In most respects, the Covid-19 crisis connects us to our ancestors. Pestilence and the fear of plagues have been part of the human condition for thousands of years.
The bubble most of us in the privileged world have been living in over recent decades is not the norm – it is, in the long view, a strange anomaly. We are being forced to undergo what countless generations endured before us: the fear, the shock, the overwhelming sense of fragility.
But there is one big difference. The great revolution in information technology has made this experience of pandemic unlike anything that has gone before.
The virus has spread so quickly and so relentlessly because we are so utterly interconnected. But, for most people in the West, its effects have been made infinitely more bearable by our ability to maintain that instant connection. We can talk to family and friends.
Without this digital connectivity, we would have been faced with a terrible choice
We can see our distant loved ones on Skype and FaceTime. We can conduct classes and business meetings. We can work remotely. We can order groceries online. We can binge-watch Tiger King.
In this emergency, we have been starkly reminded of the value of physical presence – both of the workers who still have to be there to save lives or deliver food and of the comfort of touch whose power is brought home by its aching absence. But we also have every reason to be grateful for the safety net of the virtual.
It is almost impossible to imagine where we would be without digital connectivity. The paradox of this moment is that the isolation that may save us would be unthinkable if it we did not have another joined-up world to inhabit. If we could not take refuge in the cyber realm, millions of us would have to risk death in the physical domain.
Penetrated our lives
The 2020 Sign of the Times study – conducted in January and February by Behaviour & Attitudes – tells us just how deeply this technology had penetrated our daily lives before coronavirus hit us.
Nearly nine in 10 of us have a smartphone and even among the over-65s, it’s almost 60 per cent. Eight in 10 adults access the internet at least once a day. Staggeringly, Irish families with teenagers have an average of 10 smart devices in their homes. And thank goodness for them.
It is not just that the technology has allowed us to keep our distance from one another; it is that it has allowed us to stay relatively sane while doing so.
The crisis has made it abundantly clear that the big tech companies are public utilities. What they provide are not, in essence, optional services
Without this digital connectivity, we would have been faced with a terrible choice: carry on as usual and die in vast numbers or be marooned on desert islands of solitary bleakness. With it, there has been, for the first time in the history of pandemics, a third way – a peculiar combination of distancing and intimacy that, on this mass scale, surely counts as an entirely novel collective experience.
Even 20 years ago, it would have been impossible. It is a distinctive 21st-century mode of being, and staying, alive.
And yet it is also profoundly problematic. Existential crises cause new things to happen – and this is certainly one of them – but they also magnify and bring to the surface the contradictions and tensions that are already present. The most striking thing about the Sign of the Times findings is what they reveal about our love-hate relationship with the technology-saturated environment we inhabit. The crisis is very likely to exacerbate both the love and the hate.
Maybe some of us are still Luddites. Maybe some are still tech utopians. But few can take comfort in these absolutes. We are, rather trapped in a Faustian pact with a very seductive devil. Faust wanted to know everything, to experience everything, to feel everything, to be able to move at will through place and time. The only price for being granted all of this was his soul.
Twist in the story
We, too, have been granted access, instantly, to everything. But there is a twist in the story – Faust knew what he was signing up for. He read the terms and conditions. We, collectively, didn’t. But we have given our souls to the controllers of these technological wonders anyway.
We’ve now woken up to the price implicit in the bargain. The Sign of the Times study is a distress signal. It shows a sophisticated awareness of the dilemma we have created for ourselves. We are addicts, hooked on the pleasures and the highs of the always-on world. But we know that any substance or habit we are addicted to sucks out part of our souls, the part where free will resides.
We lose control. The phones, the emails, the social media posts become coercive. We are tyrannised by the peremptory demands of incoming messages, blinded by this blizzard of signals.
We are, in this digital universe, neither properly ourselves nor truly social. We feel compelled to make a show of ourselves: to perform versions of beauty and coolness and success that live up to the expectations of our online friends. We dare not show our faces: Facetune is the niqab of the online world.
We surf an endless wave of communication, and yet 64 per cent of us (up from 50 per cent in 2014) feel that the art of conversation is increasingly being lost. And, conversely, we long for the natural. We hanker after the real, the tangible, the raw, the authentic.
The current crisis will not cut through this double bind. It will intensify it. In the immediate term, it has made us even more dependent on the technology. The traffic has massively increased on both sides of the digital highway. Daily social experiences that were still direct and physical – school and university classes, office life, concerts – have migrated online.
On the other side, the virtual has annexed ever more of the territory of the actual. The distinction between home and work, already, as the Sign of the Times study shows, under enormous pressure, has been increasingly obliterated.
So we will emerge from this extraordinary period both more inextricably wedded to our smart devices and more anxious about the state of the marriage. Three big concerns, already present but now greatly amplified, will have to be addressed.
The first is about control. The crisis has made it abundantly clear that the big tech companies are public utilities. What they provide are not, in essence, optional services.
They are vital necessities. Just as the 2008 crash revealed to the general public that banks are not private institutions, the pandemic of 2020 reveals that the big IT companies are not just “too big to fail” but too crucial to be left to their own devices. If societies – as we are now seeing – cannot afford to be without the technology, they equally cannot afford to be at the mercy of unaccountable monopolies that control it for their own benefit.
The second is about the barriers between work and life. The erection of these barriers is one of the great achievements of civilisation. Generations of ordinary people fought and struggled to set limits to the working day, and therefore to the proper realm of gainful employment: this is what I owe to my boss, the rest is for me and my family.
We see in the Sign of the Times study the brutal invasion of this private space enabled by digital technologies: we are finding it increasingly hard even to protect holidays, let alone weekends and evenings, from invasion by work emails.
Surrender
This invasion is one to which we are being forced by the virus to surrender ever more abjectly. There may, in the short term, be some pleasure and advantage in being able to work while also being with one’s kids. But in this blurring of the distinction between the time your boss owns and the time that remains your own, it is not domestic life that wins out.
If the virus really is the catalyst for a revolution in home working, it has to be accompanied by a great social movement to re-regulate working time. The "right to disconnect" recently won in France has to become universal. And the time clawed back from commuting has to belong to the worker, not to the employer.
Third, we have to confront the step-change in the use of our connected devices for surveillance that is happening in this crisis. The problem we have to reckon with here is not the disadvantage of these technologies, but their great utility.
As we are already seeing in China, apps that allow authorities to link a person's movements to their health status are immensely powerful tools for controlling a pandemic. They are also, of course, immensely powerful tools for control, full stop. Dystopian visions of systems that can not just monitor what we do but predict it are becoming real very fast.
We may well have to cede to our governments powers that will be justified by the prevention of mass deaths. But once we’ve done that, the borders of privacy will have shrunk to virtually nothing. We’ve already ceded to the tech giants the right to gather and fuse together vast amounts of data on what we read, what we buy, where we go, who we desire, how our moods change, what hidden forces affect our emotions and therefore our actions.
In what Shoshana Zuboff calls this "third modernity", the "machine hive" of data-gathering creates the "human hive", in which "individual freedom is forfeit to collective knowledge and action. Nonharmonious elements are pre-emptively targeted with high doses of tuning, herding and conditioning, including the full seductive force of social persuasion and influence."
We will learn much more about this new kind of modernity in the aftermath of this crisis. We will also have to learn new kinds of democratic accountability if we are to sort the fabulous benefits of this technology from its fearful dangers.