In the ocean of prognoses on how the coronavirus pandemic will reshape the world, one claim stands out: we will return to a renewed welfare state. “The big state is back,” as the Economist put it; reversing Thatcher’s motto, Boris Johnson noted that “there is such a thing as society.” The pandemic could, it is argued, succeed in overcoming neoliberalism where the 2008 financial crisis failed. To some extent, the shift seems to be already underway. Governments are bailing out companies, nationalizing payrolls, and redirecting industrial production towards urgent health needs. Ideas long discussed but strongly resisted, such as minimum income guarantees, have suddenly become reality in countries like Spain. Some claim (or hope) that the collective nature of the current catastrophe will promote the resurgence of social solidarity, reviving a certain “spirit” of World War II.

But if any renewal of social welfare does emerge from this crisis, it will be a very different “welfare” from that envisaged in the post-1945 period. It will be strongly driven by private corporations, and it will use their tools and platforms — whose ultimate goal is generating profit. Crucially, it will be based on opaque and intrusive forms of datafication. By this we mean not merely the intensification of surveillance — which, as many have noted, is already happening — but two interconnected processes: “the transformation of human life into data through processes of quantification, and the generation of different kinds of value from data.” A datafied welfare system will consolidate Big Tech companies as institutions essential to the basic functioning of the state and society. Should that happen, we will see not a return to the world before neoliberalism but the emergence of a new social order centered on what Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have recently called data colonialism.