So with Prime Minister announcing effectively the beginning of the end of state control of COVID, I set myself a challenge of asking the question:
How will the end of COVID change us all?
In our worklife, in resthomes, in sports games, in travel, there will be a permanent question hovering over every choice we are about to make: “Is there any reason to do this in person?”
Those who grew up in the analogue world, who hand-wrote their essays, always shook hands, always hugged … that kind of closeness and affection is dissolving and it’s not returning.
Digital engagement has created more distance, yes, but also more connection to more people who are also on average safer because of that distance.
There is less love, and more “likes”. We know each other now from a distance, from a screen.
2. NEW RESISTANCE RISES
What could in the early days have evolved into a new kind of patriotism as health and front-line workers were celebrated, has instead turned into a belligerent recalcitrance. The abuse of anyone in a shop from Colac Bay to Kaitaia to anyone required to put on a mask before entering a shop.
The marches in the streets against vaccination mandates may well cease, but the core of the unvaccinated-and-damn-the-consequences will network tightly and they will remain resolute, organised, and continue major interruptions into social media and mainstream media until they get what they want no matter its impact on the rest of us. Their children will expand the underclass because their parents damned them to it.
3. EPISTEMIC SHOCK RECOVERY
COVID has been the turn back to expertise that we had always hoped for, following the rise of the internet’s democratised knowledge. Those who have taken heed of official advice have been rewarded for it. Those who believed in reliable and regulated medical research are now on the side of the gods. The reach of the public service and of public policy deep into the recesses of personal and family behaviour from the richest to the poorest to the most criminal, over such a short time, has challenged 95% of us to agree with official advice and to make us obey that. It has changed the way 5 million of us think about facts, experts, and how we respond to actual facts with our personal behaviour.
4. THE DOMINANCE OF FAMILY AND HOME
By the time Omicron washes over us, every single one of us will know of a family who has had to stay at home in isolation while the infection passed through them. The places we live – rented or owned – will be more and more where we live, sleep, and work 24 hours a day. We shop less in shops, and with less pleasure. Pressure will mount ever-higher to find the most secure, most resilient place to live. Cable broadband will be as important as good heating. Because it will be harder to welcome the stranger in, those without good homes to go to will be even more precarious. Families, not churches or sports clubs, will be where we necessarily retreat to as primary social units.
5. THE SCREEN BECOMES OUR WORLD
We will be doing doctor consultations from home. We will be doing more court fixtures by screen. We will have our performance reviews and job interviews on line. We will buy cars with ‘on paper’ inspections. We will divorce on Teams. We will get used to family reunions, birthdays, and funerals online – and the analogue versions will be small and highly discreet moments of exclusivity. Our devices will burrow deeper and deeper into our lives as they make our screen lives continuous: who we wake up to, who cares if we exist, who we eat with, how we go to sleep at night, and whether we even need to be in the same country as them when that old world of touch is gone. We will discover how much we didn’t need to drive to do that thing – and how to prepare and make the most of driving or flying when we need to.
We will have to get used to that slippery slope between solitude and loneliness, as we face ourselves in the tiny gaps between one virtual world-device and the next.
The bucket list of our top 5 places we always thought we’d get to one day: it’s just gone.
6. OUR CARE FOR THE VERY OLD AND VERY YOUNG
We have seen gaping holes open up in our care infrastructure. We have mostly had our jobs saved, but we have gone through a nationwide crisis and we know it. We’ve had to take in elderly parents to live out their years – or indeed moved in with them – because we can’t live without each other and there’s just not enough care spaces for them anywhere.
Those in resthome care have been locked away from us, so we know it can happen again and there will be nothing to do but watch them die through a screen. The options for childcare and home schooling have amounted to young people knowing their futures were curtailed, parents under stress with noisy children at home when they need to work, and there are no carer alternatives to be found anywhere. Care is for family, and it’s tight.
7. THE MASSIVE STATE DOESN’T RETREAT
We know that yet again the state has saved us but it has appeared to cost us so much. The renationalisation of healthcare and its linkup with our communications devices for personal location together with vaccinations and the entry to society and employment that affords, has made many more people a lot more distrustful of the reach of this new form of the state.
Equally every one of us has become more and more dependent on the state’s social welfare in all its forms to keep us afloat – whether we are a business owner, a manager, a worker, a student, a sick person, a parent, or the quite old.
It is the pattern of the world that the state uses every new technology to narrow and specify what exactly is defined as freedom. The great majority of us know that a kind of social contract has been reconfirmed, and that is as dark as it is light. Where the danger lies, there the saving power also grows, and we can realise it as a chill. Those who really knew how to operate the media were taught that they could push back the politicians and the bureaucrats by force, and win: but they were as rare as they were celebrated.
8. ELECTIONS WERE OK, POLITICS WAS FINE
Election day is gone. Election month is in, and the world didn’t fall apart. Democracy didn’t collapse and in most senses since the government was elected on a COVID vote it has had to rigorously stick to everything it promised to do because it knows it was sitting on a knife-edge of public trust that got sharper and sharper by the week. We didn’t turn to extremism, we did the usual washing from mild-left to mild-right, and it continued to work out fine. Cabinet and parliament kept its cool and we on the whole responded to that.
9. THE “RULES” WERE LIES
Yes, after all that time and all those cuts in the 1990s, the government had the capacity to spend billions and billions more – on anything it wanted. All along, evictions were avoidable. At every point we needed the state to own more housing and control electricity and be certain of its command of healthcare and control national and internal borders – and we only scraped by because two decades ago most of that control had just been sold off for cents.
More lies: In fact, every rough sleeper in the country could be taken care of. No, water and electricity and rates foreclosure didn’t need to be threatened, ever. Actually, there are so few workers that our bosses totally need us.
Yes, we could have worked from home successfully and no we didn’t need to come into work and be lectured to by fools and training courses teaching us trite nonsense and buzzwords. Yes, most of the cumulative years spent commuting in cars were a complete waste of time and stress and quality time I could have had with my family. Most of the rules we lived by were bullshit.
10. WE GOT WORSE
Most of us got poorer. Almost all of us realised we didn’t have enough savings to get us through a month let alone a redundancy. Fewer of us felt like we could really get somewhere in this world. Our dependency on global supply chains was so high it sent a chill through our oligopoly retailers and service providers. We were competent and we kept trading but otherwise we retreated from the world.
We were stabilised by our national leadership but with less faith in religion or social groups and clubs or our old cultures and hangouts simply because we couldn’t participate our entire national social life is weak.
It has chilled us. It’s made us really hard to be hopeful.
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