2020
The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations
Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson went off the grid in mid-March, rafting down the Colorado River. He returned into a new world. He sees Covid-19 as a precursor into crises yet to come – chiefly global warming – and finds reason for hope.
Possibly, in a few months, we’ll return to some version of the old normal. But this spring won’t be forgotten. When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.
What’s coming? Droughts, food shortages, electrical outages, storms, floods.
Imagine what a food scare would do. Imagine a heat wave hot enough to kill anyone not in an air-conditioned space, then imagine power failures happening during such a heat wave…. Imagine pandemics deadlier than the coronavirus. These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling…
Right now we’re hearing two statements being made. One, from the President and his circle: we have to save money even if it costs lives. The other, from the Centers for Disease Control and similar organizations: we have to save lives even if it costs money. Which is more important, money or lives? Money, of course! says capital and its spokespersons. Really? people reply, uncertainly. Seems like that’s maybe going too far?”…
Even though our economic system ignores reality, we can act when we have to. At the very least, we are all freaking out together. To my mind, this new sense of solidarity is one of the few reassuring things to have happened in this century. If we can find it in this crisis, to save ourselves, then maybe we can find it in the big crisis, to save our children and theirs.”
Welcome to your work-from-home dystopia: Employers are using spyware to monitor remote employees' work at home, requiring workers to leave their cameras and microphones on at all times. Surveillance software on employee computers monitors every keystroke, takes screenshots every few seconds, and tracks every email, message, the music employees listen to while working, and records facial expressions.
What The U.S. Might Learn From China’s Approach To COVID-19 – New York Times health and science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. points to China as a model of how to stop a fast moving pandemic in its tracks.
China is not to blame for this virus. They didn’t release it on purpose, or accidentally from a lab. And they didn’t cover it up. The mayor of Wuhan covered it up and when Beijing found out about it they chastised him hard, forced him to apologize on national TV, and took swift, decisive action.
Chinese people were required to take mandatory testing and if they were positive, they were immediately taken away, separated from their families, and put in gymnasium-style hospitals where they slept on beds separate from each other, were tended by workers in PPE and – when they recovered – set free and home. It’s harsh but not cruel and it got the pandemic under control.
China has committed numerous awful crimes against its own people, but this was not one of those cases, McNeil notes. Quite the opposite; the Chinese government is demonstrating leadership and doing the right thing.
The US’s more wishy-washy approach is going to stretch out for years and cost many, many unnecessary deaths. This doesn’t mean autocracy wins; World War II teaches us that free societies can beat autocracies when those free societies have a national will and strong, intelligent leadership (rather than the current Republican Party).
Boy raises a hammer during a solidarity rally for the 42,000 miners on strike in the Zonguldak coal fields in Turkey, November 1990. via
Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans. – Mask-wearing and other pandemic protections have become political virtue-signaling.
Good article, but I think it overstates the polarization. Most Americans recognize that the current situation is both unsustainable and necessary.
The people ranting about rights and Communism are lunatics. A tornado doesn’t care about your property rights when it knocks down your house.
John Belushi reportedly visited the set of “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” on the day he died. He wanted to work on his William Shatner impression.
For those of you who are not Trekkies, that was the one with Ricardo Montalban rocking the daring decolletage.
The U.S. Needs Way More Than a Bailout to Recover From Covid-19 – We need a new New Deal to fix structural problems with the US economy that long predate the current crisis.
If we want to restart the engine that made this nation a superpower, we need to do something big. I mean really, really big: defeat-the-Nazis, land-a-man-on-the-moon, invent-the-internet big.
By my college pal Barry Ritholtz (and by “pal” I mean we talked a few times and said hello).
Funniest work videoconferencing misadventures
When videoconferencing meetings go wrong, you get to see flossing, naked husbands and more.
… I could tell both his dogs were barking frantically but couldn’t figure out what the rest of the noise was, and I was concerned. “Are you OK?” Deep sigh. “We have a parrot, and the parrot has learned to call the dogs. He waits until the dogs come in the room and then imitates my wife. When the dogs can’t find her, they lose their minds.”
Airplane Mode – For grounded frequent flyers, this web page replicates the experience of being on a long flight and staring out the window. Via Mike’s List @mikeelgan
Today on Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic
Pluralistic: 02 May 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
++ The mistrust epidemic
The pandemic isn’t the only disease that’s annihilating our society: alongside of it, there is an epidemic of mistrust in institutions and a growth in conspiricism, a panic to save yourself and let everyone else fend on their own.
Blaming Big Tech for the collapse in trust and commonly held truth is backwards: Big Tech’s bigness is en effect, not a cause, of the corruption that made our institutions so untrustworthy.
++ Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes
Coronavirus outbreaks are concentrated in three places: Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes – industries that are built on treating people cruelly, like disposable components.
“Public health has always known the truth. The care of the most margnialized members of society is important for fighting infectious diseases.”…
… the GOP’s emphasis has been on shielding employers whose employers or customers die of coronavirus due to unsafe conditions. These industries are designed to run in unsafe ways and can’t conceive of operating safely.
++ Contact tracing apps could be worse than useless.
Too many false positives and false negatives. It’s like those security warnings you see on websites that are so noisy that everybody just clicks past them and ignores them.
An exposure-notification app that forgets to notify you when you’re at risk AND often notifies you when you are not at risk becomes a worse-than-useless frippery, as well an expensive boondoggle and distraction.
And security defects in those apps could literally increase a population’s exposure to terrorism, crime, election fraud and authoritarian governments.
However, contact tracing can be useful and safe, with the right precautions.
++ Ticketmaster sold a $500M stake to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who ordered the murder, torture and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
++ And a hopeful note from Kim Stanley Robinson.
Monty Python, 1976 via
1956 kitchen design (flooring). via
July 1973 via
Zenith portable radio advertisement, 1956 via
