Hope for Our Collective Future

Reflections on the world 10 years after COVID-19

MC: Hello and welcome to the commemoration ceremony of this beautiful monument, marking the ten-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ll be hearing from a number of speakers tonight, including doctors and nurses who were on the front lines in some of the hardest-hit regions of our nation.

But before we hear their stories, I’d like to introduce Stephanie Rubenstein, writer, advocate, and founder of human-first technology think tank Atypical Reality. She designed the monument we’re here to unveil today and she’ll be sharing a short retrospective as our opening speaker.

First, a brief word on the monument.

This piece was commissioned by the US Government in remembrance of the brave souls who fought against the COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020. It is a collaboration between various artistic and medical disciplines. Dr. Rubenstein’s design was selected as the winner of a national design competition. Standing here today, we couldn’t be more inspired by the end result.

An obelisk, the monument symbolizes the timelessness of ancient civilizations. The structure is made out of recycled concrete from demolished quarantine centers. It measures 3 meters high, representing the length of a human cell’s DNA, and sits on a marble base about as tall as the average human adult. Its width is approximately 30 centimeters, mirroring the dimensions of its much taller brother, the Washington Monument sitting just on the other side of the Mall.

The obelisk is polished smooth, with narrow ticks lining its surface like the 1s and 0s of computer code. What’s written here is the human genome, depicted as stacked bands of DNA; all four faces are covered in this etching of humanity. Inside is a copy of the full human genome sequence, 100 gigabytes of data stored in on a remote-accessible drive that anyone nearby can download via bluetooth.

Thank you, and now to present Dr. Rubenstein.

Rubenstein: We’re here at the ten-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, remembering the doctors and nurses who fought for our lives, the service men and women who kept our lights on and the loved ones we’ve lost. This memorial we’re dedicating today is for them, but it is also for us all. May it stand here in Washington as a reminder of a different kind of war; while neighboring statues honor American battles or American heroes, let this memorial remind us of what we have in common with all other humans on this planet and unite us in the fight for our continued survival.

It seems so long ago that our world was shattered by COVID-19. Yet while some things have changed dramatically over the past ten years, humanity remains much the same as we’ve always been. I hope we seriously reflect on our shared history today and ask ourselves: Where will our ingenuity take us in the next ten years? Will we learn more quickly from our mistakes this decade? Or will history continue to repeat itself?

The world spins on

It had been here all along, and we should have known better than to think we could save ourselves this time. We blamed the fall of past empires on their own failures and in doing so underestimated the threat. But our enemy is older than us, and far more resilient; it is woven into the fabric of biology itself. How did we ever think we could win against something like that?

Humans are stubborn. If we’ve proven nothing else in our relatively short history on this planet, it’s that we’re excellent survivors. Whether plagues of the ancient world or of the recent decades, we have endured. But we’ve learned in the past ten years that this is often not enough; sometimes living isn’t about conquering, but about adapting.

We came out of the crisis individually changed and collectively stronger. We emerged back into the same world we had hidden from, but we were profoundly changed. As much as we tried, we couldn’t go back to who we once were. We’re finally thriving again, ten years on. But I genuinely hope we hold onto these lessons from the past. Because if history is any indicator (which time and again it has proven itself to be), then the world will keep turning, regardless of whether we’ve learned to live in harmony with it.

The butterfly effect

The first thing we learned was just how fragile we really were. The second, how completely interconnected we are with each other and this planet. How is it that when one human coughs on the other side of the world, the rest of us are sent cowering in a matter of weeks? Looking back, it’s comical that we actually blamed other countries for the spread of COVID-19. We pointed fingers at China and demanded retribution for the virus that their negligence had caused. But when we examine the pandemic through the lens of history, the picture is much more complex.

This wasn’t the first time a virus would leap from animals to humans, and it would be far from the last. Diseases have been the blight of humanity since the earliest civilizations and have occurred at increasingly global scale and frequency in the decades leading up to now. As humanity encroached on previously wild territories, conflicts inevitably arose between people and nature.

At the time, “global warming” was still a controversial topic, so we failed to see the connection of novel viruses to the greater ecological disasters we were causing. Instead, we blamed each other for the pandemic, shifting blame from one country to another as “patient zero” was reported in the Middle East (MERS, 2012), China (COVID-19, 2020) and Michigan (COVID-23, 2023).

But it really didn’t matter where the first case originated, as the next case was soon in our country, our neighborhoods. Countries tried to shore up their borders to protect their own, hoarding supplies and restricting the movement of citizens. This worked in 2020–21 but was in no way a sustainable solution for the years of pandemic flare-ups that followed, leading to crippling economic downturn and resource disparity that many areas of the world are still recovering from.

The United Nations’ “Treaty for Global Collaboration in Times of Crisis,” or “Butterfly Effect Treaty” as it’s commonly called, set the stage for a more connected and cooperative world. Signed in 2027, it was the salvation many governments needed after years of fighting alone against an unseen enemy (or fighting each other for increasingly scarce resources).

Still in its infancy, this treaty has already led to significant advancements in global vaccine research and preventative epidemiology, as well as new markets of resource exchange and knowledge transfer in healthcare, education and sustainability. But perhaps most importantly, it’s helped to change our collective narrative: from one of disparate nations fighting to survive to that of a thriving global network of humanity.

Evolution of the “Community”

The Butterfly Effect Treaty demonstrates our new willingness to collaborate at the global scale, but much of this foundational shift in thinking started during the “Community-First” movement of the early 2020s. As national governments struggled to keep control of their resources and economies, people stepped up to fill in the gaps.

Nowhere was the vacuum of leadership more apparent in those early days than in the United States. At the start of the 2020 pandemic, the country’s leadership was ill-prepared to manage a crisis, let alone prepare its people for a long-haul war on COVID-19. The U.S. government at the time seemed predominantly focused on profit and image, with businessman President Donald Trump at the helm of an extremely polarized nation.

While the virus swept across the globe, the Trump administration was preparing for election season. In an effort to salvage their reputation (and hopefully win re-election), the administration was quick to adopt tactics that shifted both blame and responsibility to others. They used language referring to the “Chinese virus” to sow dissent among Americans, leading to record levels of hate crimes against citizens of Asian heritage. Financial bailouts were prioritized to boost the economy, and any support that trickled down to small businesses and individuals was hard won and came with strings attached. Trump also made it clear that the states were responsible for their own people, leaving governors and local community leaders to jump in and help each other survive.

It was remarkable to see how people stepped up amidst this vacuum of leadership. I was especially amazed at how quickly individuals and businesses adapted to support essential workers at the front line. I remember following many of my friends on Instagram as they began sewing face masks to donate to hospitals in March of 2020. By April this had evolved into a massive cause, with companies such as Coca Cola donating supplies and converting factories to scale production. Grassroots efforts like these saved the day, stretching scarce supplies just a bit further in a time where they were really needed.

States were also quick to pick up the slack, with governors such as Gavin Newsom in California and Andrew Cuomo of New York proactively issuing shelter-in-place orders weeks before the federal government would do so. These decisions, while unheard of at the time, have been directly attributed with saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Exemplary leadership like this helped strengthen the people’s trust in state governments and established them as real sources of authority for their constituents.

This caused a shift in American politics, which has only grown in popularity since. Now our local and state elections hold more impact on the everyday lives of citizens than the national level; these are the leaders who know us and truly have our best interests in mind. Community-First government has proven quite lucrative for the United States economy too, with a leaner federal government resulting in more tax dollars being invested in the local communities of the taxpayers. And the Community-First movement has reached other countries as well, including developing regions of Africa where national governments have a long history of instability and corruption.

Technology for our collective good

It’s hard to imagine a world without the strong network of local and global communities that we have today, but this wouldn’t have been possible even ten years ago. While the tools we needed to build such networks existed back then, we didn’t have the means or desire to leverage technology in this way. Social networks, artificial intelligence and big data were well-established technologies by 2020. But it wasn’t possible to use them on the scale of global collaboration we see today, as most technological development was still limited by these companies’ business objectives.

At the time, individuals had a strong apprehension of technology platforms, especially those that collected personal data. This was before COVID-19 regulations had been established across America and Europe to protect the misuse of this type of data by corporations. During the pandemic this mistrust grew, as the spread of misinformation placed more responsibility on these same corporations. Facebook, Amazon and others stepped up to monitor what happened on their platforms and do what they could to ensure useful information reached the public.

Meanwhile, the use of data became essential to tracking hotspots in the midst of the pandemic. In an unprecedented partnership, Apple and Google joined forces to build a coronavirus tracker. This set a dangerous precedent however, as the threat of pandemics never truly went away and these data tracking solutions quietly evolved to record and predict other aspects of our lives. We were complacent while these systems were benefiting us, helping us spot virus symptoms in our neighborhoods and suggesting which products we should buy when we started getting sick. But as more of our lives were lived online and more decisions were made for us based on data, we were less inclined to accept this tradeoff.

Two things happened to establish our data rights in the mid-2020s: First, a well-planned educational campaign was launched leading up to the 2024 elections, increasing awareness of how algorithms worked and causing people to more carefully analyze their behavior online. And second, the “Personal Data Security and Accountability Act” of 2026 defined the personal health data mined from our online interactions as medical data, placing it under HIPAA’s protection.

With firm regulations in place and a shift in user behavior, it didn’t take long for social networks and other data-driven platforms to pivot. Facebook led the way, reconfiguring its algorithms to give users more control of their online social identity. New tools were launched to help people manage their data profile, secured by blockchain. Thanks to these systems of private-yet-shareable data, we’ve saved millions of lives through massive research projects and preventative healthcare.

Will we ever learn?

While many things have improved since 2020, we still have a long ways to go until the entire world shifts out of survival mode. War, corruption and poverty are rampant in many areas of the developing world, exacerbated by the global pandemics that have devastated their people and resources. Other countries remain stubbornly invested in old systems of power, refusing to learn from the successes of community-first governments seen in the US and elsewhere.

My hope for the next ten years is that we learn more quickly than we have in the past. Survival depends on us working together despite our differences to learn from the mistakes of the past and leverage the tools of human ingenuity for the betterment of our collective whole and the world we’re inextricably a part of. I pray that we can come together next time to solve the challenges we all face.