Reading tips to better understand the world after the corona crisis
Open a website of any news platform and the headlines about the corona crisis scream at you. The coronavirus has accelerated our news cycle. For people who pay little attention to the news, like us Issuemakers, there is a danger of drowning in the issues of the day.
Fortunately, Israeli thinker Yuval Noah Harari has thrown us a lifeline. In his essay The world after coronavirus, written for the Financial Times, Harari expresses what today's crisis measures mean for society in the future. Harari states that existing social developments are approaching us at an accelerated pace due to the corona crisis. Sooner than we would like, we will be faced with important dilemmas that will shape the world of tomorrow. It's nice that Harari opens our eyes, because forewarned counts for two.
After publication, the piece was frequently shared on social media and discussed by media such as DWDD and NRC. The bestselling author therefore meets an apparently strong need to oversee the social consequences of corona. In addition to Harari's piece, and with his words in mind, we give a number of reading tips that help to better understand the world after the corona crisis.
- Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
According to Harari, we are faced with a choice about privacy because of corona. Do we give governments the freedom to adopt a coercive 'totalitarian approach', including strict controls and cyber monitoring? Or opt for an approach that does not rely on digital surveillance, but on properly informing and supporting the population?
Harari warns: authoritarian forces that want to permanently take away our freedoms claim that a 'surveillance regime' is the only way to protect our health. The warning did not come out of the blue: Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu is already trying to have his secret service track the mobile phones of corona patients without interference from parliament.
In the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff outlines how the surveillance society is taking shape through the Googles and Facebooks of this world. The book warns how behavioral manipulation threatens individual autonomy and makes a well-functioning democracy impossible.
- Maurits Martijn & Dimitri Tokmetzis: You do have something to hide (2018)
Undemocratic practices such as in Israel seem far away and, moreover, taken in these exceptional corona times. The book You do have something to hide shows that privacy is also an issue in the Netherlands. Correspondents Maurits Martijn & Dimitri Tokmetzis describe how data hunger has also entered the Dutch government, well before the corona crisis. Did you know that for a while, the Dutch government used the data from parking services such as Yellow Brick and Parkline to know exactly where we parked our cars?
- Cas Mudde Populist: Radical Right Parties in Europe (2016)
A second important split that Harari points out to us in this time of crisis is, on the one hand, the path of global cooperation, and on the other, the path of national isolation. Harari is also guiding this choice: according to him, a problem that affects all humanity requires international solidarity.
This international solidarity cannot be taken for granted in 2020. Powers like Trump and Orban mainly focus on their own interests. Compared to previous crises such as the financial meltdown in 2008 or Ebola in 2014, America is now making it very clear that it cares much more about the greatness of its own country than about the future of humanity, Harari writes.
In the book Populist: Radical Right Parties in Europe Cas Mudde maps the Trump-like political movements of Europe. In addition, the Dutch political scientist affiliated with the University of Georgia identifies the most important building blocks of these political movements. According to Mudde, an important building block is 'nativism:' the idea that ideas from outside pose a threat to the nation state. Several now successful politicians have discovered that populism and nativism is a 'golden combination', Mudde writes. In his book, Mudde analyzes the political sentiment that stands in the way of international solidarity.
- Geert Mak: Great Expectations In Europe – 1999-2019 (2019)
The tension between international solidarity versus national interests is palpable in the European Union due to corona. Geert Mak wrote in NRC on March 27: 'Both forces are currently strongly present within the European Union: the practical need for internationalization and, on the other hand, the emotional tendency towards renationalization. The outcome is uncertain.' The rich northern countries, led by the Netherlands and Germany, are reluctant to pay indefinitely for the deficits of the southern countries. A 'final test for the European Union,' said Mak.
The historian published the book at the end of last year Great Expectations In Europe – 1999-2019. Mak describes the first two decades of the European twenty-first century. In doing so, Mak gives context and interpretation to the challenges that the European Union now faces.
