We are almost on the third “anniversary” of the lockdowns spreading across the globe like a rash across nettle-stung skin, and, timely or coincidentally, the discussion in the last few days has turned back to the early days of Coronamania, the origins of the virus and the global response of near-ubiquitous lockdowns. Many on both sides of the debate are navel-gazing and assessing what they did and said three years ago; some folk, like a certain former Health Minister of the UK, no doubt doing this more reluctantly than others. Here I shall voluntarily indulge in some introspective looking back on 2020, a task which comes naturally to me as a historian, since after all, by profession I am more of an Epimetheus (“hindsight”) than Prometheus (“foresight”).
Nonetheless, a few months in to the “unprecedented” era, as we were reminded so often by our media, the temptation already arose to project forward into the future where the miserable hysterics of our then current actions might lead. On 3 May 2020 on Twitter, Edward Dowd sketched out this screenplay:
I have an idea for a dystopian movie: The background begins in 2020: a virus that mimics the flu sweeps across the globe. Some believe it’s a man made bioweapon to provide cover for global economic collapse from an unsustainable debt load & rising wealth inequality. The majority believe their governments and dutifully obey orders to shelter in place while supply chains dissolve, they lose jobs or small businesses and eventually the middle class is wiped out. Inexplicably large big box businesses are allowed to operate and folks are allowed to shop there but not allowed to gather together, use beaches or parks...some cities won’t allow you to run in the street or even bike. Masks become mandatory well after the virus has spread. Drones are deployed to enforce these rules. Citizens are encouraged to snitch on each other and even get rewards. The social order breaks down and folks begin to get depressed & suicidal from isolation and some even starve to death. The virus inexplicably keeps re-emerging according to the global governments so more restrictions and punishments are enacted. Protests are not allowed as they will spread the virus you see. In the background magnanimous billionaires are working diligently on a vaccine and a digital ID system to make sure you are a good citizen. The economy won’t be re-opened the governments say without mandatory vaccines for everyone. There are still those who are skeptical of all this but they are few and far between. These few refuse to take the vaccine and decide to head for the hills. Well the vaccine is administered and many begin to die. Of course the governments blame the folks hiding in the hills as the cause. The folks who got just vaccinated are very tired, sick, starving and unfortunately not very bright believe this nonsense and begin to hunt down those folks in the hills and that’s where the movie begins in 2022. I have decided to name the movie Freedoms Last Stand. I forgot to add that while the virus spread large social media giants censored all dissenting opinions from even licensed experts that deviated from Supranational Organizational edicts that operate outside all governments. [edited slightly for typos]
With the benefit of hindsight nearly three years later, this makes fascinating - and disturbing - reading, since so many Cassandra prophecies therein came true in 2022. A month later, in late June 2020, I also had a Cassandra moment, and tried to formulate my personal predictions on what the world might look like ten years on. This was published on a private Facebook group of early sceptics, the Navy Blue Venn Diagram, which managed to avoid censorship by rigorously flying below the algorithmic radar (which we succeeded in for around 10 months before getting shut down). What follows below is my text from that site:
The world in 2030: A historian looks to the future
What will the world be like in 2030, or at least Britain, a decade on from the 2020 coronavirus pandemic? So many changes are happening so rapidly in the few months since the covid-19 virus has spread around the globe, on a political, social, economic scale. There is talk already of people having to adjust to a ‘new normal’, which raises the question of what this ‘new normal’ could look like. What follows represents the musings, based on the current state of affairs, on how the new world might have developed 10 years from now, late June 2020.
Crime
Crime rates overall will have gone down, with less people being out and about. This applies to public crimes, so there will be practically no pub brawls (since pubs have almost ceased to exist), few muggings (since cash is extinct and muggers fear the physical contact) and drastically reduced driving offences (since there will be less traffic). But private crimes, that is crimes out of the public eye, will have gone up: violence will be more or less contained within the home, abuse of spouses, children and those few elderly still living in multi-generation households will have skyrocketed, incest and sexual abuse of children will increase (because of the fear of satisfying sexual urges with strangers). Organised crime will have become far more sophisticated in terms of money laundering and finding digital ways around the decline of cash. The drugs trade has become negligible, since the modern equivalent will be the trade in fake chips, doctored apps for the tracking devices used by various governments, or artificial digital personas.
Education
Only primary schools will still have classes where children are actually physically present in the classroom, and the transition year from primary to secondary education will be mainly focussed on getting pupils habituated to the digital learning environment. All secondary and tertiary (university, college) education will be conducted through virtual classrooms only. This has two main consequences. One: children are trained from around age 11 or 12 onwards in accepting digital interactions as the norm, which further hastens the decline of physical interactions amongst people. Two: digital content of education can easily be monitored and censored. This applies especially to university education. With the recording of lectures and seminars the individual interpretation a teacher or lecturer may give can be scrutinised right across the board. This has meant that throughout the 2020s there has been a decline in the numbers of teachers and lecturers who express critical views of the post-covid world, with many leaving the profession after being politely but firmly nudged out of their jobs, leaving only those acquiescent with the new world to teach, which in turn perpetuates the new order. The arts and humanities subjects have seen a steep decline, but medicine, technology, the natural sciences and especially computing have grown exponentially.
Built environment
The appearance of cities will have changed drastically. Urban areas pre-covid had many spaces where people could socialise, from parks and open spaces generally, to buildings that only function if large numbers of people are in attendance (leisure centres, cinemas, theatres). Parks still exist but are rarely used. Buildings have changed use completely. Not just the cinemas and leisure centres have disappeared, but office buildings too have more or less gone (since most office jobs could be done through working at home already back in 2020). This meant that in the early 2020s the centres of most large cities became ghost towns, with masses of deserted buildings. However, by the later 20s various urban regeneration schemes were launched, which turned the empty offices and public buildings into housing projects (generally luxury apartments with a few token social housing units thrown in, a trend already well established in the pre-covid era). Urban areas now consist almost exclusively of housing and essential shops, with a few museums and art galleries struggling to remain open.
Arts and culture
The arts have gone almost entirely digital. Any cultural activity that involved live performance (dance, theatre, music) is still made by humans but recorded and broadcast digitally (a trend already in evidence with the ‘event cinema’ of the pre-covid era). Cinema is more or less dead, since although films are still being made, they are now distributed through Netflix, Amazon and the like only on pay per view basis. TV still exists much as before, only even more so, with yet greater channels and choice. Culture that relied on artefacts, such as ‘traditional’ museums and galleries, just about still exist, but have mainly focused on digital visits (a trend also already in evidence pre-covid). Visits in person to historic places or sights, scenic landmarks and so on have declined, with most places offering a virtual tour (this too was already happening pre-covid). Nightclubs, discos and the like exist only in an underground of speakeasies patronised by the ‘old skool’ and those few people willing to risk close physical proximity.
Family and personal life
Family life will be the only approximation of social life most people will have, due to the fear of physical contact outside of the peer group whose health status is known. One (perhaps unintended) consequence of this is a sharp population decline world-wide, since the reduced physical contact brings reduced sexual activity, hence lower birth rate. Most people now seek out partners via online dating apps, which have been enhanced from the pre-covid era to supply detailed information on a person’s health. While in Japan people had already been asking for a future partner’s blood group type before 2020, this practice has now become the norm world-wide. Marriages are ratified by the civil registries only on presentation of a health certificate. Prostitution is practically non-existent, due to the obvious fears over physical contact; in contrast, digital sex-work has exploded. The trend to online pornography that had already started before 2020 has now become the norm, with the consequence that even more than before young people are struggling to cope with the anxiety over getting to know each other in person and how to interact physically.
Environment
The initial drop in CO2 emissions seen as a result of the 2020 lockdown brought in a brief period of respite for the planet’s environment. Transport declined rapidly, hence emissions from cars and especially air travel were reduced. This improvement for the environment became negligible, however, from about 2022 onwards, when the extra demand caused by digital services ramped up energy use to entirely new levels. The vast amounts of energy required to run not just the increased use of digital services due to homeworking and the move to digitisation of arts, communications and culture generally, but also the vast banks of servers and data storage facilities used by providers, governments and intelligence companies to monitor and control the digital traffic swallowed up energy usage at levels that exceeded those of transport emissions from the pre-covid era. What was gained in environmental improvement in one area was lost to increased energy consumption for digital usage. But one small benefit for the planet did occur, since less physical travelling and movement of people generally meant that open spaces and unbuilt areas became recolonised (rewilded, as George Monbiot had argued for) by plants and animals.
Sports
Individual sporting activities like jogging, running, gym, are the norm. Team sports are still played, but always behind closed doors. The big spectator sports of the past, like football matches, are performed live in a stadium but for a remote audience. What started in South Korea in 2020 with cardboard cutouts of spectators filling the empty seats in a stadium has now become the norm and reached new heights of sophistication. From 2021 onward, the big football clubs invested in digital technology to enable fans to buy a virtual seat in the arena. Instead of a season ticket for Man U or Intermilan, fans buy the rental of a screen-cum-camera placed in a particular seat at the stadium. The screen will project the fan’s image from the seat into the empty stadium, via their phone app, together with any cheering, chanting and so on, while in reverse the fan can watch the match on their phone from the virtual vantage point of the seat they have hired. The stadium is devoid of real human beings but is virtually full, the clubs are charging as much for the virtual presence as before for real season tickets, the players have the illusion of real-time interaction, and everyone is happy… especially law and order enforcement, since football hooliganism is confined to the odd smashed phone in the home.
Economics - produce, shops and retail
The 2010s had seen a small but significant upsurge in the rise of independent, local economics, such as farmers’ markets, small artisan bakeries, hand-made produce in general and so on. This was environmentally friendly and provided local work for mainly self-employed people. The covid-19 lockdown totally and inexorably reversed this trend, and in effect killed off independent, small retailers overnight, while at the same time exponentially increasing the market share and hence profits of the big supermarkets and online retailers. Shops that could not observe social distancing could no longer remain open for business, and produce that did not survive mail-order deliveries very well (fresh local food, for example) was either subsumed by the supermarkets or simply no longer made. A lot of buying and shopping used to be linked to an age-old human activity called ‘browsing’, the tactile evaluation of the object (food, clothing, car) one intended to purchase. The post-covid rules made this impossible, so an entirely new way of browsing, namely purely in the digital sense, became the norm - screen not window shopping. This meant yet further reduction in social activity, as the idea of ‘going shopping with your friends’ became a thing of the past, and archaic pastime read about in historical texts. On the plus side, this initially decreased the demand for goods, which was beneficial to the environment, due to less consumerism, but by the late 2020s had been superseded by a glut of unwanted, mistakenly ordered online-purchases.
Economics - finance
The biggest single change concerned the decline and extinction of cash. Despite the early fears of so-called conspiracy theorists, cash was not deliberately phased out by governments (although in hindsight governments were rather pleased it did happen), but purely by a process of natural attrition. Beginning in 2020, most shops politely requested payments by card only, even if legally they still accepted cash, and all online orders were of course cashless anyway. Combined with the paranoid fears of shoppers that they could catch covid-19 from handling cash, ‘real’ money was simply used less and less. Even your local drug dealer started peddling his wares through a dedicated app linked to Paypal. Cash had practically disappeared by 2023. What this meant for the black economy was far more digital activity through financial transactions involving Bitcoin, Paypal and so on. People not sophisticated enough to have the skills to cope with this ended up resorting to a return to a primitive barter economy, exchanging services and goods. Some of the few remaining artisans and independent producers fell into this category, for instance swapping that handyman repair job on the plumbing for the box of organic vegetables. In a way this fostered social relations at a sub-state level, and was therefore a thorn in the eye of the authorities, so that bizarrely market-gardening became linked with revolutionary sentiments.
Health
Health saw the biggest changes of any aspect of society. An initial upsurge in support of public health systems, following the quasi-religious applauding of care workers during the first months of the pandemic in 2020, was quickly followed by a dismantling of the vestiges of such public services in the following years, mainly because the economic consequences of the prolonged lockdown in most countries were so severe that there was simply not enough money in the public purse to pay for it. By 2025 this meant that hardly any developed country had a public health system left in place, and the American model of private health care insurance had become the norm. The exclusive focus on just coronavirus during 2020 had meant that diagnosis of other diseases and hence treatment for millions of people world-wide had come to a halt, so that in the following years the public health services were swamped by the burdens of what could have been preventable diseases. Contrary to what politicians and scientists had said in 2020, covid-19 did not cause the collapse of public health like the British NHS, but the ensuing millions of undiagnosed and untreated cancers, diabetes, hypertension and similar cases did overburden the health services. Fear of viral and bacterial contamination (‘germophobia’) became the new normal, which meant that people avoided contact with others, hence reducing the amount of exposure their immune system had, which then exacerbated any cases when they did become infected by something. Hence the effects of the common cold had by 2029 evolved to something of the virulence of smallpox. More working from home meant more people leading even more sedentary lives, with all the detrimental health effects (obesity, high blood pressure etc) that ensued. In contrast, people in menial jobs (what were termed the ‘keyworkers’ back in 2020) retained physical activity and exposure of their immune systems to pathogens, so that this group remained comparatively healthier. The Eloi and Morlocks of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine had become the two main types of people, ironically reversed from their original inception, so that the molly-coddled, home working Eloi were in fact unhealthier and sicklier than their more robust Morlock blue-collar workers. Mental health problems initially skyrocketed, with depression, suicide, violent outbursts due to lockdown fatigue and covid-induced anxiety literally stopping people from thinking. However, in the ten years since the appearance of covid-19, the younger generation that were teenagers then has grown up, and have adapted to the digitization of everything, to the extent that the introvert, sociopathic, touch-averse recluse is now the aspirational model for humanity.