Digital geographies of the bug: A case study of China's contact tracing systems in the COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically expanded the role of algorithmic governance in everyday mobility. In China, urban and provincial governments have introduced health codes app as a national contract tracing and quarantine enforcement method to restrict the movements of “risky” individuals through malls, subways, railways, as well as between regions. Yet the health codes have been implemented with uneven efficacy and unexpected consequences. Drawing on glitch politics, we read these unintended consequences as “bugs” emerging from the introduction of platform-based management into everyday life. These bugs mediated individuals' lived experiences of the digital app and the hybrid space constituted by population governance, individual digital navigation, and technology. Drawing on a database of posts scraped from Zhihu, a popular Chinese question-and-answer site, we examine three dimensions of the bug: the algorithmic bug, the territorial bug, and the corporeal bug. This paper sheds light on the significance of end-user experiences in digital infrastructure and contributes to our understanding of the digital geographies of bugs in algorithmic governance and platform urbanism.