Why COVID-19 is a good time for rethinking our digital world 3.0
Let’s take advantage of the imposed social and economic pause to take stock of the impact of the digital revolution on our way of life.
The current social and economic pause that the COVID-19 public health emergency is forcing upon us, offers actually a great opportunity to slow down, catch our breath and take stock of our world, which has been racing ahead for the last 20 years, in the euphoric wake of the digital revolution.
Indeed, time seems to be running faster and faster since the year 2000, the new millennium, despite all the computer tools and countless “apps” that are supposed to make our daily lives easier, if not better.
In fact, the digital revolution is shaking up our social and economic worlds, very much the same way that the industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution had turned people’s lives upside down.
In short, in 2020, our contemporary societies have not yet adapted to the new World 3.0. born out of the digital revolution.
Yet, all the while, human beings have been forced to plunge into the whirlwind of this new emerging world, having to adjust their ways of life without help or guardrails.
The personal computer
Indeed, it has barely been 40 years since the personal computer kick-started the digital revolution, in the 1980s. Then in 1993, the widespread public access to the Internet with the World Wide Web (“the web”) boosted the already rapid technological change, leading to the emergence of our world 3.0.
For instance, it was only back in 1976 that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the private company Apple, after tinkering with their Apple I compact computer in Steve Jobs’ garage.
A year before, Bill Gates and Paul Allen launched Microsoft, in 1975, after designing a software to run the first “personal computer”.
Ten years later, in 1985, they released their MS-DOS operating system, installed on the first IBM personal computers (that were launched in 1981.)
That’s 35 years ago or a blink of an eye. Since then, waves of socio-economic changes have been unfurling in our daily lives and disrupting our worlds like a roaring tsunami would ravage through a seaside village. (See sidebar 3.0)
The steam engine
This world 3.0 arising out of the digital revolution is built onto the world 2.0, born out of the industrial revolution 200 years earlier.
Back then, the steam engine gave rise to the factories and triggered a major migration of populations from the countryside to cities, which in turn generated air and water pollution, ultimately producing the first public health hygiene measures in the urban environment. (See side bar 2.0)
Steamboats increased international trade, which contributed to the spread of cholera pandemics. Meanwhile, higher food production induced an explosion of the world’s population.
In short, demography, economics, urban habitat, public health, ecology, geopolitics, language even: 200 years ago, James Watt’s technological innovation of the steam engine turned life completely upside down, giving rise to our world 2.0.
Agriculture: a socio-economic revolution
Before that, 12,000 years earlier, the domestication of plants, of animals and irrigation techniques fundamentally transformed humans’ life. Our nomadic ancestors became sedentary, discovered the concept of ownership, the specialization of labour and social hierarchy. (See sidebar 1.0)
Better nutrition also contributed to a slow, gradual population increase, while agricultural practices reshaped ecosystems. Ecological crises ensued, leading in some instances to the collapse of agrarian civilizations, as witnessed in Mesopotamia.
Technology and society
Each of these three major technological revolutions (let’s not forget the mastery of fire, way earlier) has generated profound social, economic, ecological and geopolitical changes.
Yet, the transition from one lifestyle to the next did not happen overnight. So the pressure of change weighed first and foremost on the daily life of several generations of humans who were hit by the full force of these socio-economic upheavals bulldozing through the old ways of living.
In other words, average men and women and their families had to adapt to the changing world of work before society could react and modernize the rules of the game.
Rethinking our world 3.0
Our most recent innovation, the digital technology (named after the digits 1 and 0 that make up the language of computers) only dates back 30 or 40 years. Yet it has already altered significantly the lives of humans, while also magnifying certain existing imbalances.
So the current slowdown following the lockdown imposed to curb the public health crisis due to COVID-19 could be an opportunity to catch our breath and take a look back at the last few decades of our budding world 3.0, born out of the digital revolution and accelerating since the dawn of the new millennium.
Interestingly, the rapid spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus worldwide was mainly due to the rise of global transportation, manifold over the last 20 years (since the SARS-CoV-1 epidemic in 2003 for instance), thanks, in part, to digital tools.
World 3.5 or 4.0?
Very much like two hundred years ago, the cholera epidemics in London or Paris in the 1850s were after all a consequence of the industrial revolution. These public health emergencies resulted (in part) in rethinking and improving the then emerging world 2.0.
What if COVID-19 public health crisis were to do the same for our emerging digital World 3.0?
Indeed, what if this pandemic was a unique opportunity to take stock of our emerging world 3.0? While the next version 4.0, that of artificial intelligence, is already peaking through. (For instance, the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been flagged as early as December 31, 2019 by a smart health surveillance system…)
After all, to rethink means “to reconsider”or “to reassess”, and simply: “to think again about (something such as a policy or course of action), especially in order to make changes to it.”
Charles-A. Rouyer (carouyer.com) is a Toronto-based independent journalist specializing in urban health and university lecturer, teaching “Communication, Health and Environment”.
