COVID was a [pick a color] [pick an animal] - the power of metaphor
Intro to Futures, Week 4
This week was about the application of what we’ve learned so far to COVID, which created chaos in the futures community just like it did everywhere else: there was a swell of outrage that society hadn’t been prepared for something like this1; there was a huge focus on forecasting the precise course of the virus at the expense of understanding the range of potential futures; and the world became so unstable that what was plausible seemed to change every week2.
We covered two chapters in the book Infectious Futures. The first was a chapter by John Sweeney on how COVID both does and doesn’t meet the criteria to be labeled a “black swan”. Sweeney covers Taleb’s definition of a “black swan” event, which is used very casually and imprecisely today: an event must be considered an outlier, have an extreme impact, and be predictable in retrospect. Sweeney’s point is that, although the people showing evidence that global public health leaders were aware of the possibility of something like COVID was highly plausible, society at large was completely unprepared3; the criteria relate to individuals/institutions, and so an event can only be a “black swan” within the context of a particular group, and examining which of these criteria hold and for which groups is instructive. What role do futures practitioners and others play in preparing societies for these possible futures? How does the profession continue to thread the needle in arguing that futures is useful, but prediction is impossible?
The meta-lesson through all this was about the importance of metaphors and stories in determining the meanings we can perceive, in two ways. First, think about how the framing of a “war on COVID” affected public consciousness: it enabled a whole-of-government response to create/manufacture/distribute a vaccine faster than almost anyone had imagined, but it didn't make it obvious how much cultural work had to take place to create a civilian population willing to receive it4. The kinds of work exposed and the messages employed to carry out that work are shaped by the dominant narrative and likely have gaps. Second, it often devolves into a dumb debate about the metaphor itself - was it a black swan or a grey rhino, maybe we should invent new categories like black jellyfish, etc - rather than using the metaphors as a way to dig deeper into the nature of the problem and a guide to potential solutions. Some metaphors are inherently less instructive than others - if we’re in a war then there’s a general giving orders, an enemy, weapons, tactics, etc; but what do you do with a black swan - eat it, breed it, call a zookeeper?
The second chapter from Infectious Futures that I read was Garry Honey’s What Will a Post Virus World Look Like5. Honey wrote in April 2020, so it’s an amazing snapshot of just how uncertain the world seemed at the beginning of the pandemic, with language underscoring the sense of crisis, upheaval, and fragmentation that we all felt. He outlines four possible scenarios: one where governments use the pandemic as a reason to seize and consolidate power over the lives of their citizens; one where the virus heightens income inequalities and provides an opportunity for the richest to further augment their wealth at the expense of everyone else; one where additional public and financial support is given to the most vulnerable in society, frontline workers, etc; and one where governments realize that everyone has to band together to address issues that don’t stop at national borders. What’s interesting writing from 2023 is that each of these scenarios is put forward as an alternative future we might live in post-COVID, but as it happened all four of those scenarios played out to some extent and have either stopped or been reversed6. This was the lesson for me: just as the future won’t be a linear extrapolation of the present, the further future won’t be a linear extrapolation of the near-term scenarios that are imagined.
This was a great setup for a simple technique we learned as a way to model potential future events and trends: the futures wheel. It really is as simple as Wikipedia makes it sound: start with the event or trend in the center, around it write the immediate effects, around that write the effects of those effects, continue until things become too speculative, draw connections from inside events to outer events to show causation if you want, done! For example, a study came out two weeks ago showing a lack of evidence that community masking makes much difference to the spread of COVID; as a first-order effect, public trust in CDC guidance decreases; as a second-order effect, there’s lower uptake of future vaccines; as a third-order effect, there’s less selective pressure on COVID to mutate into nastier variants. Rinse and repeat.
We also watched a video from Leah Zaidi from the middle of 2020 about taking dystopian images of the future seriously. Let me start by talking about the things I didn't like, because there a few and they’re pretty big: placing all possible societies on a spectrum from “full utopia” to “full dystopia” with no gap in the middle for, like, “doing ok, all things considered”; saying things like “I don't think anybody wants four more years of Trump” in the context of stating the importance of voting acknowledging that, in fact, about half of the voters do want four more years of Trump; and, in the most poorly-agreed take, proposing to fix democracy with Blockchain. However, there was a lot of good content as well, and interesting thoughts I had from thinking about her ideas: I think Zaidi is right that many of the trends are pointing towards futures very aligned with cyberpunk dystopias, and it's instructive to see the logical extensions of those trends, thinking about what parts of those visions seem to be most imminent, and whether X policy moves us closer to or further from those kinds of futures; thinking about the future as a complex prototype that we're collectively building and shipping in something like a CI/CD manner but with bad testing; and maybe the depiction of utopias in media will increase as generative AI brings the cost of creating images and even films towards zero. I also listened to a podcast interview with futurist Tom Lombardo this week, and the two juxtaposed suggest that a useful definition of a futurist might be “someone who does science fiction for a living but is bad at writing stories”.
Don’t worry if you’re internally screaming here, I promise the “or had it?” comes later.
For good and ill: from people dying en masse in hospital hallways in the developed world, to the creation of a safe and effective vaccine in just a few months, to the profound disruption in global supply chains.
Not just the public, but the education system which had to make up a new teaching system over the first few months, companies who had no backup plan when overseas suppliers shut down, etc.
Especially on an ongoing basis. To be sure, America has examples of effective collective civilian action during wartime, such as scrap drives and victory gardens, but these are outside the living memory of everyone who people listen to.
The same content is pretty well covered in this blog post.
Examples: protests against lockdowns in China, the end of the tech mini-boom fueled by spending more time at home, the end of the expanded Child Tax Credit, and the winding down of international vaccine distribution programs.