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Thinking 2020

Written by Pablo González and Pedro Nonay trying to understand Covid 19’s consequences.

Entry 1 – covid 19

April 7, 2020

I begin to write these entries with the objective of clarifying my ideas, and to share them with friends who will give me constructive criticism and help me to better understand the situation. 

I also aim for these entries to be of some help to my friends as they adjust to the situation.

Small disclaimer: these entries are not intended to be shared on social networks, as I believe they will not be understood by the general public. They are something made to help us think among friends.

I also apologize for the low literary quality of the entries. I have dedicated my time to focus on the content and I have not made the style review or the “communicational marketing” review, which would require an effort that I have avoided.

My idea is to write an entry every time I have something to tell (I don’t know when the next one will be, nor if I will have something interesting to tell).

That said, I begin:

Moment of decisions.

Whatever happens after the current pandemic, it is clear that the situation is exceptional, and that adaptive decisions must be taken.

In order to make decisions, it is essential to know what the future scenario is. 

The bad news is that I am not at all clear on what that scenario is (I have my opinions, but I do not yet take them as “dogmas”).

The good news is that I do see different possible alternatives, and that allows us to look for the particular decisions for each alternative. 

The perfect thing would be to find a decision that would be useful for any of the alternatives, but that depends on the individual (and his or her circumstances).

The common denominator is that, in addition to the well-known health crisis, we are facing the economic crisis, and the crisis of stability of the social and political system (I am not only talking about Spain, this is global, although it has different answers in each place).

Be that as it may, for a few million years the earth will continue to circle the sun. And, … perhaps the human species will continue to inhabit the earth. In fact, the risk that our species will not be here depends almost nothing on Covid 19, but on the other, slower but more lethal threat, the so-called “climate change”, which is actually something we humans can do a lot about, but which has moved to the heading of “important”, abandoning that of “urgent”.

Possible scenarios.

Although it may be a bit cruel to put it so bluntly, the scenarios we face individually are divided into two:

This leads us to a first decision: we must prepare a strategy both for not being here and for being here.

I make some first considerations in case it is our turn to die. Each one of us will have to make our own, but I will tell you mine, in case it is useful to you:

As for the option to survive, the alternatives differ in what the world will be like afterwards. It can be:

Root cause of the changes.

Although Covid 19 is the trigger for all the changes, it is not the root cause (and never mind the debate about whether it was staged or coincidental).

In my opinion, the Internet is that cause. Someone may say that the internet is almost ancient, but it is not true. What is important is when a large part of humanity uses a technology, not when it was invented. I know that Vinton Cerf started to develop DARPA in 1976, and that was the beginning of the Internet. I also know that we all owe a lot to him, although he did not decide to create his own famous company or make the invention profitable, as others did in Facebook or Google, with much less merit in developing novelties.

The fact is that the Internet has been used by half of humanity since a very short time (the other half still does not use it).

And, it is a fact that the Internet has completely changed the way we do almost everything. 

Before:

In short, the so much studied “industrial revolution” (the train, the car, …,) referred to advances in the “world of the movement of things“. Internet is progress in “the world of the transmission of ideas“. 

In all of history, there have only been three advances in the world of transmission of ideas before the Internet, which are: 1) learning to speak (when we stopped being monkeys to start being “sapiens”); 2) learning to write (when what we call civilization began); and 3) the printing press, which made knowledge accessible to those who were not librarian monks (Leonardo Da Vinci would not have been possible without the printing press, because he was not a monk, and he would not have had access to books).

The three breakthroughs I just cited completely changed the world. And I believe we are in the midst of another such change.

The good thing is that change can be for the better. The bad thing is that it can be for the worse. It all depends on our response (that of humanity as a whole, and of each one of us). 

To be continued. … I will talk about decisions in each of the scenarios.

If you have any feedback or comments on what I’ve written, feel free to send me an email at pgr@pablogonzalez.org.

You are allowed to use part of these writings. There’s no property rights. Please do it mentioning this websitte.

You can read another writings of Pablo here:

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