Memories From the Year 2030 is a collection of fictional letters, memos and visual artifacts created by a group of futurists, speculative designers, authors and artists. Read the entire series here.
How did the COVID-19 pandemic become a wake-up call to rethink the design of human relations to nature? How did it foster a fundamental reorientation for how to organize economies, governments, and one’s own life? Looking back from 2030, several general factors can be identified. First, the disruption of normalcy opened up the space for imaginaries to expand. Second, the experience that everyone’s health depended on everyone’s efforts to stop the chains of infection strengthened a widespread sense of common purpose and solidarity. Third, the uneven death toll exposed such unfair social conditions that the ensuing moral shock fortified the resolve for change. Fourth, missing friends and relatives during the many weeks of preventive isolation measures nourished the appreciation of the values of togetherness and care as more important than mere material consumption. Fifth, the sharply reduced emissions during the shutdowns provided a pre-taste of an improved quality of life. These factors combined to unleash the momentum for transformation.
The virus’s global spread exposed the shortcomings of governance in a world marked by divisions, intersecting inequalities, and rampant unaccountability. Although experts had warned about the risks of emerging pandemics for decades, stockpiles of essential protective gear proved inexistent and the surge capacities of hospitals severely limited. Disinfectants, protective masks, and medical equipment became scarce and went to the highest bidders. Frontline healthcare workers had to scramble, reuse worn material, and were often unable to escape infection, even in the wealthiest countries. Testing kits were readily arranged for the wealthy in Telluride or on Fischer Island, while there were none for low-wage laborers in cramped meat-processing plants.
Lethal design subjects large numbers of workers, poor and discriminated groups to significantly higher infection and fatality rates than others. The pandemic demonstrated this as clear as ever. Those who could not stay at home faced heightened probabilities of infection. While the fatality risks of those infected increased by age, those with specific pre-existing conditions suffered the greatest risks. These conditions closely correlated with exposures to environmental pollutants at work, home, and in the neighborhood and with less access to healthy food and medical care. In addition, policies mandating to shelter in place meant entirely different things depending on a domicile’s size and features. Being squeezed into a crowded apartment or dormitory contrasted sharply with the convenience of a mansion with balconies and a garden. In absence of counter-measures, lockdowns increased and intensified domestic violence, with women and children suffering the gravest consequences. Access to a computer and the Internet determined the ability to work or attend school from home. Longstanding inequalities were exacerbated and brutally overt. The differential impact and lethality patterns of a pandemic are design issues.
When a vaccine against COVID-19 was developed, the pressure from global civil society had become so great that the patents of pharmaceutical corporations were voided and arrangements made to allow free access to anyone. Health care was reconceived as a universal right.
Yet it did not stop there. The momentum led also to the redesign of security in broader terms. Engaged citizens everywhere demanded that wasteful military budgets should be redirected to better early warning systems and preparedness for pandemics and the full range of other existential threats, including earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and volcano eruptions. Although the origin of such disasters originates with nature, it was recognized that a disaster becomes a disaster only by human design, the death toll shaped by institutional action or its omission, by decisions about where to locate a settlement, what to include in a building code, or whether to invest in monitoring and mitigating measures.
When the waves of national or regional lockdowns led to sudden reductions in industrial production, traffic and emissions, it gave a sense of how life could be enhanced with enough political will. The air became cleaner, noise quieted down, and visibility improved. Asthmatics were able to breathe more easily. Urbanites could hear birds singing from their windows. Some could enjoy for the first time a clear view of mountain ranges on the horizon. The absence of automobiles in the streets inspired residents to reclaim rights to the city. New bicycle lanes, which had typically taken years to implement amidst tedious pushbacks by car lobbies, popped up during the lockdowns and were there to stay.
Such experiences led to a widespread recognition that the way forward would need to be better aligned with nature. The weakness of global cooperation and the fragmentation of global society into nation-states in pursuit of narrow national self-interests, or the even narrower interests of dominant elite factions, had prevented measures that could have mitigated the disasters from climate change. Just as the organizational design of industrial production shifted from an emphasis on mere efficiency with complex global supply chains to an emphasis on resilience that could better cope with the pandemic, so too shifted the technological design paradigm from externalizing environmental costs to sustainability.
An economic depression kept production and emissions down even after lockdown measures were lifted. While most countries resorted to enormous spending packages to stimulate economic growth again, the beneficiaries were frequently not those in greatest need, but those with the strongest lobbying power. Hence, the outcomes varied sharply by country, often even exacerbating existing inequalities and further increasing social polarization. Yet, a newly won global sense of purpose mobilized the power of solidarity across borders and led to a wave of deep democratization.
The process was not smooth. The enormous expansion of digital surveillance technologies by corporate behemoths and state agencies capped overt social conflicts while inequalities deepened. While many smaller retailers went bankrupt during the pandemic, a transnational delivery corporation consolidated its predominance in scores of countries around the world, busting labor unions along the way or preventing them from even taking root. Dominant software and artificial intelligence corporations gained entry into school systems that shed prior privacy concerns for the sake of quickly shifting classes online. The health emergency and benefits of universal testing allowed the design of surveillance infrastructures that were, in many countries, little regulated and, in some, readily appropriated by increasingly authoritarian regimes. However, a global movement of engaged citizens opened critical debates and succeeded in getting digital formations reconfigured as utilities with free and open source codes.
The mellow music that had been playing in the background ended abruptly. A stern voice from the radio warned of a cyclone gaining unprecedented strength and changing its direction towards the metropolitan region. Everyone in the projected path was mandated to seek immediate shelter in the newly constructed public bunkers, except for private insurance holders at the premium platinum level who were to be flown out by helicopters. The question of the daydream seemed now utterly mistaken and in need of an inversion: Why did the first coronavirus not serve as a wake-up call? Why was the lesson not learned?
Seeking shelter in a crowded public place was a scary prospect, not the least because of recent reports about the spread of a yet unknown virus with a projected fatality rate twice that of COVID-19 and a yet longer asymptomatic incubation period. Experts had warned about it since the 2020 pandemic, but soon after the vaccine development, the urgency for stockpiles of protective gear was gone again and plans for prevention were gradually abandoned in the name of budgetary restraints. The fact that there was no further pandemic for almost ten years made the austerity hawks seem right—until they weren’t.
Despite the enormous power unleashed on nature during the Anthropocene, humans are part of nature and subject to its ecological dynamics. The challenge is to find and implement the design that aligns with nature.
Suddenly I woke up. Was this all merely a dream? The utopian reflections, the mellow music, and the haunting radio warning? The pandemic of 2020 with the almost surreal experiences of weeks-long lockdowns had woken us up from a slumber. Yet the moment of an expanded imaginary and a history in flux was fleeting. Did we miss a chance to replace the lethal design of normalcy with something better, with more equitable alternatives, with an anticipatory democracy, with futures we wanted?
Markus S. Schulz is Fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies. He is former Vice-President for Research of the International Sociological Association and President of the Third ISA Forum of Sociology. Professor Schulz’s research focuses on global dynamics, media, movements, and democratic imagination. He is founding curator of the WebForum: http://futureswewant.net. His latest book Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World: Towards the Futures We Want is available from Sage.