Digital healing? Digital capitalism? Neoliberalism, Digital Health Technologies and ‘Citizen Health’

Abstract

The emergence of digital health and illness technologies and the digitisation of capitalist economic production reflect the increasing cyborgisation of organic matter within current economic and social relations. In this paper I employ a materialist and posthuman approach to ‘digital health’, investigating micropolitically what digital technologies and apps actually do, within the contexts of contemporary social relations and the emergence of digital capitalism. This enables new insights into the impacts of the digital upon social production, making sense of the contribution of both human and non-human matter both to digital health and to the wider economics and politics of neoliberal health care. The paper evaluates four digital health technologies to consider what capacities they produce in bodies and the micropolitical impact of the technology in terms of power, resistance and social order. I then consider how these micropolitics might be changed by altering the contexts or other forces, and argue that this opens up ways for digital technologies to be used to promote radical and transgressive possibilities, by re-engineering the interactions between technologies and other materialities. I conclude by discussing ‘digital activism’. I examine how technologies and apps may be engineered to democratise data: to enable collective responses to health issues, to challenge health policy and to organise against health corporations, environmental polluters, and purveyors of fast and processed foods. This collective, bottom-up model of ‘citizen health’ (Rimal et al. 1997) counters both the marketisation of health and the paternalism of health care.