There is a big shift we are all going through, it’s a forced change towards a physically isolated but socially (technologically) connected world. Last week I touched on different use cases of tech advancement during self isolation, ranging from telework apps to home entertainment. In this article I will look into the issue from a different angle. How will our lives be different once everything is settled? What will be the “new normal”? From the way we work – at the offices/ cubicles – to privacy concerns come along with sharing public health data, I will go through some major questions.
Office Space
Looks like you’ve been missing quite a bit of work lately.” “Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob. Office Space, the movie
The late 90s movie, Office Space, is one of the best parodies about the cubicle life of a white collar worker. The movie makes a mockery out of the typical boss type, who is fixated on some random report and employees working around the clock but not really being engaged. The working model of the 21st century has shifted from that quite a bit and work today is more than an endless pile of reports. Phrases like “work-life integration”, “finding one’s passion” are becoming widely used in company visions or mottos. And now we are seeing yet another shift in the way we work. A highly contagious pandemic has created a “forced shift” for remote working. Some industries were ready for that, but most were not. And even the ones that were ready for remote working were not ready to enforce it in such a massive scale, to an entire workforce. So, what does it mean for the long term? Can companies afford it for months? How about the broadband infrastructure? Is 5G ready yet to meet high demand? On high demands for fast internet and 5G, there is a recent debate as some claims are suggesting that “COVID-19 serves as a cover up for the health hazards of 5G”. It is, obviously, a harsh claim and can have serious ramifications. In UK, the claims caused at least one phone mast being set on fire. Meanwhile, the Chinese company Huawei mentioned that the roll out of 5G in Europe has been delayed due to pandemic.
Human vs machine is another topic of hot debate when it comes to the shift in the way we work. Companies face the challenge between keeping the business as usual vs adjusting the process for the new normal. For instance, some areas like content moderation is harder to do from home due to privacy issues if you are a contract worker, hence tech companies are leaning towards automated flagging and review tools more and more in the absence of human moderators. That said, this creates its own problems.
We might be seeing the start of the [machine learning] going nuts with less human oversight. Alex Stamos – FB former security chief, Wired
Privacy Concerns
The trade off between data privacy and public health is putting many governments in a tough position. When we look at the countries in Asia who are the first to be hit by the COVID-19, it seems that the main factor behind their success in containing the outbreak is making use of aggressive surveillance measures to track and isolate infected individuals. The issue is a bit trickier for the EU countries and the U.S. given the differences in governance around individual privacy. Given the worsening situation in European countries like Italy and Spain where mass surveillance and isolating infected people were not very successful, the White House has begun talks with Google and Facebook about potentially using their data on users’ movements.
The need for high quality data is beyond mass surveillance as this data is also needed for machine learning forecasters who are working to predict the trajectory of the virus.
So what’s the solution? Hu Yong, a well-known critic in China and a professor at Peking University talks about three principles to have the balance between privacy and public health:
1- Lawmakers must treat intrusions on privacy in the public interest as exceptions rather than norms. Those exceptions must also be justified by human rights law.
2- Lawmakers should define the basic civil rights guarantees that should hold even if privacy is weakened. “It is important to realize that, although privacy may sometimes have to be restricted for the sake of the wider public interest, privacy itself is a vital public interest,” he writes. Therefore, individuals shouldn’t have to “yield to the public interest in an unlimited fashion.”
3- Lawmakers should heavily restrict how they use any information collected during a crisis. It should not be diverted to other purposes, and it should be collected, stored, and processed with stringent security. – Hu Yong, Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication
What About Us?
Image taken from Otto Sharmer’s Medium article
Somewhere in between telework hassle and privacy concern debates, there is an angle we should not ignore: humane side of things. The pandemic panic and the lockdown isolation have been stressful, almost surreal to most of us. We are all living in a sci-fi novel now. Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Not to be pessimistic or anything, but just seeing the situation as it is that we gotta take care of the things that matter to us most. One of my favorite psychotherapists, Esther Perel, talks about the collective trauma and collective healing within that context.
In the age of Covid-19, a new normal has arrived. As we isolate as individuals and families, we must activate the resilience of our communities virtually in order to gather information, plan interventions at schools and hospitals, and strategize about how to continue working, learning, socializing, loving, and desiring through screens. This is uncharted territory for many of us, and it’s the first time in our lifetimes that the mandate to do social distancing has been the norm at the global level. – Esther Perel
Perel gives several tips on how to exist in this new normal, how to heal ourselves and help the others without breaking the CDC rules. Using technological advances obviously helps; one can reach out to family members via video chat or even just a simple phone call, have virtual dates, attend webinars or livestream concerts without leaving their home… All the tenets of resilience applies to this situation, with a major addition that this time it is a collective resilience we are all trying to build. As she wrote, “we are all in this together.”
Note: Featured illustration by Vivien Leung.
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