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Yet, according to Naomi Klein, these companies are not only in the business of improving our lives.

As a consequence, the Covid-19 pandemic has allowed tech corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft to reposition themselves ‘as benevolent protectors of public health and munificent champions of “everyday hero” essential workers’ (ibid). As CEO of Steer Tech, Anuja Sonalker, puts is: ‘Humans are biohazards, machines are not’ (Klein 2020). The reason for their popularity is simple. These are all tech corporations whose products services have allowed us to work from home or have entertained us during the corona pandemic. Finally, I invoke Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to supplement such biopolitical analyses of digital capitalism with an attention to the distant ‘zones of death’ where the precarious workers that form the material bases of the digital-capitalist mode of production are left unprotected and exploited Next, I discuss Klein’s essay in relation to Shoshana Zuboff’s work on surveillance capitalism to show how they are both essentially criticizing a biopolitical turn in digital capitalism. It begins with a summary of Naomi Klein’s article, emphasising the main arguments. But while Klein’s essay successfully distils seemingly disparate events into a haunting exposé of how Big Tech companies are reshaping contemporary societies, she fails to fully develop the social- and political consequences of her perhaps most important observation: namely that the mode of production promoted by Facebook, Google, and Amazon ‘claims to be run on “artificial intelligence” but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centers, content moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants, and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyperexploitation’.ĭrawing on and expanding Klein’s argument, this essay seeks to expose the all-to-human consequences of the emergence and expansion of digital capitalism. Rather than providing technical solutions to a global health crisis, the turn to Big Tech signals the emergence of a ‘pandemic shock doctrine’ the result if which is the creation of a privately owned, digital surveillance apparatus that track, trace and store our every move. In her 2020 essay ‘ Screen New Deal’ Naomi Klein compels us to think critically about the role of big tech corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon in the global fight against Covid-19.