Going Viral and Not Going Back

Convivium, 01 April 2020

Consider the ways in which our public spaces may change as they've now moved online due to COVID-19.

Going viral.

That term doesn’t sound quite the same as it did a few months ago, when it was the aspiration of everyone who posts, reacts or publishes online. That viral tweet, post, or column was the desideratum. Now that an actual virus has shut down the planet, we have decided that going metaphorically viral is the best response. Everything is moving from face-to-face to online. It will help many lives to be saved. We will also live to regret it. 

My Convivium colleague, Peter Stockland, made an analogous point concerning civil liberties last week:

Elements are already coming into place around us that risk erasing our ability to recognize, never mind recollect, our basic liberties. They are not the work of some mysterious, string-pulling evil cabal. They’re an entirely unintended effect of good people under enormous pressure trying to do the optimal thing through use of powers we have granted them.

Remember the airports, as Peter reminded us. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, millions of airport passengers daily agree to levels of searching and control previously through the province of authoritarian regimes. The United Kingdom, home of Magna Carta and all that, does not permit any resident to be in public for any length of time without being recorded dozens of times. Big Brother is literally watching. 

Now we are moving everything that can move – and even some things that can’t, about which later – online. That is the genius of the Internet; it makes distance disappear. Getting software help from Bangalore or live streaming the Vienna Philharmonic during the Beethoven 250th celebrations – that seems like a net plus, no? Why should only those in Bangalore or Vienna get the benefit of the talented people who live there?

Continue reading at Convivium:
https://www.convivium.ca/articles/going-viral-and-not-going-back/