Toward a New Normal

A new, post-pandemic normal is coming into view.

It looks different from the world we left.

Presidents and Governors won’t decide when states open back up. Consumers will. Most Americans believe what medical experts are telling us.

That’s not what we’re seeing from Trump, or any other Republican. This willful ignorance is going to get people killed.

The most logical program is to practice social distancing for a year or two, until the pandemic has passed, and vaccines are widely available. Meanwhile, all industries that depend on crowds will have to build new business models. When sports come back, it will be to empty, or near-empty, stadia. Movie theaters and malls are gone. So are restaurants where people sit close together. So are cruise chips and casinos. Bailing them out is throwing money down the drain.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has dramatically expanded the money supply, handing out cash to keep the economy going now. The money will remain after the storm has passed. Further money supply increases will be needed to repay today’s debt. The pandemic has whipped deflation. The worry now is the value of money.

The economy is getting through thanks to the Internet. The Internet lets us continue to work from home. The Internet lets us order the goods we need to get through this. The Internet is telling us what’s what and what’s not.

The 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic happened two years before the first radio broadcast. It makes a difference. (To learn more, I recommend Pale Rider by Laura Spinney.)

The pandemic offers one more chance to save the planet. When gas prices go up, we need new solar and wind technology to scale, quickly, in order to keep the air clean. At the same time, we will need to scale-up recycling of paper, cardboard boxes, and plastic, with systems that can be deployed locally and provide raw material to manufacturers.

There will be a second wave of virus this fall, but it won’t be as devastating as what we’re going through now. Treatment protocols will be better. Vaccine candidates will emerge. Human trials are underway. Cloud computing let us model this virus quickly. Thanks to the global nature of the pandemic, a lot more scientists are working the problem.

This should increase confidence in medicine and in science generally. It should also increase the desire for community, in the broadest sense of that term. I think expertise will make a comeback. Public health will make a big comeback.

What won’t make a comeback, at least at first, will be urban real estate. While economic forces have been driving concentration for a decade, the pandemic is going to induce those with money to separate. In the near term this means exurbs will win, and urban cores will become poorer. Will the extension of Techlandia to rural areas change politics there? Republicans betting on Jim Crow to stem the political tide.

All the trends of the last decade are accelerating. Oil is dying. Wall Street is no longer the center of the economy. Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston are where the big decisions are made, implemented in northern Virginia data centers, written with Atlanta software, running on Austin-made chips. The new problems are being defined in Minnesota research centers, as well as those outside Denver, Phoenix, and wherever there are research universities.

In 1918 no one knew what to do. Treatments of the second wave were the same as in the first. It was pure horror with no one you could share it with. The result was an epidemic of PTSD, and willful forgetting. Veterans of the pandemic were like America’s WWII veterans. It all went down the memory hole. Nationalism and living for today were the results. In retrospect, the 1918 flu did more to set up World War II than the Versailles treaty. Everyone was going for themselves, or their small group. Strangers became dangerous.

Republicans and demagogues expect the same thing to happen this time.

I think they’re wrong.

In 2020 we know more. We have these clouds, this Internet. Unlike the 1918 flu, which hit one country and region at a time, this is the world’s first truly global event. It’s hitting everyone, everywhere, at virtually the same time.

We know, as a result of this pandemic, that we are one world. Just as we’re one country. You can’t open New York without Georgia. People will move around. When the undocumented workers who pick our crops and cut our meat get infected, our food supply is torn. You can’t just cover the care of the rich, or the middle class. The diseases of the poor will kill you if you do that. There is no alternative to covering everyone, and funding that care adequately. No man is an island. Jim Crow won’t work on people who can see these truths with their own eyes.

In 2016 I called Trump “Bizarro Carter” and so he has proven to be. He is as lacking in empathy as Carter was blessed with it. He is as selfish as Carter is unselfish, as arrogant as Carter is humble. But he’s suffering a similar political fate because he’s equally out of tune with the times.

The 1980 campaign was about symbolic events. The campaign was on Cable TV when that was becoming the dominant medium. The 1980 campaign was, for the middle class, about events in far off places like Iran and Afghanistan.

The 2020 campaign is on the Internet. Policing that Internet against falsehoods is the chief move tech can make to secure its own future. The 2020 campaign is in our faces, on our screens and on our streets.

This tells me most political punditry is bogus. People are talking about what candidates are doing, how they position themselves, about narrow margins in “swing states.” The decision this time will be more absolute, more transformative, as 1980 was. The house will cease to be divided. It will be all one thing or all the other. This revolution will not be televised. It will be online.

Here’s my hope.

I believe a free election will reaffirm the Obama Thesis of Consensus. This is in line with tech values. If Republicans want to say Joe Biden is running for Obama’s third term, Americans are going to say yes, please. Barack Obama is the only public figure who can rise above this race, who can define it, and who has real credibility. He is not on the ballot, but he’s Reagan.

The only doubt is whether we’ll get an election at all. Personally, I refuse to believe that the Cloud Czars, their retinue, and the technology industries are going to stand idly by while Donald Trump and his deplorables destroy their fortunes.