that in the 20th century, the state of exception transformed from a temporary, exceptional measure into a stable paradigm of governance. The state of exception becomes the norm; the camp, where law is completely suspended, becomes the "nomos" of modernity. What was conceived as a temporary deviation from the norm in the name of saving it turns out to be the permanent mode of existence of power.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided empirical confirmation of this thesis on an unprecedented scale. Governments around the world introduced emergency measures restricting fundamental rights and freedoms: freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom of enterprise, the right to privacy. These measures were justified by the temporary nature of the threat—as soon as the virus was defeated, authorities promised, everything would return to normal.
However, critical analysis undertaken in a number of recent studies reveals a different picture. As Jacob Jensen convincingly demonstrates, the pandemic did not merely temporarily suspend the normal order but fundamentally shifted the boundaries of what is considered acceptable state intervention in the lives of citizens. Tracking technologies, digital passes, vaccination status verification systems—all were introduced as temporary measures but created an infrastructure that can be (and is already beginning to be) used for other purposes.
Weiqiang Lin and Jean-Baptiste Frétigny introduce the concept of the "QR border"—a new type of border control that operates not at territorial boundaries but on the bodies of individuals themselves, not through walls and visas but through digital codes and automated checks. This border is mobile, flexible, scalable—and precisely for this reason, it can be transferred to any context, extending far beyond the pandemic emergency.
This raises a question that philosophical thought is only beginning to explore: was the state of exception of 2020–2022 truly exceptional, or did it serve as a mechanism for legitimizing the transition to a fundamentally new type of social order—an order in which governance through digital tracking and biometric identification becomes the norm?

Foucault and the Birth of Digital Biopolitics

For a more adequate analysis of what occurred, it is necessary to turn to the conceptual apparatus developed by Michel Foucault. It was Foucault, long before the pandemic, who described three models of epidemic management that anticipated the logic of pandemic measures in 2020–2022 with astonishing accuracy.
The first model—the model of leprosy—is based on the mechanism of exclusion. Lepers are isolated, expelled from society, placed in spaces where they cannot come into contact with the healthy. This is a rigid, binary division: pure/impure, healthy/sick, us/them.
The second model—the model of plague—operates differently. In a plague-stricken town, total discipline is introduced: each inhabitant is confined to their house, every movement is controlled, every condition is recorded. This is not exclusion but total inclusion—the integration of every individual into a network of observation and governance. The goal is not to expel the disease but to control its spread through total knowledge of everyone.
The third model—the model of smallpox inoculation—is associated with what Foucault calls "governmentality." Here, the concern is no longer the discipline of individuals but the regulation of populations through statistics, probability, and risk. Vaccination operates not at the level of the individual body but at the level of population immunity. This is biopolitics in the proper sense—the management of life through knowledge of life.
The COVID-19 pandemic, as researchers convincingly show, synthesized all three models. The leprosy model manifested itself in the stigmatization of the "unvaccinated," in their effective exclusion from public spaces. The plague model appeared in the total tracking of movements through applications, in QR codes recording every entry and exit. The inoculation model appeared in the very logic of vaccination as a means of achieving population immunity.
However, the pandemic added something fundamentally new to these classical models—the digital dimension. Technologies that Foucault could not foresee made observation total, automatic, requiring no human participation. Cameras tracking movements. Applications collecting contact data. Algorithms calculating risks. Databases storing the medical history of every individual.
This is the birth of what can be called digital biopolitics—a power that governs not through disciplinary institutions (school, prison, barracks) but through distributed, automated mechanisms of data collection and processing embedded in everyday life. A power that requires neither sovereign, nor executioner, nor overseer to exercise it—only a smartphone in every citizen's pocket and an algorithm making decisions.

Esposito and the Paradox of Immunization

The thinker whose conceptual apparatus proves indispensable for understanding the pandemic experience is Roberto Esposito. In his fundamental trilogy—Communitas, Immunitas, Bios—he developed a theory of immunization as a key mechanism of modern politics.
Esposito's initial intuition is simultaneously simple and profound. Community binds people through a common obligation, a common vulnerability, a common openness to one another. But this openness carries risk—the risk of contagion, the risk of invasion, the risk of destruction. Therefore, the community is forced to defend itself—to immunize itself.
Immunity is the negation of community, the removal of obligation, the closing of borders. Literally, immunis means "exempt from duties," not obliged to give. The immune system of an organism protects it from external invasions but does so by distinguishing self from non-self, by exclusion. The same logic operates in politics: the state protects citizens, but this protection always presupposes exclusion—of someone or something.
The paradox of immunization, which Esposito traces through the entirety of Western political history, is that the protection of life inevitably turns into its limitation. The stronger the immune defense, the more closed, rigid, and impermeable the system becomes. At its limit, immunization leads to autoimmune reactions, when the system begins to attack itself.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed this paradox with extreme clarity. To protect the lives of citizens, states were forced to restrict their freedom. To prevent infection, people were forced to isolate themselves from one another. To save society, sociality had to be destroyed. Immunization against the virus turned into immunization against life itself.
Esposito, unlike many critics of pandemic measures, offers neither simple condemnation nor simple approval. His thought is more complex: he shows that immunization is an inevitable mechanism for protecting life, but a mechanism that carries within it the risk of self-destruction. The task of political thought is not to reject immunization as such, but to find ways to keep it within productive limits, preventing the transformation of protection into self-destruction.

Stratification and the New Inequality: Digital Citizenship

One of the most significant consequences of pandemic biopolitics has been the formation of a new type of social inequality—inequality based on access to digital infrastructure and willingness to submit to algorithmic governance.
Researchers speak of the emergence of "stratified citizenship," where the rights and opportunities of an individual are determined not so much by their legal status as by their position within digital systems of accounting and control. Those who have a smartphone with a functioning application gain access to public spaces. Those who do not—or whose application shows a red code—find themselves excluded.
This stratification has multiple dimensions. The technological—access to devices and networks. The medical—vaccination status. The behavioral—willingness to comply with prescriptions. The social—capacity to adapt to new forms of control. A hierarchy of "digital citizens" emerges, where at the top are fully transparent, fully trackable, fully governable individuals, and at the bottom are those who for one reason or another fall outside digital networks.
Bishwa Adjaï has introduced the concept of "biometric citizenship" to describe situations in which a person's identity is authenticated not by documents but by biometric data, not by legal status but by bodily characteristics. The pandemic radicalized this tendency: identity came to be determined not only by who you are (name, citizenship, documents) but also by the state of your body (healthy/sick, vaccinated/unvaccinated).
Here we witness what can be called the ontological expropriation of the body. The body ceases to belong to the subject in the full sense of the term. Its condition is recorded by external systems, stored in databases, processed by algorithms. The subject does not control this information, does not know how it is used, cannot delete it. Their corporeality becomes an object of external governance.

Consent as a Technology of Power

The most troubling aspect of pandemic biopolitics lies not in coercion but in voluntary submission. People themselves installed applications, themselves presented QR codes, themselves accepted the conditions under which their lives became transparent to control systems.
Lin and Frétigny, in their research, emphasize the key role of "affective consent" in the functioning of pandemic technologies. People consented to tracking not because they were coerced, but because it promised safety, convenience, and a return to normal life. Consent was given voluntarily—and it is precisely this that makes it so effective.
Foucault, in his later works on "care of the self," showed that modern power operates not through prohibition and coercion but through the production of desires, through the formation of a subject who wants what is required of them. The pandemic provided empirical confirmation of this thesis: people wanted to be tracked because it allowed them to leave their homes, meet friends, return to work.
A paradoxical situation emerges, which can be called the voluntary panopticon. The prisoners themselves build their prison because the prison promises safety. The observed themselves install the cameras because the cameras promise protection. The controlled themselves produce the data on the basis of which control is exercised.
This situation calls into question traditional notions of freedom and coercion. If the subject voluntarily renounces freedom in the name of security, is this renunciation free? If consent is given under pressure of circumstances (the impossibility of living a normal life without consent), is it genuine? And where is the boundary between voluntary choice and forced submission in a situation where the alternative is social death?

Preliminary Conclusions

In preliminary conclusion, it can be said that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and radicalized tendencies that had been developing for decades within the depths of late capitalism: the fusion of biopolitics and digital technologies, the transformation of the state of exception into the norm, the emergence of new forms of social inequality based on access to digital infrastructure, and the transformation of citizenship from a legal status into a biometric registration.
The question posed to us by the pandemic experience is this: was this a temporary deviation from the norm that will end with the virus? Or are we witnessing the birth of a new type of social order—an order in which governance through digital tracking and biometric identification becomes permanent?
Researchers diverge in their answers to this question. Optimists point out that many pandemic measures have been rescinded, that applications have been deactivated, that society has returned to "normal life." Pessimists, by contrast, draw attention to the fact that the infrastructure remains, that the technologies have not disappeared, that the legal and organizational mechanisms created for the pandemic can be activated at any moment.
The truth likely lies somewhere in between. The pandemic did not create digital biopolitics out of nothing—it accelerated and radicalized processes that were already underway. It did not transform liberal democracies into totalitarian regimes—but it shifted the boundaries of the permissible, normalized what was previously considered unacceptable. It did not permanently deprive citizens of freedom—but it created precedents and infrastructure that could be used in the future.
In this sense, the pandemic is not an exception but a diagnosis. It showed what modern power is capable of when faced with a threat. It demonstrated the fragility of rights and freedoms in the face of fear. It laid bare the willingness of people to voluntarily renounce freedom in the name of security. And this diagnosis remains with us regardless of whether the virus has returned or receded.