Then in still other cases the acceleration overshot the fundamentals and created a crisis, or at least a mess. That’s basically the story in Hollywood, where the shift to streaming was bigger and faster than it would have been without Covid pinning everyone to their couch or screen, but ultimately so big and fast that it created an unsustainable new status quo, which neither the studios nor the striking screenwriters and actors appear to know how to stabilize or unwind.
“It will be the same, just a bit worse,” Michel Houellebecq predicted mordantly about the world after the pandemic. So far, the interaction between the fast-forwarding I saw happening and the falling-backward trends that Wallace-Wells describes mostly falls into the “worse” category. It basically lays on extra burdens: We’re going to be dealing with various mid-21st-century problems somewhat sooner because of Covid, and yet we’re also stuck dealing with problems we thought we’d left behind in 1999 or even 1982.
Before 2020 you could look ahead to the 2030s and say, Well, growth will be slow because of the baby bust and population aging, but at least we’ll be able to carry big deficits and enjoy safer cities as we slide into twilight. But now we look ahead and say instead, Well, the baby bust has worsened, threatening a more senescent and stagnant future, but now we’ve also got the crime problems and inflation problems of a much younger society. Thanks to Covid’s forward-lurching time machine, some aspects of our decadence have deepened; thanks to the backward lurch, it’s also become less cushioned, more uncomfortable, and chaotic and dangerous.
For countervailing optimism, the main place to look is technology. Whether Covid played a big causal role or not, there does seem to have been a technological acceleration in the past five years, a break from the relative stagnation (or digital-only innovation) of the prior decades. How far any of this will take us is unclear: The A.I.-driven economic boom remains as hypothetical as the Skynet apocalypse, and as Benjamin Breen notes (in an essay I quoted in last week’s newsletter), the true nature of scientific revolutions is often clear only in hindsight, and the correlation between tech breakthroughs and societal improvement is always complicated and contingent.
But if we’re being hopeful, the hope should be that any potential technology-driven boom could help reverse the kind of 1990s-meets-the-2030s dynamic we have right now — bringing back the best of the ’90s, not the violent crime rates but the rising productivity, social optimism, and more robust marriage rates and birthrates (perhaps mediated by the rise of work-from-home), but all set in a more futuristic landscape of cheap, abundant energy and rapid biomedical advances.