Saturday, June 6, 2020

DIVIDE & CONQUER


Singapore is developing a wearable dongle for contact tracing in hopes of "controlling the spread of COVID-19" ummmm. I'm telling you, we are living in a dystopia and it feels like just before we all lose our agency in a Handmaid's Tale-esque world. The good thing is all the comments are highlighting the similarities to 1984, the bad thing is Singapore's government has never seemed to listen to its citizens. The strange thing is I've heard stories of dormitory managers being told by the Ministry of Health to no longer give swab tests to the foreign and transient workers in Singapore. 

So the context is in Singapore, construction workers who hail from Bangladesh usually, contracted to build our incessant new buildings, they're all being housed in cramped dormitories in the ghost towns of this island and those are the current hotspots of COVID-19 transmissions. Dormitory managers have been given explicit orders for covering up the scenario, and the regular media doesn't report on this because the government is the media. 

Instead of putting in money to take care of the transient workers who are left stranded in Singapore, they've been pouring money into surveillance technologies instead, technology that citizens don't even seem to welcome. My headache grows forever stronger.