ARC
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[ All Relevant Change ]
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from later is a foresight studio.
We monitor and make sense of change, developing clear-sighted and judicious futures perspectives.
We develop tools and ways of working that augment our research, problem-solving, and creative abilities.
We explore the capacities of art, science, theory, and strategy to address complex challenges.
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ARC | All Relevant Change
ARC is a living document monitoring emerging issues, drivers of change, and critical uncertainties (related to the complex COVID-19 crisis) that may challenge the status quo. In perpetual draft form, ARC catalogues the nowness of later.
We have organized this deck as a series of themes so as to create a broad and digestible understanding of factors that may influence, evolve, or disrupt our presiding economic, social, cultural, industrial, and infrastructural operating systems. For each theme, we suggest some key considerations and potential surprises that may emerge in near and further futures. We also touch on factors that may accelerate or interrupt pre-existing trends.
ARC is a work of sensemaking. As an effort to manage the overwhelming flux of information pouring out about a chaotic web of issues, all cross-impacting with unpredictable consequences — ARC aims to reduce the space of unknown unknowns. It is also intended as a generative resource — the raw material for building worlds, developing scenarios, and determining long-term strategies.
We hope ARC provides a shared understanding of what is happening in the present; helps you imagine what might be; generates better conversations about possible futures; and equips you to create the futures you want.
If you have thoughts, suggestions, questions or comments or want to learn more about how ARC may be useful to you, please email us at: arc@fromlater.com
[ All Relevant Change ]
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BUILDING FUTURES AMIDST COVID-19
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THEMES: DRIVERS OF CHANGE AND CRITICAL UNCERTAINTIES
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Environment entanglements
As much a public health issue as an environmental one, COVID-19 is a reminder that humans are part of, not separate from nature’s self-regulating systems.
David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, argues humans “shake viruses loose from their natural hosts.” UN Environmental Chief Inger Anderson agrees, “our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbour diseases that can jump to humans.”
Amidst the massive shutdowns for transportation and industry, some scientists have estimated that in China, the number of lives saved due to reduced air pollution might be twenty times the lives lost due to the pandemic. Yet, as governments invest in reigniting the economy, environmental issues may be at risk of being deprioritized.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Mainstreaming heterodox economics
Economist Milton Friedman once said “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”.
Before the pandemic, prominent voices like Andrew Yang and Ray Dalio were drawing attention to ideas like Universal Basic Income (UBI) and the controversial Modern Monetary Theory – both of which are approaches to tackle mass unemployment. Many nations have already announced safety nets for citizens facing economic hardship.
Meanwhile at the grassroots level, mutual-aid groups have sprung up to coordinate grocery deliveries, collectively purchase essential supplies, and provide mental health support. Nathan Schneider argues that many current institutions such as labour unions, charities, and cooperatives have their origins in mutual-aid during a momentary crisis. He asks, “What legacies will we build out of our responses to this crisis?”
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Injection of funding in biotechnology
In the past, investments made during times of crisis have led to technological booms. During WWII and the Cold War, such investments were instrumental in the advancement of computation and IT, leading up to the digital age. In response to the current pandemic, public institutions and private investors have poured over $5.3 billion to fund R&D efforts, with the potential to revolutionize biotechnology in the coming decades.
Historian Walter Isaacson argues that technologies like CRISPR, gene-editing, and RNA-guided targeting, which are currently being explored as treatment approaches for COVID-19, will inspire a new generation of scientists and innovators to “drive the first half of the 21st century.”
Increased focus and funding toward disciplines like virology and epidemiology will also demand the development of new tools and methods. The application of machine learning, statistical modeling techniques, and lab automation processes may further accelerate the pace of innovation in the life-sciences.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Design of built environments
COVID-19 could induce shifts to our built environment. From materials and roads to floor plans and zoning policies — the challenges of social distancing in cities could motivate new designs that minimize the spread of contagion, similar to how tuberculosis shaped modernist architecture.
Designing for contagion mitigation will involve utilizing diverse materials — from antibacterial copper to high-tech nano materials — but also entirely new systems and behaviours. The possibility of extended stretches of on and off distancing has led Anthony Townsend to describe a scenario for ‘turn key social distancing’ — the ability to rapidly adapt the built environment to periods of self-isolation and distancing with minimal disruption.
Automation — from touchless retail to robotic delivery — along with gestural and voice interfaces, all of which lower literal touchpoints, may become fixtures of future urban spaces. Additionally, the ability to dynamically repurpose space and infrastructure, such as by changing how roads and sidewalks are used, or policies to prepare hotels and shipping containers to be transformed into hospitals.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Individualist autonomy
Instincts for self-reliance and self-preservation have shown themselves during the pandemic. Sales of guns have spiked in America, prompting fears about declining trust and increased polarization.
The prepping industry has surged during the crisis – even the Kardashians are hawking luxury preparedness kits. And panic-buying behavior has been common, leading to shortages of essential goods. Whole countries are even stockpiling food, leading to fears of global shortage.
A self-reinforcing loop, the retreat from collective ways of managing the crisis could shape scales ranging from the local to the national and global. The result could be less dialogue and negotiation and more unilateral action.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Open science
Responding to the need for new vaccines and treatments, researchers are sharing knowledge early and openly. Epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch says in this “completely new culture of doing research” large groups of scientists are working together to audit results, check assumptions, and advance the scientific enterprise.
To enable real-time collaboration, researchers have adopted channels like Twitter and Slack and are releasing vast amounts of daily data through preprint servers. Leading Scientific publishers and journals like Elsevier and Nature have committed to making all coronavirus-related studies freely available to aid in research.
Yet, online activists believe that the response to COVID-19 may have been swifter and stronger if restrictions to scientific knowledge were lifted altogether. Archival project “The Eye” has offered open illegal access to over 5000 studies related to the coronavirus in order to remove the “copyright on the health of humanity.” Parallel to this, open technology activists are advocating for a “Right to Repair Law” that would require manufacturers to share necessary information allowing citizens to repair their own goods.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Unraveling global supply chains
From shortages in essential medical goods to the disruption of auto manufacturing in India, the coronavirus epidemic is exposing existing vulnerabilities in our sprawling global supply chains.
Over the years, reducing reserve inventory, offshoring manufacturing, and consolidating supply networks had helped lower prices in the West, but policymakers today are voicing a need for diversifying and localizing supply to increase resilience. Some analysts believe that achieving complete national self-sufficiency is cost prohibitive and the world should continue to embrace globalization.
In the wake of the current crisis, new trade policies, technologies like 3D printing and robotics (for local manufacturing) or IoT (for monitoring goods during transit), and the growing tensions around economic nationalism may all play a role in determining how future supply chains are reconfigured.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Crisis innovation and brand repositioning
From stitching masks at home to retooling assembly lines, individuals, businesses, and Governments are working in unison to find solutions to the challenges posed by COVID-19. Crisis time efforts in the past have led to tremendous business innovation. Many familiar and valuable brands such as Duct Tape, Superglue, and even M&M’s got their start during World War II.
Businesses today are stepping up their response to the pandemic. LVMH and Coca-Cola among others have switched factory operations to produce essential goods like hand sanitizer and face shields. As consumption patterns adapt to new safety measures, companies are pivoting to opportunities in home delivery, emergency kits, and temperature screening.
Harvard Business Professor Michael Porter once said that downturns are moments when companies can shift positions in the marketplace. “It’s times like these when leaders can become followers, and followers can become leaders.” While many companies may resume usual business operations, some will discover new purpose or a unique competitive edge for the future.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Making sense of the moment
As the basic dynamics of time and space have changed, the search for meaningful semantic devices abound. From wartime analogies used to galvanize collective action to literary interpretations framing the experience as a cocoon or portal, zealous language has helped to shape our response to the imperatives of the moment.
But as Susan Sontag argued in AIDS and its Metaphors, the language of illness is not neutral. Voices describing COVID-19 as the “chinese virus” or as “gods punishment” reflect specific political ambitions. Others claim that “we are the virus.” As economists seek to reduce market volatility, the analogy of “induced coma” and “coiled spring” have gained popularity, revealing aspirations for perceived control.
Yet, for many people the search for meaning has been personal, with one study estimating that for every 80,000 cases of the virus the search volume for “prayer” doubles. A Yale University course called “The Science of Wellbeing” had over 600,000 enrollments in March alone. As religious institutions look to creative solutions for safe community engagement, we are reminded of the famous dictum that “there are no atheists in foxholes.”
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Rapid loss in service occupations and gig work
With social distancing measures in place, many workers are facing mass lay-offs, or turning to the gig economy for short-term contract work, exacerbating issues of economic precarity and elevating health risks.
In response, workers have begun to collaborate, forming mutual aid collectives and planning national “sickouts”. Still, as emergency aid programs reveal benign incentives and benefit gaps, activists are calling for more extreme measures, such as rent strikes and increasing the mandate for national service.
With the duration of the crisis uncertain, more creative solutions to labour allocation are being proposed, from provisional medical licenses for internationals to employing summer students as seasonal farm workers.
Yet, as government debts continue to mount, critical voices can be heard, as the pandemic becomes another factor in the creation of a millenial ‘lost generation’.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Criminal justice reform
The spread of COVID-19 in Rikers Island and other correction facilities has spurred large scale prison depopulation worldwide. Iran, for example, reported the release of 85,000 prisoners. Blanket releases of non-violent offenders as an emergency public health measure could accelerate the agenda of activists advocating for mass decarceration and long-lasting criminal justice reform.
Meanwhile, ICE continues to imprison migrant families, and the extension of emergency powers to detain citizens for violating quarantine have caused scrutiny over policing and public safety priorities. Advocates are now calling for measures to grant reduced sentences, stop police arrests of minor offenses, and institute a “presumption for release” to potential parolees. These efforts are galvanizing a reassessment of “tough-on-crime” policies and the modernization of justice systems that have long resisted change.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Public health surveillance
Coordinating a decisive response to the crisis has justified government efforts to monitor citizens with data collected by technology companies. But the backlash to surveillance was growing even before the pandemic; some watchdogs have raised concerns over a “Patriot Act for health care.”
Israel has used its spying infrastructure to monitor the public health crisis, while Singapore is piloting participatory contact tracing and inspiring the development of privacy-preserving protocols. In China, the Alipay Health Code is a color-coded QR code given to each citizen to link health status and travel history with clearing checkpoints in public spaces.
Companies and governments are also using the crisis as a way to test and deploy new systems like machine vision, to automate the monitoring of temperature or mask adherence. One of the biggest questions the crisis raises is whether the language of surveillance and individual privacy is nuanced enough to handle these new situations and use-cases.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Reshaping global order
Different national responses to COVID-19 have exposed the strengths and weaknesses of their respective governing regimes. In terms of superpower contentions, it has exacerbated tensions between the US and China, with finger-pointing on both sides of the aisle, including calls to hold China or the WHO accountable for damages, or on the other side, claiming its place as a global leader.
Even before the crisis, nations and models of governance were diverging, a process that is deeply imbricated with the information technologies and systems used to govern. The various governance/tech models of the US, China, the EU, and Russia have only accelerated in becoming different.
China’s state-blessed super-apps, the EU’s hyper-regulation, Russia’s digital self-isolation, and America’s public-private cooperative model have all, so far, doubled down on their approaches. As this hemispheric divergence continues, the role and relation of multilateral institutions and unilateral superpowers remains an open question.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Trusting experts?
The pandemic is deepening the split between camps that argue for the trustworthiness of experts – for their ability to rise above the bickering of a politicking class – and those who see in experts decidedly less trustworthy figures, spectres of authoritarianism.
Many Americans trust the medical establishment more than business, government, and the media. Some say political processes should be rolled back and decision-making power put in those experts’ hands. Tech company perceptions have also improved, by monitoring the pandemic and linking the quarantined with the outside world as lifelines.
Against experts are an array of credible and less credible perspectives. Concerns about the WHO bowing to political pressures abound. Notions of a ‘medical deep state’ have been voiced across the political spectrum, and conspiracies like ‘5G poisoning’ have circulated widely on social channels. But individuals have also used social media to access and assess information in ways that have helped them prepare more efficiently than the mainstream media or experts have.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Mass remote work and learning
With indefinite social distancing in effect, everyday interactions are shifting to remote form. These include work, education, and family and friends.
Where it can, work’s online shift has revealed class and racial divides, as some forms of cognitive work can more easily go remote while others can’t. What counts as truly ‘socially necessary’ work could be revealed, including how much of contemporary work culture is make-work. There could also be long-term transformations in enterprise networks, and new forms of managerial control, like ever greater surveillance of workers.
Education, too – from grade school to university – has gone online. This giant unplanned experiment might sour the field with bad experiences, or it could lead to innovative new tools, models, and practices. Higher-education, which is as much about credentialing as it is about learning, could come out of the crisis with a premium, as it becomes even more scarce. In that case, lower-prestige forms of education could remain forever online.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Cultural production online
Culture has been forced to instantly and exclusively exist online. This period will see fringe digital practices embraced by the mainstream, while rapidly giving rise to new ones. Lacking the ability to demonstrate lifestyle choices through clothing and product consumption IRL, as Toby Shorin notes, new spaces and ways of performing lifestyle online are emerging.
For one, the trend toward metaverses – shared, inhabitable 3D universes like Fortnite and Roblox – will accelerate. Expect to see new practices within them, like graduation ceremonies, marriages, baptisms, and even funerals, continuing the trend to expand online virtual worlds beyond just gaming.
Livestreaming, as well, is seeing a boom in use and experimentation – hosting everything from cloud raves to private Zoom comedy shows. Some of these performances might even remain preferable to their offline counterparts – a strange new reality where everyone is alone, together.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Chaotic agents and accelerators
With supply chains and frontline services strained, the pandemic has left our way of life exposed to agents of chaos. An unforeseen disaster at this time could compound the effects of the coronavirus, further disrupting infrastructure, raising the death toll, and unleashing civil unrest.
Malicious actors have found abundant opportunities during this crisis. Underhanded profit schemes have ranged from extreme markups on essential supplies and selling fake medicine to hawking bodily fluids of survivors on the darkweb and ransomware attacks on medical services. Capitalizing on the uncertainty, terrorist organizations have doubled down on their efforts to spread propaganda and encouraged supporters to strike cities when defences are weak.
An earthquake that disrupted the COVID-19 lockdown in Croatia, is a harsh but timely reminder of the wildcards that abound. While disasters like hurricanes (with an increased probability of North American landfall in 2020) or solar flares could become existential threats during a crisis, even minor shocks can trigger major breakdowns of communications systems and social order.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Trauma and mental health
As in past pubic health crises, COVID-19 may exact a lasting psychological toll and induce widespread trauma. Frontline workers have been forced into tough ethical positions, leading to moral injuries and compassion fatigue. For the general population, the prolonged effects of financial uncertainty, constant “low-grade anxiety”, and indefinite isolation may spark a mental health “echo pandemic” to follow.
While stigma surrounding mental health was already being lifted, conversations on Netflix and other channels in response to the pandemic may accelerate the process. But as liquor sales rise, domestic violence reports surge, and divorce rates spike, the mental health crisis to ensue will require therapy and support to be delivered at even greater scales.
“Covid stress syndrome” has inspired a range of support services. From a boom in use of mental health apps and free video-based peer support groups, to individual artists hosting mindful drawing parties. Art therapy initiatives that were being piloted at museums have also found new urgency.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Food
During the pandemic, food has become an important issue not only because its essential for survival but also as a source of comfort during lockdown. Gardening, cooking, and baking have become modest means of achieving self-sufficiency. A household technology for food safety, fermentation is also on the rise as people share variations on sourdoughs and fermented brassicas. Restaurants and food suppliers are delivering directly to homes. Chefs and amateurs are sharing their recipes with patrons and neighbours. Some even offering dietary direction on how to boost immunity and reduce stress.
But like healthcare, access to food is unequal and the pandemic has exacerbated disparities. Dependent on lunch programs, school going children are going hungry due to school closures. Racialized neighbourhoods, often food deserts with higher rates of chronic illness, account for a substantial proportion of COVID-19 related deaths. With parts of Africa approaching famine, massive loss of work, migrant agricultural workers facing travel disruptions, shortages in fertilizer, and declining demand for the hospitality sector, the damage to our food systems will outlast the pandemic.
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Touch and intimacy
The immediate effects of distancing are obvious: touch is taboo. Many are experiencing what therapists call ’skin hunger’ – a lack of physical caress and psychological anguish that’s reminiscent of Harry Harlow’s touch deprivation experiments on monkeys, only this time on humans, society-wide, indefinitely, and – then, as now – without ethical oversight.
Nor is the taboo of touch just physical. On Zoom, tutorials tell us to look at the camera rather than the screen, substituting sight for touch – becoming cinematic directors of our own eyeline matching. But when walking, eye contact is avoided. As the name implies, eye contact is a little too close to touch. Our behaviors might be a little less rational and a little more driven by affective intensity than we’d like to believe.
So here comes the sex tech revolution, tipping point: COVID-19. Luckily, the big patent on teledildonics expired two years ago. Welcome to the unbridled era of VR strip clubs, Zoom masturbation parties, and remote control sex toys. Add cross-modal sensations, like synaesthetic ‘digital foreplay experiences,’ to induce ASMR hybrids of audio and touch and suddenly ‘You are your safest sex partner.’ But might we, Sam Kriss asks, just be getting the sex we deserve?
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UNCERTAINTIES
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Reorganized unrest
Disruption of services has triggered unequal forms of unrest globally. In Nigeria, police have killed 18 enforcing lockdown, while in Lebanon, the army is combatting protesters firebombing banks. Hunger and riots loom for much of the world’s most vulnerable as food chains suffer. This inability to supply services is being filled by parallel states, like cartels distributing food and medical supplies in Mexico, or jihadi groups seizing ports in Mozambique. Shadow entrepreneurial-ideological organizations could continue to play an outsized role after the pandemic.
In the US, consumer entitlement protests emerged, summarized by slogans like ‘I want a haircut.’ Other movements, like climate and Wet'suwet'en, are moving online, hosting Zoom rallies of up to 900 people and negotiating treaties – and trying to figure out how to organize digital publics. Biden staffers have floated the idea of holding Travis Scott-like concerts in Fortnite, with a giant Biden floating over the Grand Canyon. In places where censorship is more common and protests interrupted, like in Hong Kong, demi-publics like Animal Crossing have been used in place. Lacking an ability to gather IRL, online multitudes could develop increasingly effective digital tactics – ways of hijacking or disrupting entertainment and communications platforms.
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Contact
Robert Bolton
e/ rbolton@fromlater.com
t/ +1 416 854 3446
w/ www.fromlater.com
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Contributors and Credits
Themes and uncertainties are researched, written, and updated by Valdis Silins, Udit Vira, Macy Siu, Robert Bolton, and Sam Venis.
ARC is an evolving document which draws from reporting, analysis, and research by a number of individuals and organizations (linked to in the text) whose work we’d like to acknowledge.
The theme description and uncertainties text in this document are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
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Changelog
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