‘The Walking Dead,’ other ways to explain a post-Covid-19 world

Columnist

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to batter the world, many are now looking to the future. There is agreement that the “world will not be the same”, but only a fool says with certainty what that “not the same” will look like.

However, several crystal ball gazers are saying we could see a sharp rise in “surveillance capitalism” and surveillance states, with the powers that be sticking their noses further into our private lives to monitor diseases, and scour our lands for signs of likely virus outbreaks.
Optimists think some things could get better; we shall have more investment in health, new technologies and infrastructure that will allow us to be disrupted less by pandemics, more compassionate societies, and even less abuse of Earth’s environment.

If I had to take the safer route of telling the likely post-Covid outcomes of the next 10 or so years via the make believe of film, but based credibly on current realities, I would make three movies.
The first would be one where locusts, that are imperiling East Africa, and the ravages of climate change, combine to badly wreck our societies. The very rich retreat to the hills and mountains, grow their food in green houses, have their schools, hospitals, malls, offices, off grid electricity, and helipads, all inside their fortress communities, with the poor laying siege to them outside.
It would be something like The Walking Dead TV series, but on a grander scale and with a bandit economy developing outside the walls, with powerful gang leaders and warlords building their power off controlling the leftovers and waste from the inside people.
The second has also been partly explored in fiction and is happening partially in reality.
Blue Origin, the space exploration company founded by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, and which has a contract with the US Air Force to develop a reusable rocket, was given exemption to continue operating because it was deemed an “essential” service by the government.
We have come closer to a mass secession of the rich and chosen to settle on another planet.
A relative dramatically bemoaned the tragedy that we had brought the coronavirus pandemic upon ourselves by “eating monkeys”. The idea being that if we have to feed on pangolins, bats, and related creatures, then we have truly lost our way and don’t deserve Earth.
Anyway, the people with means, some of it accumulated through the things that have polluted Earth, will escape in pricey vessels to conquer another planet.
A third one would be where a new world emerges from protest movements against the ways that imperil us. Instead of Molotov cocktails and guns, viruses are weaponised by tech savvy rebel youthful movements against power.
The Internet is seized and used to rob banks, hijack infrastructure, and redistribute wealth and knowledge to the poor. Nation states as we know them would collapse, and city states, around which this youthful insurgent power is organised, re-emerge. Not bad.