Chapter 13 describe COVID-19 as a wicked problem and show how different CI-mechanisms have been used to cope with the pandemic. The first CI-mechanism is the transparent information flows during the pandemic. Knowledge is being shared at a rapid pace in the global online setting. Most of the big news sites provide citizens with updated statistics on the spread of the virus. Another example is the governmental “test and trace”-strategy that aims to maximize information about the spread of the virus at all times. A second CI-mechanism is citizen responsibility. Citizens in all countries have faced the challenge of complying with behavioral rules enforced by the government. Rules on social distancing and voluntary quarantines depend on citizen cooperation. Here, New Zealand stands out as one of the most successful countries. Third, collective learning at a system level has been important in dealing with the pandemic. One example is South Korea who learned a lot from the Middle East Virus (MERS) in 2015 a couple of years before the COVID-19 outbreak. Their past failure in coping with that outbreak, made them much better prepared than other countries.

This chapter addresses autonomy’s role in democratic governance. Political authority may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy, which is in turn a function of autonomy. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools.