Covid-19 Shifts
The other week, Venkat Rao posted 100 shifts on twitter and challenged other people to do the same. I had a try.
Post-Covid-19 Shifts
- Home cooking
- Normalisation of work from home
- School from home
- Competence based assessment in schools
- Touchless delivery
- Touchless doors
- Remote sales meetings
- Cross-border working
- Collocated teams
- Asynchronous collaboration
- Not-handshakes
- Off peak travel
- Staycations
- Alone together/together alone
- Home offices
- Office-at-the-node
- Vaccination proof
- Papers please
- Social safety net increased where it already exists
- Depletion of social safety net where already in decline
- Broadband as essential public infrastructure
- Withdrawal of elderly from public life
- Stranger danger social distancing
- Performative public cleaning
- Item limits in grocery stores persist
- PPE-chic
- Outerwear as defensive layer
- Shoes off inside
- Decontamination-in-depth in houses
- Primary carers with children at home in the everyday remote workforce
- Synchronous remote socialising
- Work-at-home wardrobe (“the fourth wardrobe”)
- Second shift weekends (offset weekends)
- Split shift white collar work (9am-2pm; 7pm-10pm)
- Antibacterial packaging
- Prepackaged fruit
- Gloves on retail workers
- Gloves on public transport
- Masks in public in Western countries
- Bottle episodes
- One room plays
- Home gyms/workouts
- Local high tech manufacturing
- Surveillance socialism for the rich
- Surveillance capitalism for the poor
- Remote learning becomes the norm for most tertiary education
- Smaller university campuses
- Smaller planes
- Smaller busses
- Attendance logs for business meetings
- Subscription payments for hairdressers
- Public-private partnership “public” hospitals
- Telehealth for GP visits
- Tele-service centres for government shopfronts
- Wealthy keep more cash on hand
- High cash/asset ratio becomes key investment driver
- Antibody testing in normal check-ups
- printing and scanning at home
- rental agreements get public health subclauses
- Temperature scanning people in airports
- Less hugging
- Decline in cinema attendance
- Wider spaced seating in cinemas
- More bottom up “self care” talk in workplaces
- Changing speed expectations in workplaces (some things faster, others slower)
- More involvement of people with disabilities in the WFH workplace
- Retreat to deep exurbs, satellite cities with good rural broadband
- Only boomers shake hands
- Rise in experts as part of everyday news
- Public health statistics as part of every day news
- Large workplaces/schools/universities track employee/student health publicly
- Normalisation of tech-enabled state surveillance for subsets of diseases
- Disease-based discrimination magnifies race-based discrimination
- Long term tech boom follows massive public sector investment (20+ years away)
- In-home recording studios
- Cash is deprecated
- Shopping malls close
- Smaller retail stores
- Big box retail eats more local retail
- Niche sports narrowcasting
- Panel shows as grids of talking heads
- Local supply chains
- Micro factories
- Legacy media celebrities pivoting to solo local streaming
- New collaborative social media broadcasting from experts
- Conservative Keynesianism
- Unquestioned national budget deficits
- Barre (special inside joke for Australians)
- Regional international collaboration
- Government-supported cartels for essential services
- Socialised childcare
- Full unhinging of anti-vax / move underground
- Health minister (Australian govt position) gains equal prestige as Treasurer
- Blue helmet occupation forces
- Hand washing as a generational marker
- Better webcams in MacBooks
- External microphones as part of everyday kit
- Ring lights as part of premium mediocre kit
- De-gentrification of cities
- Quarantine rooms in houses