Code is intended both as a computer-based language to program software and as a functional and visual language for organizing administrative processes, visualizing information, performing behaviour control, and reinforcing shared imaginaries based on surveillance and dread.This special issue of Digital Culture & Society deals with the concept of code in relation to the Covid-19 crisis.The contributions depart from the idea that both forms of coding have become dramatically intertwined during the pandemic and are structuring a new way of being in and seeing reality.They explore the new forms of data-driven surveillance and representation of the pandemic evolution at the level of real-time epidemiology, sensor technologies, science policies, push media, and the heterogeneous counter-discourses that try to subvert them.