It’s hard to work out just how different the covid and post-covid world will be, because it’s changing so comprehensively. Consider movie theaters. The first-order effect seems obvious: they’re doomed! Even after they reopen, they can’t make money with 50% of their capacity. How will they pay their rents?

Wrong question … or, more accurately, right question, but wrong scale. Yes, AMC and co. will probably go bankrupt, and in a just world their shareholders will get wiped out and their bondholders will take a haircut — that’s capitalism, baby, or at least it should be —

— but let’s consider the second-order effects. Inability to pay rent is only catastrophic if your landlord can rent your space to someone else. Who’s going to rent massive theater spaces during a pandemic? Who’s going to rent them during the recession which follows the pandemic? It’s not just movies; it’s basically every retail and theatrical space.

As the old joke goes, “if you owe the bank a million dollars, then you have a problem; but if you owe the bank a billion dollars, then the bank has a problem.” You may think it’s bad to be a movie theater, a restaurant, or a retail store, and it is … but the second-order effect is that it’s even worse to be in commercial real estate. One struggling tenant is a headache. All struggling tenants is a catastrophe.

But hey, at least you’ve got office space, right? Except that we just might find that a lot of companies forced to try out working from home might discover it’s actually highly cost-effective:

The same is true of retail space everywhere. Remember, “retailpocalypse” was headline fodder even before the virus prompted everyone to start getting everything delivered from the Internet. The same is true of restaurants, who were struggling to come to terms with food delivery services (please, stop using GrubHub and Seamless) even before the virus hit.

So, the first-order hit is to the obvious suspects: theaters, stadiums, restaurants, retail, gyms. The second-order hits are to owners of commercial real estate. wholesalers, service providers, etc. The third-order hit is to taxes paid to, and therefore budgets of, governments. We’ll see comparable effects elsewhere, too — e.g. first-order to airlines and buses, second-order to hotels and rental cars and events and cargo shippers, third-order to airports and governments again.

But let’s focus on one particular interesting question. What happens next?

Consider San Francisco, everyone’s favorite overpriced, overcrowded, inequality poster child. It has roughly 150 million square feet of combined office and retail space at the moment. If the covid lockdown-then-recession eventually eats 20% of that — which seems at least plausible, between the retailpocalypse and what I will christen the “officepocalypse,” i.e. the revealed cost savings of working from home — that’s 30 million square feet of empty space.

If converted to housing, this could increase the city’s total housing stock by well over 10%. That would drive prices and rents, already pressured by the recession, way down — while presumably still remaining simultaneously profitable, since current prices are so high. Needless to say this conversion would also create a lot of jobs. (Although in some cases no conversion will be required.)

While you’re at it, you could take a couple million feet of those space and convert them to 200 sq. ft. mini-apartments to house every homeless person in San Francisco. (It’s not that crazy a notion. New York City has been legally required to house every homeless person in its five boroughs, and has plenty of apartments that small which people pay good money for.)

This is no panacea, of course. Nothing will be. Converting retail and office to residential will be very expensive … although not as expensive as letting them lie there worthless without collecting any rent at all. But if our post-covid world is one in which demand for office and retail space plummets, which seems likely, let’s take advantage of that space to help deal with the housing crisis which has plagued wealthy cities across the world.

Ultimately, tech companies, long blamed for gentrification and spiraling prices in San Francisco and many other cities, could become a major part of the solution to that problem, by making the tools (and setting the examples) for freeing up office space by working from home. Sadly, we can preemptively rely on this dark irony being lost on the usual outraged suspects.

Two years ago I attended an “Innovation in Immersive Storytelling” event at Industrial Light & Magic, featuring the Chief Game Wizard of Magic Leap. I should have known then, from all the strained corporate sorcery in that sentence, that their demise was inevitable. But in fact I went into that talk a Magic Leap skeptic, and came out … less so.

Magic Leap drew in a lot of true believers over the years; $2.6 billion worth. Investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Google (not Google Ventures — Google itself) and many many more. Sundar Pichai joined Magic Leap’s board. And did they rave. I mean, it’s a VC’s job to rave about their portfolio companies, but this was different:

Now there is something new. Not just an order-of-magnitude more pixels or a faster frame rate, but – thanks to sensors and optics and mobile phone volumes and breakthroughs in computer vision – something I always dreamed of … The product is amazing … this is different

— Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins.

It was incredibly natural and almost jarring — you’re in the room, and there’s a dragon flying around, it’s jaw-dropping and I couldn’t get the smile off of my face

— Legendary Pictures CEO Thomas Tull

Legendary and a16z had previously invested in Oculus Rift. Tull even told TechCrunch “Magic Leap takes a completely different approach.” This is especially interesting because when Magic Leap finally — finally, after 5 years and $1.6 billion — released a product, Oculus’s Palmer Luckey wrote a truly scathing teardown of the Magic Leap One. Again, yes he would do so … but the details are quite striking …

They call it the “Lightwear”. This is the part that has gotten the most hype over the years, with endless talk of “Photonic Lightfield Chips”, “Fiber Scanning Laser Displays”, “projecting a digital light field into the user’s eye”, and the holy-grail promise of solving vergence-accommodation conflict, an issue that has plagued HMDs for decades … TL;DR: The supposed “Photonic Lightfield Chips” are just waveguides paired with reflective sequential-color LCOS displays and LED illumination, the same technology everyone else has been using for years, including Microsoft in their last-gen HoloLens. The ML1 is a not a “lightfield projector” or display by any broadly accepted definition

What happened to that “completely different approach?”

It’s worth noting there was some spin-that-more-than-verged-on-deception going on. Magic Leap sent an email to press with a video and the claim “This is a game we’re playing around the office right now”; subsequently, The Information revealed that entire video was F/X, created by Weta Digital.

ML then released another video “shot directly through Magic Leap technology on 10/14/15, without the use of special effects or compositing.” Was that true? Definitely a question worth asking, in light of what had happened with the previous video. But all things considered, the answer seems to be: “probably.” See also Kevin Kelly’s sparsely detailed megafeature on ML for Wired in 2016:

All three major MR headsets rely on images that are projected edgeways onto a semitransparent material—usually glass with a coating of nanoscale ridges. The user sees the outside world through the glass, while the virtual elements are projected from a light source at the edge of the glass and then reflected into the user’s eyes by the beam-splitting nano-ridges. Magic Leap claims that its device is unique in the way it beams light into the eye, though the company declines to explain it further at this time.

How to square this with Luckey’s — so far as I know, undisputed — report that Magic Leap’s mega-hyped “Lightwear” technology is nothing even remotely special? To say nothing of their compete failure to release a product which sparked anything remotely like the same joy or enthusiasm that its internal demos sparked in investors and journalists?

The answer is straightforward: “The Beast.”

As The Information’s Reed Albergotti revealed more than three years ago, “The Beast” was Magic Leap’s original demo box. It was everything people said. It was stunning, dreamlike, breakthrough technology. And it weighed “several hundred pounds.”

“The Beast” was followed by “The Cheesehead,” which fit on a human head, and “showed they could miniaturize the light field signal generator they’d invented” … but still weighed “tens of pounds,” obviously far too heavy for any real-world applications. (There are pictures of both in the linked CNET piece.)

“The Beast” and “The Cheesehead” help explain the multiple rounds of massive venture investment. But then — could Magic Leap miniaturize their breakthrough technology further, to anything actually releasable?

Clearly they could not, and that’s the crux of the matter, the answer to how and why Magic Leap raised $2.6 billion dollars, then laid off half its employees, while hardly releasing anything at all in seven years. To quote Vanity Fair quoting The Information quoting CEO Rony Abovitz:

The technology behind The Beast is “not really what we’re ultimately going to be shipping,” Abovitz told The Information, adding that prototypes were merely good for showing investors and others “what was good about it, what was not.”

Intended or not–I assume it wasn’t–Magic Leap became a $2.6 billion bait-and-switch, the consequences of which are now all too apparent.

“Why are people still giving Magic Leap Money?” our own Lucas Matney asked a year ago. Their device sales were terrible. Last month they sought an acquisition for a $10B price tag Josh Constine rightly called “crazy.” Then they laid off half the company and pivoted to enterprise. Now the question we’re asking is “What happens if Magic Leap shuts down?”

Will “The Beast”‘s technology eventually make its way into living rooms and dorm rooms and offices? Maybe. Was that a notion worth betting $2.6 billion on over six years starting in 2014? Another maybe. But it was a bet that did not pay off. Ultimately, Magic Leap’s story isn’t one that should feed outrage, or anger, as much as sheer sadness that hardware is so hard, and that human senses — especially sight — make for such a challenging development platform.

An epic number of citizens are video-conferencing to work in these lockdown times. But as they trade in a gas-burning commute for digital connectivity, their personal energy use for each two hours of video is greater than the share of fuel they would have consumed on a four-mile train ride. Add to this, millions of students ‘driving’ to class on the internet instead of walking.

Meanwhile in other corners of the digital universe, scientists furiously deploy algorithms to accelerate research. Yet, the pattern-learning phase for a single artificial intelligence application can consume more compute energy than 10,000 cars do in a day.

This grand ‘experiment’ in shifting societal energy use is visible, at least indirectly, in one high-level fact set. By the first week of April, U.S. gasoline use had collapsed by 30 percent, but overall electric demand was down less than seven percent. That dynamic is in fact indicative of an underlying trend for the future. While transportation fuel use will eventually rebound, real economic growth is tied to our electrically fueled digital future.

The COVID-19 crisis highlights just how much more sophisticated and robust the 2020 internet is from what existed as recently as 2008 when the economy last collapsed, an internet ‘century’ ago. If a national lockdown had occurred back then, most of the tens of millions who now telecommute would have joined the nearly 20 million who got laid off. Nor would it have been nearly as practical for universities and schools to have tens of millions of students learning from home.

Analysts have widely documented massive increases in internet traffic from all manner of stay-at-home activities. Digital traffic measures have spiked for everything from online groceries to video games and movie streaming. So far, the system has ably handled it all, and the cloud has been continuously available, minus the occasional hiccup.

There’s more to the cloud’s role during the COVID-19 crisis than one-click teleconferencing and video chatting. Telemedicine has finally been unleashed. And we’ve seen, for example, apps quickly emerge to help self-evaluate symptoms and AI tools put to work to enhance X-ray diagnoses and to help with contact tracing. The cloud has also allowed researchers to rapidly create “data lakes” of clinical information to fuel the astronomical capacities of today’s supercomputers deployed in pursuit of therapeutics and vaccines. 

The future of AI and the cloud will bring us a lot more of the above, along with practical home diagnostics and useful VR-based telemedicine, not to mention hyper-accelerated clinical trials for new therapies. And this says nothing about what the cloud will yet enable in the 80 percent of the economy that’s not part of healthcare.

For all of the excitement that these new capabilities offer us though, the bedrock behind all of that cloud computing will remain consistent — and consistently increasing — demand for energy. Far from saving energy, our AI-enabled workplace future uses more energy than ever before, a challenge the tech industry rapidly needs to assess and consider in the years ahead.

The new information infrastructure

The cloud is vital infrastructure. That will and should reshape many priorities. Only a couple of months ago, tech titans were elbowing each other aside to issue pledges about reducing energy usage and promoting ‘green’ energy for their operations. Doubtlessly, such issues will remain important. But reliability and resilience — in short, availability — will now move to the top priority.

As Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) last month reminded his constituency, in a diplomatic understatement, about the future of wind and solar: “Today, we’re witnessing a society that has an even greater reliance on digital technology” which “highlights the need for policy makers to carefully assess the potential availability of flexibility resources under extreme conditions.” In the economically stressed times that will follow the COVID-19 crisis, the price society must pay to ensure “availability” will matter far more.

It is still prohibitively expensive to provide high reliability electricity with solar and wind technologies. Those that claim solar/wind are at “grid parity” aren’t looking at reality. The data show that overall costs of grid kilowatt-hours are roughly 200 to 300 percent higher in Europe where the share of power from wind/solar is far greater than in the U.S. It bears noting that big industrial electricity users, including tech companies, generally enjoy deep discounts from the grid average, which leaves consumers burdened with higher costs.

Put in somewhat simplistic terms: this means that consumers are paying more to power their homes so that big tech companies can pay less for power to keep smartphones lit with data. (We will see how tolerant citizens are of this asymmetry in the post-crisis climate.)

Many such realities are, in effect, hidden by the fact that the cloud’s energy dynamic is the inverse of that for personal transportation. For the latter, consumers literally see where 90 percent of energy is spent when filling up their car’s gas tank. When it comes to a “connected” smartphone though, 99 percent of energy dependencies are remote and hidden in the cloud’s sprawling but largely invisible infrastructure. 

For the uninitiated, the voracious digital engines that power the cloud are located in the thousands of out-of-sight, nondescript warehouse-scale data centers where thousands of refrigerator-sized racks of silicon machines power our applications and where the exploding volumes of data are stored. Even many of the digital cognoscenti are surprised to learn that each such rack burns more electricity annually than 50 Teslas. On top of that, these data centers are connected to markets with even more power-burning hardware that propel bytes along roughly one billion miles of information highways comprised of glass cables and through 4 million cell towers forging an even vaster invisible virtual highway system.

Thus the global information infrastructure — counting all its constituent features from networks and data centers to the astonishingly energy-intensive fabrication processes — has grown from a non-existent system several decades ago to one that now uses roughly 2,000 terawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s over 100 times more electricity than all the world’s five million electric cars use each year.

Put in individual terms: this means the pro rata, average electricity used by each smartphone is greater than the annual energy used by a typical home refrigerator. And all such estimates are based on the state of affairs of a few years ago.

A more digital future will inevitable use more energy

Some analysts now claim that even as digital traffic has soared in recent years, efficiency gains have now muted or even flattened growth in data-centric energy use. Such claims face recent countervailing factual trends. Since 2016, there’s been a dramatic acceleration in data center spending on hardware and buildings along with a huge jump in the power density of that hardware.

Regardless of whether digital energy demand growth may or may not have slowed in recent years, a far faster expansion of the cloud is coming. Whether cloud energy demand grows commensurately will depend in large measure in just how fast data use rises, and in particular what the cloud is used for. Any significant increases in energy demand will make far more difficult the engineering and economic challenges of meeting the cloud’s central operational metric: always available.

More square feet of data centers have been built in the past five years than during the entire prior decade. There is even a new category of “hyperscale” data centers: silicon-filled buildings each of which covers over one million square feet. Think of these in real-estate terms as the equivalent to the dawn of skyscrapers a century ago. But while there are fewer than 50 hyper-tall buildings the size of the Empire State Building in the world today, there are already some 500 hyperscale data centers across the planet. And the latter have a collective energy appetite greater than 6,000 skyscrapers.

We don’t have to guess what’s propelling growth in cloud traffic. The big drivers at the top of the list are AI, more video and especially data-intense virtual reality, as well as the expansion of micro data centers on the “edge” of networks.

Until recently, most news about AI has focused on its potential as a job-killer. The truth is that AI is the latest in a long line of productivity-driving tools that will replicate what productivity growth has always done over the course of history: create net growth in employment and more wealth for more people. We will need a lot more of both for the COVID-19 recovery. But that’s a story for another time. For now, it’s already clear that AI has a role to play in everything from personal health analysis and drug delivery to medical research and job hunting. The odds are that AI will ultimately be seen as a net “good.”

In energy terms though, AI is the most data hungry and power intensive use of silicon yet created — and the world wants to use billions of such AI chips. In general, the compute power devoted to machine learning has been doubling every several months, a kind of hyper version of Moore’s Law. Last year, Facebook, for example, pointed to AI as a key reason for its data center power use doubling annually.

In our near future we should also expect that, after weeks of lockdowns experiencing the deficiencies of video conferencing on small planar screens, consumers are ready for the age of VR-based video. VR entails as much as a 1000x increase in image density and will drive data traffic up roughly 20-fold. Despite fits and starts, the technology is ready, and the coming wave of high-speed 5G networks have the capacity to handle all those extra pixels. It requires repeating though: since all bits are electrons, this means more virtual reality leads to more power demands than are in today’s forecasts.

Add to all this the recent trend of building micro-data centers closer to customers on “the edge.” Light speed is too slow to deliver AI-driven intelligence from remote data centers to real-time applications such as VR for conferences and games, autonomous vehicles, automated manufacturing, or “smart” physical infrastructures, including smart hospitals and diagnostic systems. (The digital and energy intensity of healthcare is itself already high and rising: a square foot of a hospital already uses some five-fold more energy than a square foot in other commercial buildings.)

Edge data centers are now forecast to add 100,000 MW of power demand before a decade is out. For perspective, that’s far more than the power capacity of the entire California electric grid. Again, none of this was on any energy forecaster’s roadmap in recent years.

Will digital energy priorities shift?

Which brings us to a related question: Will cloud companies in the post-coronavirus era continue to focus spending on energy indulgences or on availability? By indulgences, I mean those corporate investments made in wind/solar generation somewhere else (including overseas) other than to directly power one’s own facility. Those remote investments are ‘credited’ to a local facility to claim it is green powered, even though it doesn’t actually power the facility.

Nothing prevents any green-seeking firm from physically disconnecting from the conventional grid and building their own local wind/solar generation – except that to do so and ensure 24/7 availability would result in a roughly 400 percent increase in that facility’s electricity costs.

As it stands today regarding the prospects for purchased indulgences, it’s useful to know that the global information infrastructure already consumes more electricity than is produced by all of the world’s solar and wind farms combined. Thus there isn’t enough wind/solar power on the planet for tech companies — much less anyone else — to buy as ‘credits’ to offset all digital energy use.

The handful of researchers who are studying digital energy trends expect that cloud fuel use could rise at least 300 percent in the coming decade, and that was before our global pandemic. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency forecasts a ‘mere’ doubling in global renewable electricity over that timeframe. That forecast was also made in the pre-coronavirus economy. The IEA now worries that the recession will drain fiscal enthusiasm for expensive green plans.

Regardless of the issues and debates around the technologies used to make electricity, the priority for operators of the information infrastructure will increasingly, and necessarily, shift to its availability. That’s because the cloud is rapidly becoming even more inextricably linked to our economic health, as well as our mental and physical health.

All this should make us optimistic about what comes on the other side of the recovery from the pandemic and unprecedented shutdown of our economy. Credit Microsoft, in its pre-COVID 19 energy manifesto, for observing that “advances in human prosperity … are inextricably tied to the use of energy.” Our cloud-centric 21st century infrastructure will be no different. And that will turn out to be a good thing.

We are beset on all sides, daily if not hourly, by COVID-19 data, hypotheses, speculation, and crackpot conspiracy theories. Even if armed with a mathematical mind, and some kind of grounding in critical thinking, how are we supposed to make sense of it all?

Assuming you even want to make sense of the chaos; assuming you haven’t already decided on a fixed position and a rigid lens. Assuming that resisting any change in your thinking, no matter what new information comes in, has not become the bedrock of your identity. It’s sad how often that seems to be the case. It applies to everyone ranting “Bill Gates did it” to “we are the virus” to “it’s just the flu” to “any deceleration means it’s clearly time to end lockdown,” and numerous others.

In extremely grudging fairness to them, we live in a world in which news, or “news,” often pops up on social media without any useful context or consideration. We have to provide our own context, now, in this brave new world of news. Learning how to do that is becoming one of the most crucial skills we need to make sense of what we read.

Even if you’re blessed with that skill, though — well, we’re all watching science happen in real time. Extraordinary work is being done at an astonishing rate. We live in a miraculous era. That said, the process can be messier than some may have imagined. We have to know how to weigh preprints vs. peer review, models vs. data, and hypothetical speculation vs. grim reality.

This applies to treatments as much as research. If your opinion of whether Drug X works is colored by whether your political tribe supports Drug X, you aren’t just doing science wrong, you’re doing knowledge wrong. The virus does not care about your politics.

We also have to accept nuance. Consider ventilators. The initial word was: “we desperately need as many ventilators as possible!” Of late there have been some intimations that “ventilators are overused, and may sometimes do more harm than good!” Both of these things could be true at the same time. Resist the temptation to conquer this chaos with slashing, drastic mental oversimplifications.

A good way to make sense of the noise is to distinguish between three categories of information: A) what we know is true, B) what we think is true, inferences drawn from reasonably strong supporting evidence, and C) opinions and speculation.

There’s a lot of C) with extremely limited evidence masquerading as B). And there are a lot of grim facts which are now firmly in category A), such as the extremely clear evidence that this virus can and will overwhelm hospitals if left unchecked, as shown again and again: in Wuhan, in Lombardy, in Spain, in New York City.

There was low-grade C-category speculation early on that the virus might have an infection fatality rate as low as 0.025%. Now that ~13,000 New Yorkers are already categorized as confirmed or probable COVID-19 deaths, in a city with a population of 8.5 million — a fatality rate of 0.15% for the entire city, not just those infected — it’s past time to recategorize that and similar speculation as category D), “proved completely wrong.”

It’s important to be ready to move your own beliefs to category D as well. There’s much we don’t know, and much we’re still learning. If you think you know all the answers today, please consider the certainty that you are incredibly wrong. I can assure you that you will never get a chance to debate the virus and convince it of the rightness of your beliefs. So try to be not just ready, but eager, to change them in the face of new evidence.

Here come the blood tests, and it’s about time. Serosurveys, to determine what percentage of populations have already contracted COVID-19. And, individually, tests to indicate whether you, too, already caught it, but suffered only mild symptoms, or none at all.

In America alone, millions will soon be recovered from COVID-19 infection. Half the people I know, including myself, seem to have had Schrödinger’s Respiratory Infection in the last couple of months, and are beyond eager to know if they test positive for COVID-19 antibodies.

Even if they do, though — to be clear, most won’t — what then? Suppose antibodies indicate immunity, for a while at least. That seems somewhat likely, he said cautiously. Suppose the tests are accurate enough to rely on. What do we as a society then do with that information?

The immune — the positives — could return to relative normality with no immediate fear of further infection, while everyone else — the negatives — could not. Do we want to create a two-tier society like that? Do we want to make a point of replacing negatives with positives in high-risk contexts like nursing homes? Do we want people’s test status to be publicly known, or available upon demand by the government? How about their employer? How about their healthcare provider?

Most of these are hard questions with no easy answers, and while I, like you, have opinions, some strong, about which are the least bad options, I also think this is mostly a subject about which reasonable people can disagree. Still, no matter what our collective answers are, we can all agree we want them to be implemented in the most privacy-preserving way. That’s where technology comes in.

It’s worth noting that proving immunity is far from a new problem. I’ve traveled to many countries which require proof of yellow-fever vaccination before they allow visitors to enter. Some even enforce it. The solution is venerable, simple, and decentralized; a slip of paper stamped, dated, and signed by a doctor.

This solution is relatively privacy-preserving — authorities can’t demand to see anyone’s yellow-fever papers at any given moment, because they’re only needed at border posts. It is very hard to verify, and relatively easy to forge … but it’s good enough to have worked. Its purpose is not to eliminate the risk of transmission with absolute 100% efficacy, but to reduce it to a manageable amount.

The same applies to COVID-19. As Harvard epidemiologists Bill Hanage and Marc Lipsitch wrote back in February, it’s important to “distinguish between whether something ever happens and whether it is happening at a frequency that matters.” We don’t have to worry about freakish edge cases. A 99% effective solution should be just fine.

So what would that solution be? Something simple, decentralized, reasonably effective, and privacy-preserving. Suppose that you go to your doctor’s office to get a test, and while you’re there, your picture is taken, and you choose a passcode. Then, along with your test result, you may receive some kind of wristband with a QR code. When your status needs to be verified, the QR code is scanned, you enter your passcode (or choose not to, or conveniently forget it), and then your headshot pops up, confirming your identity and status.

I’m not pretending this is any kind of perfect solution; real cryptographers will likely come up with something different and better. (In particular, to pseudonymize your individual test sample to the extent possible, and ensure that whoever hosts the central database, if any, cannot decipher the data therein.) This is to illustrate the key points that 1) only those you approve of can see your status, and 2) that status can be verified to ensure it’s actually yours, via some personal identifier like a headshot.

What do we then do with such a system? Well, after the curve flattens and recedes, perhaps we will consider reopening restaurants so long as every other table remains empty, and stores as long as only 1 (masked) customer is within for every 100 square feet of floor space. Alternatively, perhaps, restaurants and stores will also have the option of opening only to the positives — meaning with no internal restrictions, but COVID-19 positive status must be verified before allowing entry, in the same way that bars check your age before letting you enter.

Would those requirements be desirable? Again, that is eminently debatable. Would some people hack such a system in the same way that kids use fake IDs? Sure. Will this happen “at a frequency that matters?” That seems quite unlikely. In cases where it seems more likely, presumably more stringent rules can be applied.

The important thing to which technology can contribute is to make this all simple, straightforward, effective, and privacy-preserving, while consonant with our collective goals as a society. Regardless on what we agree on as those goals, if it turns out previous infection confers immunity, the positives will have a key part to play as we try to resume our lives — to the extent possible — in the ever-present shadow of the pandemic.

SpaceX has banned use of Zoom for remote operations. So have Google, Apple, NASA, and New York City schools. Earlier this week, the FBI warned about Zoom teleconferences and live classrooms being hacked by trolls; security experts warn that holes in the technology make user data vulnerable to exploitation.  Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan, has this week publicly admitted that he “messed up” on privacy and security.

But we are missing a larger question as we grapple with Zoom’s security flaws. Who controls the platform? Who benefits from it? Zoom received its seed funding from TSVC, which presents as a Los Altos-based venture capital firm but invests with the funds of a Chinese State-owned Enterprise, Tsinghua Holdings. Founded and run by a Chinese entrepreneur, Zoom’s mainline app is developed by China-based subsidiaries. Zoom servers in China appear also to be manufacturing its AES-128 encryption keys, including, as a Citizen Labs report documents, some used for meetings among North American participants. Beijing’s privacy laws likely obligate China-manufactured keys to be shared with Chinese authorities.

Zoom is precisely the kind of tool that Beijing values. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pursues a decades-long grand strategy to develop and capture global networks and platforms – with them to define global standards. Hold over standards promises enduring control of international resources, exchange, and information; a global geopolitical operating system with coercive might. Beijing has officially endorsed this ambition since its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, when it launched the National Standardization Strategy. 

Now, the CCP is putting that intent into action. Beijing is about to launch China Standards 2035, an industrial plan to write international rules. China Standards 2035 is the successor to Made in China 2025; an even bolder plan for the subsequent decade premised not on governing where global goods are made, but on setting the standards that define production, exchange, and consumption. 

Beijing completed two years of planning for China Standards 2035 at the beginning of March. The final strategy document is projected to be issued this year. While the specifics of China Standards 2035 have yet to be published, the intent – and focus areas – are already evident. The National Standardization Committee has released its preliminary report for the year ahead, the “Main Points of National Standardization Work in 2020.”

Our firm, Horizon Advisory, has translated and analyzed that report – and the past two years of planning that informed it. We find in it instructions to “seize the opportunity” that COVID-19 creates by proliferating China’s authoritarian information regime; to co-opt global industry by capturing the industrial Internet of Things; to define the next generation of information technology and biotechnology infrastructures; to export the social credit system – and Beijing’s larger litany of incentive-shaping platforms. We find an explicit global ambition that weaponizes commerce, capital, and cooperation.  

As Beijing sees it, the world is on the verge of transformation. “Industry, technology, and innovation are developing rapidly,” explained Dai Hong, Director of the Second Department of Industrial Standards of China’s National Standardization Management Committee in 2018. “Global technical standards are still being formed. This grants China’s industry and standards the opportunity to surpass the world’s.” 

Dai was speaking at the inauguration of China Standards 2035’s planning phase. He said that the plan would focus on “integrated circuits, virtual reality, smart health and retirement, 5G key components, the Internet of Things, information technology equipment interconnection, and solar photovoltaics.” Throughout, the emphasis would be on “internationalization” of Chinese standards.

Two years later, China Standards 2035’s initial research results reveal the concrete implications of those buzzwords. China Standards 2035 is to focus on setting standards in emerging industries: high-end equipment manufacturing, unmanned vehicles, additive manufacturing, new materials, the industrial internet, cyber security, new energy, the ecological industry. These align with the focus areas of the Strategic Emerging Industries initiative — also of Made in China 2025. Having secured its foothold in targeted physical spheres, Beijing is ready to define their rules. 

DJI has a near monopoly over commercial drone systems. The National Standardization Administration is now intent on “formulating the international standards for ‘Classification of Civil Unmanned Aircraft Systems’ to help the domestic drone industry occupy the technical commanding heights.’” 

Second, China Standards 2035 will accelerate Beijing’s proliferation of the virtual systems underlying, and connecting, those industries: the social credit system, the State-controlled National Transportation Logistics Platform (known as LOGINK), and medical and consumer good standards.

The plan’s third prong is internationalization. The Main Points outline the intent to “give full play to the organizational and coordinating roles of the Chinese National Committees of the International Standards Organization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).” Reports from the National Standardization Committee explain that giving “full play” means shaping “strategies, policies, and rules.” Beijing is to bolster internationalization through bilateral and regional standards-based partnerships – partnerships like China and Nepal’s standardization cooperation agreement, ASEAN’s standards docking, and nascent efforts with Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, among others.  

China’s standards plan stems from a clear, deliberate strategic progression. Beijing has spent the past two decades establishing influential footholds in multilateral bodies and targeted industrial areas. Now, it is using those footholds to set their rules – with them, to define the infrastructure of the future world. According to China’s strategic planning, this is what power means in a globalized era: “The strategic game among big powers is no longer limited to market scale competition or that for technological superiority. It is more about competition over system design and rule-making.”

But no one appears to be noticing China’s strategic positioning. Not much pops up when you Google China Standards 2035. That was a serious deficit before COVID-19’s global disaster. The stakes are higher now. Global shutdown has created what the CCP calls an opportunity to accelerate its strategic offensive.  Our lock-down induced reliance on virtual connections has offered Beijing an unprecedented angle in. 

As we grapple with the COVID-19 disaster, we need also to resist Beijing’s exploitation of it. We need to recognize the role of standards and the manner in which the CCP weaponizes them. We need to compete for alternative, safe, norm-based ones – and protect them from Beijing’s influence. Or we need to get used to security, privacy, ownership, freedom concerns far more serious than trolls at Zoom happy hour.

Times are exceptionally hard, especially for local restaurants, which were always in a precarious business even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But when times are hard, people pull together, right? Or at least they don’t take advantage of the suffering and desperate to exploit and profit from them. Right?

We’d all like to think so, but it’s not always true. Case in point: GrubHub, which owns Seamless. Do the math, and you’ll see they are hurting, not helping, restaurants they pretend they’re trying to support.

GrubHub recently rolled out a “Supper for Support” promotion which is, to quote New Yorker writer Helen Rosner, “strongarming client restaurants into giving customers a discount, but charging restaurants their platform commission fee on the pre-discount total.” This follows a so-called, widely reviled “relief program” which only defers fees, without reducing them — unlike Doordash/Caviar — and requires those suckered into it to remain on GrubHub for a full year.

The fees charged by all meal delivery services are already extreme: “typically, 20 to 30 percent per order,” sometimes more. They were often ruinous to restaurants even in better times. GrubHub’s fees can easily total more than a third of the pre-tax total, by their own calculations.

Now they are taking advantage of the desperation caused by this massive global crisis, and exploiting the natural inclination of stressed, frightened and sleepless people to reach for any lifeline, no matter how catastrophic, in the hope of keeping their lights on and their people employed. GrubHub hypocritically claims to be “supporting the restaurants you love,” while actually trying to increase their own share of the take. This is despicable.

Infuriated, I reached out to the company for comment. No actual GrubHub employee could apparently be bothered to defend their actions, but a hired PR flack wrote back saying:

Grubhub is always looking for ways to increase sales for its independent restaurant partners, especially during these critical and challenging times. The optional Supper and Support effort does exactly that. In fact, local restaurants that chose to participate in the optional initiative have, on average, seen a more than 20 percent increase in the number of orders they have received as well as overall sales. We are proud of that and will continue to try to connect them with hungry diners and grow their businesses.

This enraged me even more. The GrubHub program is “optional” for your local restaurateurs, who are hanging on for dear life, in the same way that a lifeline laced with contact poison is “optional” when offered to a drowning man. It is “optional” with the unspoken subtext that if a restaurant doesn’t opt in, other restaurants might use it to siphon business from them. It is a program that monetizes others’ suffering.

Does a 20% increase in orders sound good? Don’t be fooled. Do the math. Obviously “$10 off on orders over $30” incentivizes people to keep orders small, to maximize their discount percentages. Consider 100 $40 orders from which GrubHub would normally take 30%, or $12 from each. That would leave the restaurant with $2800. Already very painful, as you can see…

…but now take those 100 orders, and apply this promotion and its vaunted “more than 20% growth.” Heck, make it 30% growth. That means 130 orders, for which customers now pay only $30. But GrubHub still takes $12 each … so the restaurant now keeps only $2340, far less than they would have made without the promotion.

It gets even worse. The smaller the order size, the crueler the math gets for the restaurants. According to GrubHub’s 2019 results, last year it had $5.9 billion in gross food sales, and 492,300 orders per day, meaning an average order price of … $32.83. Yes, that’s right: Using the average order price from GrubHub’s own announced results, and a 30% commission rate, even with 50% order growth — double the “more than 20%” they trumpet — restaurants participating in this program will still lose huge. I invite you to do the math yourself.

The PR flack subsequently went on to proudly note a new addendum to the program, wherein “each restaurant will receive $250 from GrubHub to enable it to give $10 off any order of $30 or more.” This is even more maddening yet. $250 is much less than 1% of average restaurant monthly revenue. Weigh that against inflating GrubHub’s take to as much as 45%, on $30 orders, through this predatory “offer the customer a $10 discount, but pay our commissions as if you hadn’t” promotion. You’ll quickly see that this $250 is an empty gesture which does not affect the numbers in any meaningful way.

There is a legitimate discussion to be had, sometimes, about the merits of pricing some items higher in times of high demand due to emergencies, so that their production and availability will increase. This is in no way part of that legitimate discussion. This is pure price gouging by GrubHub, and making it optional isn’t much of a fig leaf at a time when restaurants, like so many other establishments, have literally never been so needy and desperate.

People need to eat, and people want to support their local restaurants. The best way to do so is to buy directly from them. If you use a delivery service, ~20-30% of your money goes to the service rather than the restaurant. Many restaurants are now offering their own delivery, curbside pickup, etc., for the first time.

That said, delivery services remain the best or only option for some. But if you must use one, and if you have even a shred of basic human decency, don’t support predatory gouging that manifestly hurts the people it claims to help. Instead, from now on, avoid GrubHub and Seamless like — well — the plague.

After the shutdown, the testing and tracing. “Trace, test and treat is the mantra … no lockdowns, no roadblocks and no restriction on movement” in South Korea. “To suppress and control the epidemic, countries must isolate, test, treat and trace,” say WHO.

But what does “tracing” look like exactly? In Singapore, they use a “TraceTogether” app, which uses Bluetooth to track nearby phones (without location tracking), keeps local logs of those contacts, and only uploads them to the Ministry of Health when the user chooses/consents, presumably after a diagnosis, so those contacts can be alerted. Singapore plans to open-source the app.

In South Korea, the government texts people to let them know if they were in the vicinity of a diagnosed individual. The information conveyed can include the person’s age, gender, and detailed location history. Subsequently, even more details may be made available:

In China, as you might expect, the surveillance is even more pervasive and draconian. Here, the pervasive apps Alipay and WeChat now include health codes – green, yellow, or red – set by the Chinese government, using opaque criteria. This health status is then used in hundreds of cities (and soon nationwide) to determine whether people are allowed to e.g. ride the subway, take a train, enter a building, or even exit a highway.

What about us, in the rich democratic world? Are we OK with the Chinese model? Of course not. The South Korean model? …Probably not. The Singaporean model? …Maybe. (I suspect it would fly in my homeland of Canada, for instance.) But the need to install a separate app, with TraceTogether or the directionally similar MIT project Safe Paths, is a problem. It works in a city-state like Singapore but will be much more problematic in a huge, politically divided nation like America. This will lead to inferior data blinded by both noncompliance and selection bias.

More generally, at what point does the urgent need for better data collide with the need to protect individual privacy and avoid enabling the tools for an aspiring, or existing, police state? And let’s not kid ourselves; the pandemic increases, rather than diminishes, the authoritarian threat.

Maybe, like the UK’s NHS, creators of new pandemic data infrastructures will promise “Once the public health emergency situation has ended, data will either be destroyed or returned” — but not all organizations instill the required level of trust in their populace. This tension has provoked heated discussion around whether we should create new surveillance systems to help mitigate and control the pandemic.

This surprises me greatly. Wherever you may be on that spectrum, there is no sense whatsoever in creating a new surveillance system — seeing as how multiple options already exist. We don’t like to think about it, much, but the cold fact is that two groups of entities already collectively have essentially unfettered access to all our proximity (and location) data, as and when they choose to do so.

I refer of course to the major cell providers, and to Apple & Google. This was vividly illustrated by data company Tectonix in a viral visualization of the spread of Spring Break partygoers:

Needless to say, Apple and Google, purveyors of the OSes on all those phones, have essentially the same capability as and when they choose to exercise it. An open letter from “technologists, epidemiologists & medical professionals” calls on “Apple, Google, and other mobile operating system vendors” (the notion that any other vendors are remotely relevant is adorable) “to provide an opt-in, privacy preserving OS feature to support contact tracing.”

They’re right. Android and iOS could, and should, add and roll out privacy-preserving, interoperable, TraceTogether-like functionality at the OS level (or Google Play Services level, to split fine technical hairs.) Granted, this means relying on corporate surveillance, which makes all of us feel uneasy. But at least it doesn’t mean creating a whole new surveillance infrastructure. Furthermore, Apple and Google, especially compared to cellular providers, have a strong institutional history and focus on protecting privacy and limiting the remit of their surveillance.

(Don’t believe me? Apple’s commitment to privacy has long been a competitive advantage. Google offers a thorough set of tools to let you control your data and privacy settings. I ask you: where is your cell service provider’s equivalent? Ah. Do you expect it to ever create one? I see. Would you also be interested in this fine, very lightly used Brooklyn Bridge I have on sale?)

Apple and Google are also much better suited to the task of preserving privacy by “anonymizing” data sets (I know, I know, but see below), or, better yet, preserving privacy via some form(s) of differential privacy and/or homomorphic encryption — or even some kind of zero-knowledge cryptography, he handwaved wildly. And, on a practical level, they’re more able than a third-party app developer to ensure a background service like that stays active.

Obviously this should all be well and firmly regulated. But at the same time, we should remain cognizant of the fact that not every nation believes in such regulation. Building privacy deep into a contact-tracing system, to the maximum extent consonant with its efficacy, is especially important when we consider its potential usage in authoritarian nations who might demand the raw data. “Anonymized” location datasets admittedly tend to be something of an oxymoron, but authoritarians may still be technically stymied by the difficulty of deanonymization; and if individual privacy can be preserved even more securely than that via some elegant encryption scheme, so much the better.

Compared to the other alternatives — government surveillance; the phone companies; or some new app, with all the concomitant friction and barriers to usage — Apple and Google are by some distance the least objectionable option. What’s more, in the face of this global pandemic they could roll out their part of the test-and-trace solution to three billion users relatively quickly. If we need a pervasive pandemic surveillance system, then let’s use one which (though we don’t like to talk about it) already exists, in the least dangerous, most privacy-preserving way.

The path forward now seems pretty clear. First we get through the grim month-and-more ahead, supporting health care workers in any way we can. (Tip: findthemasks.com lists where to donate PPE, personal protective equipment, in the US. If you have any, do so. We are very literally all in this together, and they need it a lot more than you do.) Then we ramp up massive, pervasive, frequent Covid-19 testing infrastructure everywhere. Then we take stock.

Things will get worse before they get better. Hospitals in some places are already creaking at the seams. The patients entering the ICUs today were infected 3-4 weeks ago. Those infected the day of your local lockdown will reach ICUs 3-4 weeks from that day … and their number doubled every several days between the former batch of infections and the latter. The math is bleak. Many places haven’t locked down yet. They will, hopefully sooner rather than later.

What can we do in tech? Well, here’s an NYC doctor saying “We need our technology friends to be making and testing prototypes to rig the ventilators that we do have to support more than one patient at a time.” Here are the UK government’s specifications for Rapidly Manufactured Ventilator Systems. And here’s a suggestion that people ramp down their Dunning-Kruger armchair epidemiology a little–or a lot. Also:

It’s beyond appalling that the US government is only now realizing that they would more need personal protective equipment, but here we are, beyond appalled. Anything we can do to provide more PPE will be hugely beneficial as well.

Then we need to test, test, test. It is also beyond appalling that America has only recently started testing at scale, and that testing is still hugely restricted, but again, here we are, beyond appalled. We need nationwide, or better yet planetwide, ubiquitous testing.

Ideally we’d want everyone to get tested regularly, maybe weekly, symptomatic or not. Realistically, right now we need to massively expand and expand and expand our testing, and trace the contacts of those who test positive, so we know where the virus is and how many people have it. At the moment we’re all but blind.

Once we know, on a quasi-real-time basis, the numbers of the infected in a given area, we’ll be able to talk about lifting the lockdown. Maybe only for temporary periods, in certain areas, for people who don’t have a fever, lest the virus come roaring back. But the point of pervasive testing-and-tracing is that we’ll know whether that risk exists, and be able to respond appropriately.

Currently we’re making overall progress with testing, but at the same time, in places we’re dialling it back, and we’re limited by test kits, by swabs, by testers, and more. We need much, much more testing capacity to come online in the following months. Once we get there, once the blinding lights of pervasive testing have lit up the virus for us and we can watch it in near real time, then life can slowly begin returning back to normal. Ish.

Maybe then we can start thinking about how, in many places, and in many ways, the pandemic has forced us to start doing the right thing as a temporary emergency measure – everything from housing the homeless, to realizing that it’s grocery workers / janitors / drivers / nurses who are actually essential to our civilization and should be celebrated and rewarded accordingly, to admitting that the liquids limit on airplanes is meaningless, and almost everyone can do their office jobs from home.

Let’s bear that in the back of our minds: but right now, we have a very hard month–and likely months–ahead. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it is already later and worse than you think. Whatever we all can do to help, we should.

The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains feels more social than social networks have in a long time.

With no source material, we’re doing it live. Coronavirus has absolved our desire to share the recent past. The drab days stuck inside blur into each other. The near future is so uncertain that there’s little impetus to make plans. Why schedule an event or get excited for a trip just to get your heartbroken if shelter-in-place orders are extended? We’re left firmly fixed in the present.

A house-arrest Houseparty, via StoicLeys

What is social media when there’s nothing to brag about? Many of us are discovering it’s a lot more fun. We had turned social media into a sport but spent the whole time staring at the scoreboard rather than embracing the joy of play.

But thankfully, there are no Like counts on Zoom .

Nothing permanent remains. That’s freed us from the external validation that too often rules our decision making. It’s stopped being about how this looks and started being about how this feels. Does it put me at peace, make me laugh, or abate the loneliness? Then do it. There’s no more FOMO because there’s nothing to miss by staying home to read, take a bath, or play board games. You do you.

Being social animals, what feels most natural is to connect. Not asynchronously through feeds of what we just did. But by coexisting concurrently. Professional enterprise technology for agenda-driven video calls has been subverted for meandering, motive-less togetherness. We’re doing what many of us spent our childhoods doing in basements and parking lots: just hanging out.

For evidence, just look at group video chat app Houseparty, where teens aimlessly chill with everyone’s face on screen at once. In Italy, which has tragically been on lock down since COVID-19’s rapid spread in the country, Houseparty wasn’t even in the top 1500 apps a month ago. Today it’s the #1 social app, and the #2 app overall second only to Zoom.

Houseparty topped all the charts on Monday, when Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch that Houseparty’s download rate was 323X higher than its average in February. It’s currently #1 in Portugal (up 371X) and Spain (up 592X) despite being absent from the chart a week earlier.

After binging through Netflix and beating the video games, all that’s left to entertain us is each other.

Undivided By Geography

If we’re all stuck at home, it doesn’t matter where that home is. We’ve been released from the confines of which friends are within a 20 minute drive or hour-long train. Just like students are saying they all go to Zoom University since every school’s classes moved online, we all now live in Zoom Town. All commutes have been reduced to how long it takes to generate an invite URL.

Nestled in San Francisco, even pals across the Bay in Berkeley felt far away before. But this week I had hour-long video calls with my favorite people who typically feel out of reach in Chicago and New York. I spent time with babies I hadn’t met in person. And I kept in closer touch with my parents on the other coast, which is more vital and urgent than ever before.

Playing board game Codenames over Zoom with friends in New York and North Carolina

Typically, our time is occupied by acquaintances of circumstance. The co-workers who share our office. The friends who happen to live in the neighborhood. But now we’re each building a virtual family completely of our choosing. The calculus has shifted from who is convenient or who invites us to the most exciting place, to who makes us feel most human.

Even celebrities are getting into it. Rather than pristine portraits and flashy music videos, they’re appearing raw, with crappy lighting, on Facebook and Instagram Live. John Legend played piano for 100,000 people while his wife Chrissy Teigen sat on screen in a towel looking salty like she’s heard “All Of Me” far too many times. That’s more authentic than anything you’ll get on TV.

And without the traditional norms of who we are and aren’t supposed to call, there’s an opportunity to contact those we cared about in a different moment of our lives. The old college roommate, the high school buddy, the mentor who gave you you’re shot. If we have the emotional capacity in these trying times, there’s good to be done. Who do you know who’s single, lives alone, or resides in a city without a dense support network?

Reforging those connections not only surfaces prized memories we may have forgotten, but could help keep someone sane. For those who relied on work and play for social interaction, shelter-in-place is essentially solitary confinement. There’s a looming mental health crisis if we don’t check in on the isolated.

The crisis language of memes

It can be hard to muster the energy to seize these connections, though. We’re all drenched in angst about the health impacts of the virus and financial impacts of the response. I certainly spent a few mornings sleeping in just to make the days feel shorter. When all small talk leads to rehashing our fears, sometimes you don’t have anything to say.

Luckily we don’t have to say anything to communicate. We can share memes instead.

The internet’s response to COVID-19 has been an international outpour of gallow’s humor. From group chats to Instagram joke accounts to Reddit threads to Facebook groups like quarter-million member “Zoom Memes For Quaranteens”, we’re joining up to weather the crisis.

A nervous laugh is better than no laugh at all. Memes allow us to convert our creeping dread and stir craziness into something borderline productive. We can assume an anonymous voice, resharing what some unspecified other made without the vulnerability of self-attribution. We can dive into the creation of memes ourselves, killing time under house arrest in hopes of generating smiles for our generation. And with the feeds and Stories emptied, consuming memes offers a new medium of solidarity. We’re all in this hellscape together so we may as well make fun of it.

The web’s mental immune system has kicked into gear amidst the outbreak. Rather than wallowing in captivity, we’ve developed digital antibodies that are evolving to fight the solitude. We’re spicing up video chats with board games like Codenames. One-off livestreams have turned into wholly online music festivals to bring the sounds of New Orleans or Berlin to the world. Trolls and pranksters are finding ways to get their lulz too, Zoombombing webinars. And after a half-decade of techlash, our industry’s leaders are launching peer-to-peer social safety nets and ways to help small businesses survive until we can be patrons in person again.

Rather than scrounging for experiences to share, we’re inventing them from scratch with the only thing we’re left with us in quarantine: ourselves. When the infection waves pass, I hope this swell of creativity and in-the-moment togetherness stays strong. The best part of the internet isn’t showing off, it’s showing up.

We are handling the first real global crisis since the Cold War with staggering incompetence. People are already dying en masse. We all need to stay home and stay away from one another. If we wait until those who can’t do math see the awful consequences all too visible to those who can, things will get colossally worse. It is already later than you think.

A few nations–Taiwan, South Korea–are responding with admirable competence and alacrity. People everywhere else have a lot to be extremely angry at. Especially in America, the theoretically wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, which, it turns out, is completely incapable of handling a crisis that is neither military nor financial.

A pandemic is to a society as a month of heavy rain is to a roof. It will find all of your architectural flaws, papered-over cracks, and loose tiles; it will use them to spread and spread; and you only have so many buckets. The USA is like a palace whose owners chose to spend the last twenty years squandering their money on gaudy decorations and a home theater, rather than fixing its decrepit roof. Now a storm is hammering down.

None of this is news. We’ve all been witnessing America’s ongoing diminishment in real time for some years now. It’s easy to imagine this crisis marking its official decline into former-hyperpower status, while China assumes the global title of “most important nation.”

In in the meantime, pay no attention to the reported, so-called confirmed, numbers of Covid-19 cases in America. The real numbers are clearly much larger. We’re in a dark room, surrounded by an unknown number of monsters, unable – and apparently unwilling – to turn on the lights.

But let’s be optimistic. Suppose people come to their senses, and stop interacting with — and infecting — one another. Suppose the period during which hospitals are overwhelmed, and grandparents die in parking lots because there are no ICU beds left for them, is mercifully brief. Suppose we actually do manage to Flatten The Curve.

What then?

Previous, lesser crises have gone away by themselves. The 2008 financial crisis was, as Bruce Sterling observed at the time, something “we made up”: nothing about the world changed except our perception of it. The World Trade Center attacks were only a real crisis for those in Lower Manhattan that morning and their families. This, though, is likely to affect our collective way of life, and our economy, for a long time.

For most people, “the economy” is a giant treadmill of rent, bills, and paychecks, on which they must keep perpetaully running lest they be flung into an abyss. Social distancing right now is — and will remain, for an unknown period — critically important. But its implication is to say to everyone in travel, hospitality, retail, restaurants, nightlive, events, etc.: “You absolutely must stop running, right now, but of course we’re not turning that treadmill off for you. Don’t be ridiculous! We can’t even imagine what turning it off would look like.”

Things are better if you’re in tech … but not much better. Does your company count any travel, hospitality, retail, events, etc., companies or people as clients or customers? No? Well, do your clients and customers count any as their clients or customers? You won’t have to go very far before you realize: we’re all interconnected. Meaning: we’re all screwed. The whole treadmill starts breaking down if enough of us stop running.

So what would turning that treadmill off, or slowing it down, look like?

In the US, it obviously starts with universal healthcare. But there’s no reason to stop there. Think bigger. Imagine a six-month rent jubilee, on the grounds that property owners are more able than suddenly self-isolating renters to deal with the financial repercussions, and also better positioned to negotiate with governments for a subsequent bailout. Imagine giving people cash, whether you want to call it “special unemployment insurance” or “universal basic income.”

Imagine maybe even rebuilding the whole treadmill from scratch, into an entirely different machine.

We built it ourselves, after all; it was not handed down from Mount Sinai. Maybe we can fix it so that it encourages scientists and artists and engineers to start up truly new and better things, rather than more adtech and parasitical financial instruments. Maybe it can reward subway workers and teachers and farmers, rather than the throngs wasting their days in dreary, pointless, but better-paid “bullshit jobs” in offices everywhere.

But that’s all in the future. Right now we’re in a crisis. Stay home, cancel on your friends, wash your hands; flatten the curve. We can’t fix the treadmill after the fire is out, and the grim nature of fire is that if we wait to act until we feel ourselves burning, it will already be too late.

I want to talk about malignant incompetence on the part of our elected officials, and this isn’t even about the pandemic. Rather, it’s about the spectacularly misguided, counterproductive, expensive, and overbearing approach to end-to-end encryption by the USA along with Australia, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand — the so-called “Five Eyes.”

Consider the TSA Lock program. (Bear with me; this is important.) It’s an initiative to ensure all luggage locks can be opened by universal keys, held by the TSA and other aviation security agencies, so that any luggage can be searched at any time. The cited purpose is to prevent terrorism, which of course we all want. Unfortunately, the TSA master keys have been publicly leaked, such that anyone could make copies. Furthermore, TSA agents are numerous, fallible, and prone to misusing their authority.

Still, preventing terrorism is a good thing which we all want, right? Some people may feel that TSA Locks are an unacceptable intrusion into personal liberties, but a majority seem basically OK with them. They’re a trade-off between public security and personal privacy which we have collectively more-or-less agreed on.

Suppose, however, that the situation was tweaked slightly. Suppose that anyone who really wanted to could, at the cost of some slight inconvenience, instead use invulnerable luggage, proof against keys, scans, and external access of any kind, all for free … and airlines were required to convey that luggage anyhow. Call it the “TSA Locks Except For People Willing To Take An Extra Half Hour To Pack” program.

Suddenly that whole program sounds completely insane, doesn’t it? Suddenly this isn’t a trade-off at all. Clearly people with anything to hide, such as terrorists, drug smugglers, etc., would immediately switch to using the invulnerable luggage, and the rest of the TSA Lock mandate would become a gratuitous invasion of personal privacy.

Suddenly the program’s chief impact would be the imposition of significant and unnecessary risks, such as leaked master keys, rogue TSA agents, and misuse by tyrannical governments, on the entire flying public who don’t go to the inconvenience of using invulnerable luggage. Suddenly the program brings no benefit whatsoever. Suddenly it is a poster child for malevolent government overreach, negligence, and authoritarianism.

Well, “TSA Locks Except For People Willing To Take An Extra Half Hour To Pack” is, I am appalled to report, a perfect and exact metaphor for what the Five Eyes want to do with end-to-end encryption. They want a ‘golden key‘ back door — aka a TSA Lock — for all messages sent over messaging systems like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, etc., despite the inescapable fact that unbreakable encryption — aka invulnerable luggage — has long been widely available, open-source, and free to all.

Even if you wanted to put that genie back in the bottle (and you really shouldn’t, as it has granted us many wishes which protect us all) it is far too late now. Even if you wanted to prevent messages with strong encryption from being transferred (which you really really shouldn’t) you couldn’t; there are too many ways to disguise them as other messages, e.g. encode them in images. Invulnerable luggage is a fact of life, and has been for decades.

And yet governments keep trying to legislate it out of existence, withlegislation that will only harm people who use the metaphorical TSA locks, courtesy of leaked keys, rogue government workers, and authoritarian governments everywhere. The latest attempt is the EARN IT act, introduced Thursday by a bipartisan coalition. Here is a summary of its most grievous flaws, by Riana Pfefferkorn, he Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, who previously described the bill as “how to ban end-to-end encryption without actually banning it.”

The cited intent of the bill is to fight “child sexual abuse material,” or CSAM. Which of course is a most laudable goal, which we all desire. Just like the goal of preventing terrorist attacks on airplanes. But as with the TSA Locks metaphor, this will simply drive awful people to use their own encryption — their own invulnerable luggage — while giving authoritarian governments, people with leaked keys, and rogue agents access to potentially trillions of previously secure private messages worldwide. It is a catastrophically dumb idea crafted by people who don’t understand what they’re doing. Let’s hope, just as with the pandemic, there’s still time enough to convince them of the reality.