En/forcing the Tokyo 2020 Olympics: The Racialization of Digital Engagement and Digital Solutionism

This chapter problematizes the racialization of digital engagement and digital solutionism, and how they reinforce dominant ideologies of power, race and digitality. I examine how Tokyo Olympics 2020 was promoted and ultimately realized during a global pandemic, despite mass protests and the tremendous human and financial costs incurred by Japan. I propose the double notion of both forcing and enforcing digitality. In the context of Tokyo 2020, not only was opt-out not a viable option, but one that actively carried a financial penalty, thus making compliance necessary. As such, I critique how the forcing and enforcing of Tokyo 2020 was grounded upon geopolitical inequalities of engagement and disengagement. In the process, I explore the naturalization of digital, social and economic dis/engagement as situated within a pandemic time–space that brought together the need for material labour, digital productivity and consumption. Ultimately, I argue that Tokyo 2020 represents a moment when digitality – presented as the ‘safe’ revolutionary solution – was weaponized, commodified and exploited by both the International Olympic Committee and Japan, as inter-related and mutually complicit forms of racialized digital engagement, both serving their own ‘project’ of economic, political and socio-cultural dominance.