[Genuine Realist]

The greatest American failure with this pandemic, putting aside the incompetence and disinformation spread by the White House and its enablers, is how we have not put technology to good use for effective contact tracing, and not digitized our battle against the virus on an every person basis.

It's mind-blowing to me how any society that lives on its mobile phones and allows large corporations to spy on them and know everything about their lives, is somehow reticent to use information technology to track who is sick and who isn't, so everyone can use that data to protect themselves and each other.

Couldn't agree more, but you had better relate that to the fashionable demonization of the infosphere between 2010 and 2016, the NSA, concerns about social information, etc. It is going on to this day, the recent privacy initiative enacted by proposition recently in California. There is also the tendy denunciation of facial recognition software, potentially a hugely valuable tool not only for law enforcement but in any number of social contexts, including contact tracing.

What stopped the US from using its information resources to do contact tracing wasn't the government as such, but the ACLU (to the Left), Rand Paul (to the Right), and numerous associated Luddites. It wasn't the authorities.

Repeating myself, information technology is value neutral, but an infinitely useful tool to whatever values a society espouses. The more you know about anything, the better you do it. You could use a database to ascertain which citizens have distant Jewish or African ancestors, or you can use it to find the right school for a a 'different' child - or to do contact tracing in a pandemic. It all depends on social values - the information technology is by itself neutral, just a tool. But no one seems to understand that.

[Genuine Realist]

The greatest American failure with this pandemic, putting aside the incompetence and disinformation spread by the White House and its enablers, is how we have not put technology to good use for effective contact tracing, and not digitized our battle against the virus on an every person basis.

It's mind-blowing to me how any society that lives on its mobile phones and allows large corporations to spy on them and know everything about their lives, is somehow reticent to use information technology to track who is sick and who isn't, so everyone can use that data to protect themselves and each other.

Couldn't agree more, but you had better relate that to the fashionable demonization of the infosphere between 2010 and 2016, the NSA, concerns about social information, etc. It is going on to this day, the recent privacy initiative enacted by proposition recently in California. There is also the tendy denunciation of facial recognition software, potentially a hugely valuable tool not only for law enforcement but in any number of social contexts, including contact tracing.

What stopped the US from using its information resources to do contact tracing wasn't the government as such, but the ACLU (to the Left), Rand Paul (to the Right), and numerous associated Luddites. It wasn't the authorities.

Repeating myself, information technology is value neutral, but an infinitely useful tool to whatever values a society espouses. The more you know about anything, the better you do it. You could use a database to ascertain which citizens have distant Jewish or African ancestors, or you can use it to find the right school for a a 'different' child - or to do contact tracing in a pandemic. It all depends on social values - the information technology is by itself neutral, just a tool. But no one seems to understand that.