While browsing LinkedIn one can quickly sense the site is filled with professionalized visionaries professing the future.
This is the wonderful imagination we can expect from entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, some makers, a few or more artists, a number of artisans, a whole lot of movers & shakers and policy makers’ think-tank spokespersons, who all frequent this social platform.
These days and months, since the end of 2019 into 2020, I have been noticing a shift into how that “just-a-flu” morphed into an emergency for a relatively few, into a pandemic for some more and into a fore-bearer of dramatic change to the human species, mapped without or with climate change (as an instigator of epidemics).
For some this has “suddenly” appeared the last two weeks or so. For others — that is, for those who are global nomads or global citizens, anyone from around the world living in China yet with loved-ones around the world; any Chinese citizen living in the world — this is now going into its 4th month and counting. For even fewer this was, now in retrospect, foreseeable; or so does the power of probability theory offer us.
Making a forecast, in the spirit of this biased opinion piece here, I foresee to be influenced in an emotionally heightened manner, as it has been, for another 3 months. That’s a very personal event of 6 to 7 months; for each one of those who fit the above category. That is, if I’m allowed being a bit too self-centered, not anticipating the passing of anyone close in these coming months because of virus-related complications.
Then there will be the echoes and reflections (and hopefully as little fall-out as possible) following this. Perhaps adding another 6 months? I’m just using a wild unsubstantiated version of prediction. I will call this my not so impressive “prediction” of the “Pandoflux”. Is a world of, and a world in, change a progressive world? Or, is progress what we do with change in relation to others and their context?
My predicting is not impressive to me since I also sense that flux seems simply inherent; even at a cellular or deeper level; even if we are imposingly-conserving. The latter too will pass, while its mechanism seems ever there?
Although I am very serious when I smile, is this attitude implied here too flippant or is it rather a watered-down version of a Taoist view on the world? At the least, I want you to think with me. Give it a moment.
“Things will never be the same again…. we will never go back to how it was.” Previously, in a pre-pandemic sense, such statements seemed to come with an undertone of optimism and progressive thinking. Now, peri-pandemic, it sounds as if driven by fear and loss. It does not have to be, though.
Again, without wanting to be callous nor frivolous, nothing ever is the same and one can never ever go back to how something was before. That is, unless the affect of the memory of a change can be wiped from any mind that has been zapped back into a previous state. You know, like a reset button and a factory preset as the one suffered by Buzz Lightyear, in one of the Toystory animation franchises. Buzz too could not forget his previous setting.
Humanity and its events, however, are not a cartoon. It might seem like one, at times, but this tends to smell of sarcasm, disdain or at least of irony at the awkward moment. Indeed, perhaps this writing runs that risk as well.
When is the right moment to speak of change? Where and by who? When can we observe markers of change? What is such marker but a trigger of a parameter in a probability calculation of an environment that has always been in flux and has thrived on change?
In that regard, and as a side note, is a Machine Learning application an agent of change? Is it rather an agent in a process of corroboration that change is inherently part of the human experience and nature, as formalized via the field of advanced Calculus? Is perhaps such an AI application a neurotic obsession with control and its implied hanging onto a veil of pseudo-fixed and comforting insight?
After all, is a pattern not a pattern because it does not change? Or does it? What shall we call a pattern that is not to be recognized as a fixed pattern; chaos or rather, life?
I choose the latter.
When some individuals reminisce over the obvious how-it-was and the yet unknown changes to come, which dynamic pattern do they envision? A Chaotic one or one of LIFE?
In the struggles we face, whichever type, form, degree or function, we humans do want a sense of meaning as to the changes or the continuity these struggles imply. We make choices. We choose and recognize patterns.
This choice is there even if it is the meaning-giving idea of letting-go, breathing-out, moving-on and not looking for or clinging-on meaning in one attribute of a struggle in question. That is meaning. It could specifically be concerning if the meaning-giving labeling turns out as a painfully meaning-less one; driving one to the brink of or into madness and despair. That too is meaning. Meaning-giving is geared towards giving a future to a past event or to an event imagined becoming a past.
It is equally so as it is with communication: there is no such thing as no communication . One can not not-communicate with one’s brain; that meaning-giving thing between our ears. Even if we are trying to delegate this meaning-creation to the artificial realm of Machine Learning . This meaning-giving is inescapable.
On the other multiple ends of this 4-dimensional spectrum (yes, try to imagine this in a 3D high fidelity manner with a variable changing attribute over time), we can either observe small-minded yet large-sounding conspiracies of contrasting flavors and we can also see analyses of large Geo-political potentials and paradigm shifts.
This morning I was presented with a snippet of just that; the latter that is. The former is too irritating to me, while I do care about its extreme dangers.
In the earliest hours of the morning, I wake up very early, I was listening to BBC News World Service and its Newshour show. In it the astronomic numbers of applications for unemployment benefits in the USA were discussed. The data indicated about 10 million individuals were “shed” from their previous employment . Yes, “shed,” a word used in reporting as if humans are prickly needles from an ever-green pine tree that surprisingly looses its convoluted leaves. They and those without health insurance in the USA were discussed and then this was followed by an interview with Noam Chomsky. He was introduced as the academic who has “a radical solution to the economic shock” yet, who himself has repeatedly, and in this interview, rebutted this by stating that neo-liberalism is the radical paradigm here.
The episode, Newshour-20200402-USJoblessClaimsHitNewRecord, was retrieved on April 3, 2020 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172x2ylvg5rx9l
I suppose there is a reason why this morning the BBC, of all newscasters, suddenly interviewed Professor Noam Chomsky… no longer only Ms. Amy Goodman does so…
Later that same morning, I was sent a second item. It was a audio-video recording of an interview given by the present-day governor of New York State.
Yes, one competes in a free market construct. Is this “free,” though? Is the following forecast, here below, of not-so-much-change too esoteric? Could it, in the end, be the common USA citizen, with house loans and student loans, in the billions, and some of whom can not afford insurance, that shall pay for this? Is this an attribute of the so-called change we have to see happen (from our distance)?
This pandemic could very well be a massive shift in some human consciousness that previously did not see the issues we are facing. Now, that is without linking this to climate change which has been done, preceding the pandemic in that it was suggested that with climate alterations pandemics might become more frequent.
It might be that the idea of nothing ever being the same again, which some are talking about, is the re-delegation of education to the parents turned teacher, on top of their in-house distant working, their gig-economy project, their home-cooked meals and their in-house floor-mopping.
Isn’t human civilization (at least quantatitively) perceived as great because its members have invented the process of delegation? At least, one person is not looking forward to this change in delegational power:
Or, the foreseen change might be that new EdTech APP we can innovate on with increased human-originated data collection and Machine Learning processes in support of the mother company and its marketing or advertising-placement strategies.
Will it be a never-seen-before change in child-like bickering, finger-pointing, belly-button staring and saddening forms of competing between (nation) states?
Or, is it a change in a form derived from that which people such as Noam Chomsky are speaking of ?
Humans are living proof of the possibility of a multitude of patterns in change and in changing patterns. Surely changing patterns of and in life are as well. Life and lives without meaning and meaning without life and lives, are not the changes a human needs.
Luckily for you, I cannot offer you any of these or other such changes, nor am I a forecaster.
I breathe out. At the least, I can offer one constant of hope: be well and do well, my fellow earthling.
