https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8264487/
In common with Naomi Klein's (2008) shock doctrine thesis, Agamben works on the principle that those in power will not allow a good crisis to go to waste, but rather will take the opportunity to press forward on practices and policies that match their political agenda. A new paradigm of governance is emerging, one that attempts to reverse the declining power of national leaders: ‘The dominant powers of today have decided to pitilessly abandon the paradigm of bourgeois democracy – with its rights, its parliaments, and its constitutions – and replace it with new apparatuses whose contours we can barely glimpse.’ (Agamben 2021: 8) This is based on ‘the state of exception’, the suspension of normal activities on the grounds that we face an unprecedented challenge that governments can only respond to by abandoning that earlier paradigm.
For Agamben, this has disturbing echoes of Germany in 1933, although this time what is happening is the introduction of a sanitation of terror and a religion of health. ‘Biosecurity’ is the term he uses to describe this. Once a threat to our health is presented, then we are apparently prepared to accept limitations on our freedoms that would have been unthinkable even a few months beforehand. Not even two world wars or indeed many authoritarian regimes would have persuaded the general populace to undergo such sacrifices.
Central to this process is the deployment of digital technology, working in harmony with the new structure of relationships known as ‘social distancing’. Human relationships will have to happen as much as possible without physical presence, and this depends upon the mediation of the digital. This was already underway but has been accelerated by the response to the pandemic in which the new paradigm is that of connection, or for some, disconnection.