Looking Back at Covid From the Year 2100
What will the great upheaval of 2020 look like in hindsight? That’s one question that writer Peter Leyden is addressing in his new speculative fiction series The Transformation.
In its first installment, the fictional Stuart Rand—perhaps a reference to the Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand—reflects on the changes he’s witnessed in his century-long life, looking back from the year 2100. For instance, he writes that viewed from a distance, the timing of the Covid-19 pandemic was actually ideal, arriving after the digital revolution made it possible for the world’s knowledge workers to move their operations online.
More good news from 2100? The Covid-19 pandemic helped spur broad societal changes across the planet, leading to a second Enlightenment which Rand dubs “the Transformation.”
[The Enlightenment’s] steam engine was our digital computer, the core building block of the new system. They scaled up carbon energies, and we did the same with clean energies. They had their industrial revolution. We had our biological revolution. They invented financial capitalism and we reinvented sustainable capitalism. They invented representative democracy, and we devised digital democracy.
Solutions to pandemics, global warming, late capitalism, and populism? Now that does sound like science fiction.
