The coronavirus backwards forecast: how we will be surprised when the crisis is "over".
I am often asked at the moment when Corona will "be over" and everything will return to normal. My answer: never. There are historical moments when the future changes direction. We call them bifurcations. Or deep crises. These times are now.
The world as we know it is disintegrating. But behind it, a new world is coming together, the shaping of which we can at least guess at. I would like to offer you an exercise that we have had good experience with in corporate visioning processes. We call it the RE-Gnosis. In contrast to PRO-Gnosis, we do not look "into the future" with this technique. Instead, we look BACK from the future to today. Sounds crazy?
Let's take a look at an optimistic and globalized world:
The re-gnosis: Our world in the fall of 2020
Let's imagine a situation in the fall, let's say in September 2020. We are sitting in a street café in a big city. It's warm and people are out on the street again.
Do they move differently? Is everything the same as before? Does the wine, the cocktail, the coffee taste like it used to? Like before Corona?
Or even better?
What will we be surprised about in retrospect?
We will be surprised that the social sacrifices we had to make rarely led to loneliness. On the contrary. After an initial period of shock, many of us were even relieved that all the running, talking and communicating on multiple channels suddenly came to a halt.
We will be surprised at how quickly digital cultural techniques suddenly proved themselves in practice. Tele- and video-conferencing, which most colleagues had always resisted (the business plane was better), turned out to be quite practical and productive. Teachers learned a lot about internet teaching. Working from home became a matter of course for many - including the improvisation and time juggling involved.
People who had never been able to relax because of the hectic pace, including young people, suddenly went for long walks (a word that was previously rather foreign). Reading books suddenly became a cult.
Reality shows suddenly seemed grotesquely embarrassing. All the trivia trash, the endless soul garbage that streamed through all the channels.
Crises work above all by dissolving old phenomena, making them superfluous...
We look back in amazement at how much humor and humanity actually emerged in the days of the virus.
We will be surprised how far the economy could shrink without something like "collapse" actually happening, which was previously conjured up with every tax increase, no matter how small, and every government intervention. Although there was a "Black April", a deep economic slump and a stock market collapse of 50 percent, although many companies went bankrupt, shrank or mutated into something completely different, it never came to zero. As if the economy were a breathing being that can also doze or sleep and even dream.
Today, in the fall, there is once again a global economy. But global just-in-time production, with huge branched value chains in which millions of individual parts are carted across the planet, has outlived its usefulness. It is currently being dismantled and reconfigured. Intermediate warehouses, depots and reserves are growing again everywhere in production and service facilities. Local production is booming, networks are being localized, craftsmanship is experiencing a renaissance. The global system is drifting towards GloCALization: localization of the global.
Could it be that the virus has changed our lives in a direction in which it wanted to change anyway?
We may even be surprised that Trump is voted out of office in November. The AFD is showing serious signs of fraying because vicious, divisive politics do not fit in with a coronavirus world. The coronavirus crisis has made it clear that those who want to turn people against each other have nothing to contribute to real questions about the future. When things get serious, the destructive nature of populism becomes clear.
This crisis gave politics in its original sense as the shaping of social responsibilities a new credibility, a new legitimacy. Precisely because it had to act "authoritatively", politics created trust in society. Science also experienced an astonishing renaissance during the probation crisis. Virologists and epidemiologists became media stars, but "futuristic" philosophers, sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists, who had previously been on the fringes of polarized debates, also regained their voice and weight.
Fake news, on the other hand, rapidly lost market value. Conspiracy theories also suddenly seemed like slow sellers, even though they were offered like sour beer.
A virus as an evolutionary accelerator
Every deep crisis leaves behind a story, a narrative that points far into the future. One of the strongest visions left behind by the coronavirus are Italians playing music on balconies. The second vision is the satellite images that suddenly show the industrial areas of China and Italy free of smog. In 2020, humanCO2 will fall for the first time. This fact will do something to us.
If the virus can do something like this - can we possibly do it too? Perhaps the virus was just a messenger from the future. Its drastic message is that human civilization has become too dense, too fast, too overheated. It is racing too fast in a certain direction in which there is no future.
But it can reinvent itself.
System reset.
Cool down!
About the author Matthias Horx
Even as a young technology enthusiast in the 1960s, Matthias Horx was interested in the secrets of the future. After a career as a journalist and publicist, he became the most influential trend and futurologist in the German-speaking world. He has published 20 books, some of which have become bestsellers. He founded Germany's most important futurist think tank, the Zukunftsinstitut, with headquarters in Frankfurt and Vienna.
He stands for a futurology that does not chase after every fear or every technology hype, but instead incorporates the change in consciousness. "The future emerges when we look at the world from the perspective of tomorrow - and our minds sense the connections between the present and the future!"
As a passionate European, he commutes between London, Frankfurt and Vienna, where he has lived in the "Future Evolution House" with his family since 2010.
Mission and goals
Matthias Horx's life project is to further develop the "futurology" of the 1960s and 1970s into holistic forecasting - an interdisciplinary combination of systems, social, cognitive and evolutionary sciences (see also Futurology).
