It is now just over a week since we entered lockdown. The statistics of the number of known COVID-19 cases seemed to have flattened off, but the authorities warn that there may be many more people that are infected that we don’t know about yet.
… don’t panic, don’t panic …
So, here we are going about our business in as far as one can go about one’s business sitting at home. Of course we need to stay positive. This is especially important for those of us living alone. As a result, I find myself thinking about the situation, observing how things develop and trying to think what it will lead to. I came to the conclusion that the world will probably never be the same again. Even assuming we get through this (and I guess one must hold onto the conviction that we will get through it), there are certain things that (I think) will change forever.
Perhaps you’ve already heard that one of the effects of lockdown is that more people will start to work from home. Video conferencing will become more prevalent. So will online file-sharing facilities and all that kind of stuff. (Let’s just hope the internet keeps on working.) However, I think there is another consequence that has been largely ignored. It is something I call the collective impetus.
So, what is this collective impetus? A long long time ago there was this TV series called Star Trek. It actually spawned several different series. One of the iconic antagonists that appeared in many of these series, but especially in Star Trek Voyager is the Borg, a cybernetic hive mind that called itself the Collective. It would inform its victims: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”
Some time ago I started to see a resemblance between the Collective (the Borg) and those people that are constantly on their cellphones. It occurred to me that the obsession of these people to be in contact with others (so much so that they even do that while driving a car) effectively means that they are gradually becoming part of a collective hive mind.
Enter lockdown. Now, what little face-to-face interaction people had is drastically reduced. As a result, more people are forced to keep contact with one another via cellphones. Hence the collective impetus. The society that will emerge after the lockdown may look significantly more like a collective than before the lockdown.
One can even imagine that cellphones will eventually start to look like the devices on the heads of people in the Borg. Perhaps this is the next phase in the evolution of the universe. Perhaps people will lose their individuality and the whole collective hive mind will start to act like a single organism. What about those of us that refuse to become part of this collective?
Flippiefanus 