When you hear someone utter the word “unprecedented”, you can be sure they are just filling up space and have no intellectual sensibility to offer you. Plagues have happened before. What hasn’t happened is a plague affecting us. How dare it do that. A plague in the Information Age isn’t even unprecedented. In fact it has happened, it just didn’t affect us as a whole, only a subset. Now that each and every one of is affected suddenly it becomes unprecedented, but the thing is why does precedent even matter. Who cares. Shut up.
We are smarter and more connected now. We should have known better. We should have done better, but the status quo and path of least resistance is a great impediment. Sometimes when things change and we think wasn’t it great back then, how do we recapture that? You don’t, it’s gone, move on. Overcome the differences. Things will never be the same again, and that is ok. This new world will be better.
I hope I shall not return to normal too soon.
Remember the before times? There were Yahoo groups and Geocities and other search engines. People didn’t mind standing next to each other in line. Before that was another time, we talked on the phone more and radio waves didn’t fry our brains. Drugs did that, and it was just fine. Now we just drink wine, and a lot of it is good wine. There are some real craftsmen out there. And women, I’d use a non-gender specific term if English had one. Artisan. There are some real artisans out there. That is better. I found the word by looking for the Chinese translation of “craftsman”. I suppose you could say “craftsperson” as well.
工匠 Gōngjiàng
The epidemic will pass and we will be stronger because of it. Those of us that didn’t die that is. The economy will recover. We will recover. The world will be better and more prepared for something like this in the future. If we spend to much time trying to imagine what that future will look like, we will be like the character in Philip K. Dick’s story “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” and not be able to accept it when gets here. If we try to move too fast we won’t like the time-line we are on any more than the one we have been on. Maybe there is some way we can jump back on to the right time-line from here?
If there is one person I will listen to about this, it’s Annalee Newitz, she is one of the artisans out there:
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