Mutual Aid via Social Media
If help is required, all that is needed is to ask a local group on Whatsapp, Facebook or something similar and a response is almost certainly guaranteed. Technology stepped up to alleviate much needed problems created in the wake of the Covid 19. Some of the usual requests include picking up a medicine from a pharmacy or essential items from the corner shop. Social media is also helpful in raising funds for the indigent and the poor or provide meals for health care workers. Whatsapp groups are normally members only and someone has to be added by an admin, so there is reasonable safety in such a platform.
Adjustments in the World of Work
The rise of the GIG economy over the last 20 years since the event 2000, and consequently huge developments of the startup ecosystem for it, are beginning to shift career concepts. The head of ITV remarked recently in the Daily Telegraph that older actors will be excluded from television dramas until social distancing rules have eased! This will of course be a trend in the new wave of employment contracts forward.
This sees a trend from the traditional linear concept of a corporate ladder to a more flexible and fluid journey with multiple roles in a new concept of industry. Skill sets, expectations and priorities are shifting in a major way, and the current pandemic upped the time scales tremendously. An old workforce will perish in the rise of a very new one, where the delivery service of goods and products is going to play a major role and the Uber type transportation of people might even slack down. A few years ago I foresaw Hyper-loops for this role between warehouses and production centres. This should perhaps seriously be looked at again.
Adjustments in law enforcement
With national lock downs appearing all over the world, lockdown enforcement, and hence curfews and heavily armed police and army personnel on the streets in what is a medical, not insurgency related , emergency, have been drawing negative attention worldwide as well.
Authorities are worried that there is both a danger of over response or people becoming more restless and showing signs of lockdown fatigue.
At the same time things are falling apart when, in the biggest democracy (the United States) an act of police brutality pitched the public in demonstrations against such action,which again quickly led to crackdowns and then general rioting. A spiral of violence that is unprecedented in a nation still battling with Covid 19.
Noah sums this up in an emotional report on the Daily Social Distancing show:
What this unfortunate events is highlighting is that improvements in law enforcement, and ways of averting confrontation, in fact just listening to the public for a change, should be high on the agenda of new methodologies that are planned forward from this impasse.
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