Tech billionaires exploited pandemic emergency measures to push permanent touchless-society changes.

Evidence

This was during that first devastating wave—before we could get good masks, let alone vaccines, back when staying away from one another was pretty much the only tool we had to stop the spread of a virus we barely understood. But the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other tech billionaires seized on those stop-gap emergency measures to push for more permanent changes that would represent huge profit-making opportunities for their sector—everything from moving large parts of education permanently online to creating so-called smart cities, which would radically increase the surveillance of daily life. The future they were seeing in the crisis was one in which not only our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. It was a grim, AI-enabled vision of a touchless society that would employ far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It would accept no cash, and have skeletal mass transit and far less live art. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 479

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Klein’s earlier ‘Shock Doctrine’ framework of crisis exploitation — the pandemic as the latest shock. Also resonates with the reading-list The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s surveillance-state anxiety in theme only.