The Pandemic As a Portal: Tracking and Enabling New Possibilities
Channel: The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Date: 2020-06-24

The pandemic is a portal, the novelist Arundhati Roy wrote in an essay for the Financial Times. “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

In many ways, the coronavirus pandemic has resurfaced and amplified the worst in the world: intensification of surveillance, racism, nationalism, anti-scientism, bigotry.

But something strange has happened as well. Changes, ideas and solutions that were previously deemed impossible have suddenly become possible. Many of these changes still don’t go far enough, come with caveats and fine print, are subject to absurd means-testing, or are only temporary. These aren’t necessarily the changes we want, but they give us a glimpse of what has suddenly become possible.

A number of projects are seeking to capture and document the new possible. In this lunch hour, three of these projects, COVID-19 Policy Response, The New Possible, and Don't Go Back to Normal talk about their experience and debate how we can ensure that the new normal doesn’t turn into the old normal. 

To learn more about the Berkman Klein Center, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu