QRcoding the Smart City: Dystopian governmentality and the digital infrapolitics of the post-pandemic present

QR (Quick Response) codes have become ubiquitous graphic artifacts within our post-pandemic cityscapes, mediating a great variety of activities and reconfiguring routine practices and daily interactions. Drawing on a series of ethnographic observations on the use and display of QR codes collected in different global cities (Milan, New York, Jakarta, Toronto), this article explores the ideological and semiotic infrastructures underlying the contemporary trope of the ‘Smart City’ and the role of digitally encoded data in organizing information and conduct in our post- pandemic present. It is argued that the new machine-readable data encoding standard called QR code lies at the heart of different representations of the future metropolis. Suspended between dystopian visions of digital surveillance and techno-optimist fantasies of cyber-metropolitan lifestyles, the actual encounters with QR code-mediated infrastructures are, in fact, the theatre of a new post-pandemic techno-corporeal regime wherein new forms of ideological and sensorimotor compliance are interspersed with unintended glitches and artful acts of defiance. The article discusses the interplay between acts of ideological and corporeal alignment with the contemporary conceptual construct of the ‘Smart City’ and the emerging infrapolitics of alternative digital textualities. In so doing, it describes, how in the post-pandemic world, QR codes are embedded in a complex history of remediation and repurposing. At once infrastructures of consumer desire and statecraft surveillance, they generally interpellate users in ways that conflate the role of citizen and consumer. The analysis, however, shows how QR codes can be openly contested or occasionally “remediated” and used to unsettle expected outcomes, redirecting users to innovative forms of political action and aesthetic intervention.