Citizens go digital: A discursive examination of digital payments in Singapore’s Smart Nation project

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalisation efforts in many countries as they try to contain the virus. With the physical handling of cash posing as a potential virus transmission risk, digital payments have become important in the urgent transition to a cashless society and a key feature of smart city projects. Critical analyses have typically framed smart cities as neoliberalist developmental projects that see the partnering of the state with private corporations. However, it is unclear how the smart city emerges under the technocratic inclinations of the developmental state. Focusing on the digital payments project under Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, this paper unpacks the discursive practices employed in mobilising citizen support for electronic payments through a critical analysis of publicly available government materials and recent initiatives. The discourse surrounding digital payments is bound up in narratives surrounding economic competitiveness, technological progress and public health and safety, and strongly rooted in a technocratic governance ethos that limits genuine citizen participation in shaping smart payments technologies. This paper argues that such discursive framings represent a missed opportunity to build a smart city that is truly citizen-centric. This reorientation requires more bottom-up and grassroots-based modes of governance that reformulate smart citizenship into one that pays greater attention to the affective and social contexts behind digital technologies.