Two women dance Charleston on the terrace of the Sherman Hotel in Chicago in 1926.George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images
Let's raise the focus.
Today we are stunned by the stoppages of vaccines that we believed already infallible, by the temporary employment regulation files, masks, distances, fatigue and a thousand other things that we could put on this list.
That we are bored to put on this list.
But let's move away a few years from the current moment and try to place ourselves in 2030, for example, to look back at the decade that is just beginning.
It is an exercise.
And perhaps everything is not as voracious as we think.
The parallels with the equivalent decade of the 20th century have made the proclamation of a kind of repetition of the phenomenon of the roaring twenties immortalized in
The Great Gatsby
irresistible.
Scott Fitzgerald's novel that didn't have much luck in the 2013 Leonardo DiCaprio-starring movie. Never mind. It helps us understand an icon of those years in which, after World War I and a flu pandemic that had claimed millions of lives, the West immersed itself in a vibrant world of opportunities, of spectacular growth in the stock market, of consumption, hedonism, excesses, hope and vitality, although it ended as it did. Today, thanks to science and vaccines, we also hope to get out of a pandemic that has stopped the clock on the economy and on our lives. Economic projections already indicate good growth prospects: 6% in 2021 and 4.4% in 2022 globally, according to IMF forecasts. The money embalmed by families in the form of savings (108,844 million only in Spain,according to the INE) it will begin to flow as soon as it can be socialized again. An increase in spending and consumption is expected to accompany a new, more anxious state of mind in which relationships, shared leisure, travel, fashion and pleasure regain momentum. The industry is ready, according to experts, for a technological take-off that is also going to bring us amazing changes in the decade. Also for environmental care that goes through another way of eating, flying, warming up or choosing the vehicle. Crazy years are coming in terms of changes, yes, but also a serious danger of duality as the gaps that are already deep are widening that put enormous warning signs on capitalism as we know it.An increase in spending and consumption is expected to accompany a new, more anxious state of mind in which relationships, shared leisure, travel, fashion and pleasure regain momentum. The industry is ready, according to experts, for a technological take-off that is also going to bring us amazing changes in the decade. Also for environmental care that goes through another way of eating, flying, warming up or choosing the vehicle. Crazy years are coming in terms of changes, yes, but also a serious danger of duality as the gaps that are already deep are widening that put enormous warning signs on capitalism as we know it.An increase in spending and consumption is expected to accompany a new, more anxious state of mind in which relationships, shared leisure, travel, fashion and pleasure regain momentum. The industry is ready, according to experts, for a technological take-off that is also going to bring us amazing changes in the decade. Also for environmental care that goes through another way of eating, flying, warming up or choosing the vehicle. Crazy years are coming in terms of changes, yes, but also a serious danger of duality as the gaps that are already deep are widening that put enormous warning signs on capitalism as we know it.for a technological take-off that is also going to bring us amazing changes in the decade. Also for environmental care that goes through another way of eating, flying, warming up or choosing the vehicle. Crazy years are coming in terms of changes, yes, but also a serious danger of duality as the gaps that are already deep are widening that put enormous warning signs on capitalism as we know it.for a technological take-off that is also going to bring us amazing changes in the decade. Also for environmental care that goes through another way of eating, flying, warming up or choosing the vehicle. Crazy years are coming in terms of changes, yes, but also a serious danger of duality as the gaps that are already deep are widening that put enormous warning signs on capitalism as we know it.
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The lesson of the 1920s: from the endless party to the rise of populism
In search of the happy twenties
We could approach this matter from the optimism of scientists, technologists and experts who celebrate the opportunities that are about to emerge and that the pandemic has accelerated;
or from the pessimism or realism of philosophers, social analysts, with the data that remind us of our habitual inability to calculate limits.
Probably everything is true, as the twenties of the XX were very crazy in very positive advances, and not for that reason the
crash
of 1929
was avoided
. Let's see everything.
Electrification allowed the first electrical appliances that made life easier;
combustion cars or trucks massively promoted population movements and the transport of goods;
assembly lines multiplied production;
the radio sneaked into homes and broadcast both the most contagious music and the rapid rises in shares on the stock market that encouraged speculation.
That ended as it did, yes, but this time at least we already know.
Nanotechnology Research Center in Troisk (Russia) Valery Sharifulin / Valery Sharifulin / TASS
As then, today dizzying changes are coming, also accelerated thanks to remote work that the pandemic has advanced in seven years, according to a survey by the McKinsey consultancy based on interviews with executives. "In these twenties the fourth industrial revolution will be consolidated by the hand of nanotechnology, biotechnology, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence," says Nuria Oliver, doctor in Artificial Intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “The vaccine itself is the result of these advances, and if several have been achieved at the same time, it is thanks to this fourth industrial revolution, which will continue to advance and transform society. That is why it is an industrial revolution ”.
A refrigerator or a washing machine does not look like a revolution, and yet it was. Like these, they saved time buying fresh food or cleaning clothes while trucks traveled the West to move products en masse. Today it is the data, the cloud and artificial intelligence that will bring us impressive leaps: personalized medicine and drugs, telemedicine, cochlear, retinal or brain stimulation implants that will take us to new terrain for ethics, such as the possibility of hearing more frequencies or increase our memory, says Oliver. This is how we will have changed in a decade: on-demand and more horizontal education, driverless driving, not to mention vehicles that leave fossil fuels once and for all. "Neither hybrid nor electric, you have to go to the hydrogen one,much more compatible with the resources we have on the planet ”, says Margarita del Val, probably the best known virologist in Spain, from the Severo Ochoa Molecular Center and the CSIC.
Telemedicine in a hospital in Aachen (Germany), last January.INA FASSBENDER / AFP via Getty Images
The roaring twenties of the twentieth century, says Del Val, were “a flight forward because there was no learning from the pandemic. And now we have to learn from her, not about how an arm is pricked, but about the value of research ”. The scientist believes that the so-called Spanish flu was a failure: "It is neither registered, nor does it have literature or art, and it is important that a legacy remains." More pandemics will come, she assures, and if we are able to transfer the collective scientific energy that she has admired and that has made these vaccines possible to prevention, we will be able to face them better. "You have to hire computer engineers and put them to manage public health, there is such an amount of data that if we knew how to milk it we would know exactly how many blood clots exist every day in each place, by gender, by age, for example."
Tracking antibiotic-resistant bacteria, monitoring what is circulating, lubricating the production of vaccines for all the coronaviruses that arise will be stars this decade if there is sustained investment, because that is not improvised as a field hospital.
So far, the possible inventions of the decade: data mining and artificial intelligence in the role of the old combustion engines that changed lives a century ago. But what will the Charleston of this era be, beyond the domestic choreography circulating on TikTok? Which futurism, jazz or fashion boldly mark this era? The Treaty of Versailles that put an end to World War I was celebrated to the sound of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a rhythm that caught on in that decade when it became "festive, playful, danceable music" just as tango spread "by its very sensual, carnal and also danceable component ”, recalls Fernando Neira, a musical expert. People wanted to dance, enjoy themselves, and Josephine Baker succeeded, for example, dancing with her banana skirts as an icon of the explicit, the fun,of giving everything as if there was no tomorrow. "Now I can again foresee a culture of hedonism, of evasion, of a certain sensual content, especially after the very tortured music that has been created in confinement," says Neira.
Two dancers practice a choreography for the social network TikTok in April 2020.
For Luis Vidal, an architect of great international projection, the decade is going to be the most hectic we know because, he says, we will live in 10 years the equivalent of the last 100.
And it offers five reasons: because of the pandemic that is already generating changes in our cities;
for the environment that will set the agenda;
by artificial intelligence that will accelerate our societies;
for financial resources that have never been invested in such a global and transversal way in all sectors;
and for the social revolution.
"We have the opportunity to substantially improve the way society inhabits, occupies and uses the planet."
Architecture, he argues, is ultimately intended to improve people's quality of life and that is what it will do.
The same optimism is breathed in the world of fashion, which can prepare for a new emergence in the face of the hunger for luxury that has awakened after the darkness of the pandemic and the boredom of the tracksuit, according to Anna Wintour, editor of
Vogue.
and industry guru. Isabel Berz, director of the Center for Research and Education at the European Institute of Design, believes that the uncertainty generated has created the perfect space for reinvention. “In fashion we have been without buyers for two seasons, structures have fallen, and yet unlimited creativity is being promoted, a rebirth of spontaneous entrepreneurship, a relationship from you to you, from person to person, thanks to Instagram. We will live a great time for the creation of the author, the authenticity, the direct relationship and without intermediaries, in front of an industrial production system ”.
Online shopping, which has exploded in the pandemic, will not only not decline even if mobility returns, but will evolve towards a new, more inclusive format that Sophie Hackford, researcher and trend specialist, describes from Oxford as a universe closer to videogames than current websites: “The new internet of this decade will offer richer and more cinematic experiences that will leave 2D in the dust. Taking as a model big-budget video games, we will spend time in amazing virtual worlds shopping, enjoying with friends, meeting or at medical appointments. They will be new theme parks where you shop, work and hang out, and not flat web pages. We can feel the data, smell it, hear it. It will be a post-pixel decade in which we will live inside the machine and not looking at it.The world will become a computer. And the pandemic has accelerated it ”.
Young people playing video games in Osaka (October 2020) Buddhika Weerasinghe / Bloomberg
Acceleration is an indisputable engine and Carlos Sallé, industrial engineer and specialist in the environment, stresses that it is also the driving force behind awareness. “The pandemic has been an awakening, it has accelerated the awareness that we will not solve global problems if we are not all there. That you have to put the human being at the center ”. Sallé has already confirmed considerable advances in mobility such as research in hydrogen, electric batteries for airplanes, biofuels, the extension of bicycles, shared cars and electric cars, the limitation that France is going to make on short flights as Norway did before, as well as in fertilizers, non-polluting cement or artificial meat that helps to lower that "very high protein level that we did not have before World War II".
But let's also look at the obstacles.
Let us see the threats in this prospecting exercise in which we do not have to make too many efforts to glimpse what our particular 1929 may be: inequality, unemployment, high public debt, digital, health and educational gaps and the distrust itself in a system that has already failed us many times and does not arouse hope.
"What is different about this crisis is that it is superimposed on other crises," recalls Txetxu Ausín, PhD in Philosophy and researcher at the CSIC.
"And just as in the twenties of the twentieth century there was optimism, confidence and great hopes for a capitalism in maximum development, now we have great uncertainties, the idea of progress and growth is questioned."
Volunteers from a soup kitchen in Marseille last March.
NICOLAS TUCAT / AFP via Getty Images
The system has faced its limits, reflects Ausín, marked by the climatic and ecological crisis or the survival of the planet itself. And security has been broken, even in science. "The happy twenties gave way to the dark thirties, and that uncertainty and fear are causing an exacerbated polarization, the search for simple solutions to complex problems." It is, Ausín warns, a perfect breeding ground for populism and simplification that also triumphed after 1929 in the form of fascism and totalitarianism. Careful.
The alert that Txetxu Ausín launches is on the table. And he finds a reply in a great connoisseur of the economy like Emilio Ontiveros, who perceives that governments or institutions such as the IMF have finally understood that "the economy is not at the service of any ideology, but at the service of minimizing damage", and who perceives in companies that it is no longer enough to make money, but that this must be compatible with limiting damage to the planet and inequalities.
“The system has understood that excesses are harmful to the survival of the system itself. They have been slow to realize it, but the lesson has worked, ”says Ontiveros. “And not because the system has become a charity sister, of course. But because he has seen the ears of the wolf ”. The economist notes advances such as the flexibility of companies thanks to remote work or the debate on the obsolescence of the retirement age.
Hope or pessimism?
Crazy years or a gun to the temple of the system itself?
The solutions are already written, they all stand out: in the purposes of climate change, the 2030 Goals, investment in science, in education and the proper use of technology and robotics.
This technological decade doesn't have to be a nightmare.
“It is not an inevitable force that we are forced to absorb.
We don't have to sleepwalking into an undesirable future, ”says Oxford researcher Sophie Hackford.
The point is that between the euphoria, the Charleston to come, the dazzling fashion and the social promiscuity that we long for after confinement, we should not imitate Gatsby when he said, while pointing to the stars in the sky: “My life has to be like this, always in ascent".
Always looking around and not only up will save us trouble.