On the Future after the Coronavirus in 250 words (series: notes to myself)

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I was invited to contribute to this beautiful initiative by El Pais with a short comment (250 words) on the future after the coronavirus, in relation to digital technologies. I was honoured and delighted to accept. 

You can read the Spanish translation here. 

The following is the original English version (preferable in terms of the logical flow of the reasoning). It introduces the concept of three-dimensional solidarity – social, political, and environmental – and the suggestion that the human project that could sustain it and be sustained by it, may be one based on the marriage between the Green of all our environments (natural and artefactual) and the Blue of our digital technologies (the green and the blue project, see also here).

In this time of great suffering, there is a strong desire to look beyond the pandemic. Thus, much is being written about the future. There are predictions. They try to guess what the world will be like. The more specific they are, the greater the chance they will be wrong. There are projections. They tell us much about our fears and desires, but little about the world we shall inhabit. The purer they are, the less they inform us about the future. Finally, there are projects. They are about what could happen if we choose. A future in which global solidarity is a strong and widespread component of our politics may seem a poor prediction, or a merely wishful projection, but it should be taken seriously as part of our human project for the 21st century. After the pandemic, we should work hard not to go back to an old normal, which we did not like, but to move forward to a better new normal, of which we might be proud. To do so, we need solidarity among ourselves, between ourselves and our institutions, and between ourselves, our institutions and all the environments within which we flourish. It will not be easy, but digital technologies could help enormously if properly harnessed. I have called this the green and the blue project, a new marriage between sustainable and digital solutions, to tackle the challenges facing us after the pandemic: economic crisis, climate change, social inequality, and the suffering of billions of people.

Picture: WHO.

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