Yekaterina Shulman spoke about five basic trends that accelerated the pandemic

The topic was "New consumer values and the transformation of employment after the pandemic".

As part of her presentation, she spoke, in particular, about five basic trends that were before the pandemic and which the pandemic has accelerated.

"The first tendency: humanization and increasing the cost of human life.

Against the background of bad news that constantly comes in, it almost looks like a mockery.

But we must understand that the very severity of those restrictions to which we subject ourselves, like all of humanity, is due to the fact that people have become dear. And that no government in the world can allow disease to take those it wants to take.

Whether these measures are effective or ineffective, whether they should have been introduced or not - now I am not even discussing this.

But no one - almost no one - can afford to pretend that nothing is happening: God gave - God took. Some kind of activity must at least be demonstrated.

The second trend is globalization, which is combined with isolationism in an interesting way. Physical barriers and a single, as never before, information and political space.

Even despite the fact that all were again separated by borders and in some places a curfew was introduced, as it happened in the 19th century, humanity has never been so united in terms of its mental field, the consumption of information.

One problem, one topic, is the focus of the entire collective mind. This has probably never happened before. All the agendas merged into one agenda. We can see this very clearly in the vaccine competition.

… Everyone is looking at each other and seeing each other as closely and in detail as never before. Psychologically, in the course of evolution, we have developed a mechanism that extends our sympathy only to ourselves and to people like us.

Previously, the misfortunes of someone living on another continent were perceived as distant stories. And now, when in video format we have all the suffering of humanity literally at arm's length, this creates such a load to which our psyche is not yet accustomed.

But we are learning to deal with it.

The third trend: the famous move of everything online. The versatility of online services, from commerce to education. And the flip side of digitalization: transparency is universal surveillance.

Everyone watches everyone, everyone sees everyone. Governments collect data, corporations collect data, people worry about the fate of this data, but in an obvious way - and this, by the way, follows from the very first point, people are ready to trade privacy for convenience and even more so for security.

Security continues to be the religion of the new century, and this is also associated with the cost of life.

Those who provide security or promise to provide it become the rulers of the world, in one form or another, and people are ready for their permeability, for their transparency, in order to save their priceless life from various dangers.

Will there be a backlash? Will new generations strive to protect their data?

There is concern about this, but so far it is not clear what it will result in. But, if there is action, then there will be opposition, and we will look at it later.

The fourth tendency: domestication - domestication - of labor.

People work from home and this affects urban development and improvement, political behavior and family relationships. Affects everything! For the sale of clothes - only the upper part, not the lower part of the suits, and so on.

And the second side: people locked at home saw how much unpaid work must be done in order for anyone to be able to work for money at all. Unpaid reproductive labor, which is mainly performed by women, suddenly became visible to all of humanity.

Part of this maintenance work was taken over in peacetime by the urban infrastructure itself, and this also failed. People were left without the help they were used to. What can this lead to?

Besides, that everyone will start to value women even more than they did before? In this direction, one of the answers to the basic income problem can be found. This is a topic for a separate lecture, but the basic difficulty is that if people are paid money for nothing at all, it can negatively influence their behavior as employees. Perhaps one of the solutions for this pathology will be to pay people, for example, to make food at home. Because it boosts public health, lowers health care costs, and is extremely beneficial to everyone.

It is quite possible to imagine such forms when householders and housewives will be paid extra for the fact that they are engaged in all this reproductive - that is, reproducing - work.

Again, online education for children has shown that parents are very involved in it. And teachers are paid extra, for example, for class leadership, and if you have a child at home, then you are his class teacher. So, can this be compensated? Can.

... In general, home workers should receive more than those who go to the office, because they cover the costs that the employer assumes in the office: heating, lighting, depreciation of equipment, the equipment itself, food, cleaning … In the office, all this is done by the employer, and at home you do it all.

And generally speaking, instead of thanking your boss for allowing you to work from home, the conscientious worker should collectively team up with others and demand to be paid more. Because it is spent - well, at least for the same electricity.

These are all areas of development that, believe me, will still show themselves.

And the last tendency, the fifth: the securitization of medicine and the medicalization of the public sphere.

This also goes back to the great religion of safety and the religion of health, a very complex concept of our day.

Remember how seriously, at the political level, in the first wave of severe quarantine, it was discussed whether it was possible to allow people to jog and generally play sports in parks or not. Among other things, this means that healthy lifestyle practices have become so universal that for a city dweller, doing sports in the fresh air or at home and the entire infrastructure of fitness rooms is as necessary a thing as the infrastructure of a cafe or laundry. And thirty years ago this was absolutely not the case. This was not the case anywhere. This is a manifestation of the end times.

People live longer, society is becoming more diverse and, accordingly, medicine is getting into such spheres of human life, in which it was not before.

We can assume that both international and national analogues of Rospotrebnadzor with power functions will appear.

Well, it’s no surprise that in terms of medicalization of the public sphere, such intimate information as your body temperature is now known to every guard and you are obliged to report it publicly. And it will also be good if we meet the frames of thermal imagers only at the entrance to public buildings, and not at the exit from our entrances, so that the exit is not blocked from the apartment, if suddenly the thermometer showed a temperature slightly higher.

All this is becoming a subject of public interest and discussion. And this is also a dissolution of privacy.

This is probably a price to pay for the fact that we live longer, for the fact that people who did not survive in the societies of the past are now surviving. But this has a number of manifestations that people were formed in the 20th century and these people perceive as uncomfortable".

You can watch the whole performance of Yekaterina Shulman here, on her author's YouTube channel.