The coronavirus pandemic is a "devastating blow" for the world.

A global, novel virus

that keeps us contained in our homes—maybe for years—is already reorienting our
relationship to government, to the outside world, even to each other.

Countries are racing to slow the spread of the disease by testing and treating patients,
carrying out contact tracing, limiting travel, quarantining citizens, and cancelling large
gatherings such as sporting events, concerts, and schools. The pandemic is moving like
a wave—one that may yet crash on those least able to cope.

But COVID-19 is much more than a health crisis. By stressing every one of the
countries it touches, it has the potential to create devastating social, economic and
political crises that will leave deep scars.

Every day, people are losing jobs and income, with no way of knowing when normality
will return. Small island nations, heavily dependent on tourism, have empty hotels and
deserted beaches. The International Labour Organization estimates that 25 million jobs
could be lost.

COVID-19 will sweep away many of the artificial barriers to moving more of our lives
online. Not everything can become virtual, of course. But in many areas of our lives,
uptake on genuinely useful online tools has been slowed by powerful legacy players,
often working in collaboration with overcautious bureaucrats. Medicare allowing billing
for telemedicine was a long-overdue change, for instance, as was revisiting HIPAA to
permit more medical providers to use the same tools the rest of us use every day to
communicate, such as Skype, Zoom, Facetime and email. The regulatory bureaucracy
might well have dragged its feet on this for many more years if not for this crisis. The
resistance—led by teachers’ unions and the politicians beholden to them—to allowing
partial homeschooling or online learning for K-12 kids has been swept away by
necessity. It will be near-impossible to put that genie back in the bottle in the fall, with
many families finding that they prefer full or partial homeschooling or online homework.
For many college students, returning to an expensive dorm room on a depopulated
campus will not be appealing, forcing massive changes in a sector that has been ripe
for innovation for a long time. And while not every job can be done remotely, many
people are learning that the difference between having to put on a tie and commute for
an hour or working efficiently at home was always just the ability to download one or two
apps plus permission from their boss. Once companies sort out their remote work dance
steps, it will be harder—and more expensive—to deny employees those options. In
other words, it turns out, an awful lot of meetings (and doctors’ appointments and
classes) really could have been an email. And now they will be.

Many countries are implementing digital surveillance mechanisms in order to prevent

the virus from spreading. Many people take COVID-19 as dystopia. But I don’t think so.
Because dystopia means something else, and here with this pandemic there are still
some positive things.

When the lockdowns are over, we will doubtless rush into the sunlight and nod to each
other about how “nothing beats real-world connection”. Maybe the experience of online-
only life will stimulate a greater appreciation for the non-digital. But technology rarely
allows a retreat: it takes a piece of territory and colonises it.

There are many reasons why we need the pandemic to end. Avoiding a tech dystopia
isn’t top of the list. But the march of the tech giants is accelerating – what took years
now takes months. It’s already difficult to imagine a world without them everywhere:
connecting, collecting, delivering, censoring, entertaining and providing. Much more of
this and we might not even notice them at all – and the takeover will be complete.