We saw the future in 2020 and the future sucks

Flying cars are starting to look like a crock of shit. 

That’s the classic futuristic dream, right? Packing the family in some mid-size aircraft and zipping around a great blue skyway. 

I contend we’re living in the future, and — spoiler ahead — flying cars aren’t the future we got. Listen, I hate this gut feeling as much you probably do, but I can’t quite shake it: 2020 looks a whole hell of a lot like the future. And it sucks. 

We lived through screens — at least, you did if you were fortunate and caring  — and limited our human interaction to a bare minimum. Food: delivered, if possible. Celebrations: virtual. Hours upon hours poured into television or immersive video game worlds. 

It all reminds me of a piece my friend Mike Murphy wrote for Quartz in 2016 titled, “The future is a place where we won’t have to talk to or hear from anyone we don’t want to.” It explored all the ways we could isolate ourselves: delivery services, troubleshooting chatbots, VR, stores with automatic checkout. In the end, it feels like a gloomy existence. Sound familiar? Then just add in working remotely and that was 2020, frankly, if you were privileged and smart. 

And, maybe I’m projecting here, but in that future — one where you don’t need to (or can’t) interact with others regularly — didn’t we just end up missing everyone? No offense to the virtual birthdays I attended, but they kind of suck. The itch wasn’t scratched. I missed taking the train — I legitimately missed bumping bodies on the New York City subway. 

We weren’t made to live through screens. Depression and anxiety levels have been shown to skyrocket alongside case numbers as people tucked themselves away from society. Hundreds of thousands of people losing loved ones, of course, added to that as well. 

But remote life is only the half of it. 2020 might be our future in even more sinister ways. 

WATCH: Andrew Yang thinks Big Tech and capitalism need to be reined in ASAP

Living at work

Hopefully, lord-willing — cross your fingers, knock on wood, say a little prayer — as the world gets vaccinated, we’ll regain some of our in-person entertainments. Bars, live shows, sports games, etc. But it’s tough to imagine regaining it all. Can you really see a world with fewer screens? Can you imagine life more unplugged, with your life less tied to the internet?

Work, for many, will never be the same. Corporations have offloaded office space en masse. And while there are some perks to working from home — no commute, no paying for gas or a train pass, sweatsuit dress code — it’s also removing the place where we use to do the bulk of our socializing, even if it was limited to small talk and bitching over endless meetings. How many days after couch working did you miss your open-floor-plan shared-desk a little? Be honest. 

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the idea of life needing three places. Home, work, and a social center. We lamented over losing the third place: bowling alleys, bars, social clubs, reading groups, community centers, etc. But working from home also mashes together the first and second places. 

Where does work begin and home end? Is it when we transfer from the Bad Screen to the Good Screen?  It’s fucking disorienting.

And yet, it seems unlikely that work will ever return to normal for millions of people. It’s been repeatedly hypothesized that some roles might never again be office-based. Tech giant Twitter already told its employees they can WFH forever. 

In that way, the pandemic likely accelerated what was already coming. It became clear that for many white collar jobs, an office simply is not a necessity. Slack, email, and Zoom calls can suffice. 

And here’s a low-key sucky part of that work revolution. If we can live more cheaply, away from business centers, companies may attempt to pay employees less. It’s already happening. Facebook, that American bastion of morality, already indicated in May it’ll dock the pay of remote people who move to cheaper areas. Bloomberg Businessweek wrote this month a piece titled “The Work-From-Home Boom Is Here to Stay. Get Ready for Pay Cuts.” 

When work-from-home shape-shifts from a perk to a cost-cutting measure, you better believe its the workers who are going to suffer. 

The dark side of a Gig Economy

And we cannot forget, if you were forced to spend 2020 working from home, you’re one of the lucky ones. Hell, if you have a job at all right now, you’re lucky. 

Many so-called gig economy and essential workers weren’t granted the good fortune of working from home. Health care workers risked their lives, but so did delivery drivers, grocery workers, line cooks, servers, postal workers, and anybody else that helped our isolated society tick. And often for little pay. 

We’ve all now become used to food, packages, and literally everything else showing up at our doorstep for a nominal fee. It’s safe and useful, kind of magical, and even necessary at times. I’m as guilty as anyone. But that nearly magical result is typically made possible by people who are overworked and underpaid. The pandemic has, again, accelerated an unfair status quo. 

Let’s look at DoorDash, one of the major food delivery services. Buoyed by the pandemic, its stock price soared after its IPO last week, turning its founders into instant billionaires. (The price soon fell sharply, then regained a bit but it’s still safe to assume the founders are rich.) Meanwhile, the people who make the deliveries — the giggers of the gig economy — routinely get screwed. They had to plead for bathroom access. DoorDash just settled a $2.5 million lawsuit that accused the company of deceptive tipping practices that didn’t send money directly to delivery people. 

And DoorDash isn’t alone in its chicanery. Uber nearly immediately raised fees on rides and deliveries just after securing a law that keeps its drivers as contractors and not employees, despite claiming the law would do the opposite. 

Amid that controversy, food-delivery apps in general saw their business double in the pandemic. Greg Bensinger wrote in the New York Times this month how these sorts of apps are gutting the restaurant industry by cutting into restaurants’ already paper-thin margins via high fees.  

Oh, but you cook at home? Instacart, the main grocery delivery service, has been accused of low pay and tip stealing as well. Hell, even a new company branded as the moral Instacart has a worker backlash on its hands. 

The simple truth is: The new-age services we’re using to help survive the 2020 pandemic are exploitative and unsustainable. But can you imagine going back to how things used to be? Would Americans be willing? 

No help is on the way

Gig workers aside, the U.S. in particular — for better or worse, once a world leader — has plainly fucked over its most vulnerable population. Lawmakers tossed one measly $1,200 check for the entire pandemic, with maybe another check soon to come. To be fair, unemployment benefits were temporarily improved as well. But the help was still meager. 

Meanwhile, frontline roles like nursing home workers, cleaners, transit workers, corrections officers, EMTs, and meatpacking workers — many of whom are staffed by people of color — have been ravaged by COVID-19. Only a quarter of Americans can WFH easily, and large swaths of workers can’t get paid sick leave, which means the virus spread like wildfire in those workplaces. 

People working essential, in-person jobs were left hanging. Because in America we decided things had to go on. Those workers had to suffer to staunch the bleeding of ailing businesses. Restaurants weren’t bailed out, meat plants had to truck on through outbreaks, nursing homes struggled to get PPE. Of the $4 trillion bailout, $2.3 trillion went to businesses that weren’t obliged to prove how COVID impacted them or commit to no layoffs. Just $884 billion went to workers and families, and only 16 percent of the money went fighting COVID itself. As the Washington Post put it, the bill “bestowed billions in benefits on companies and wealthy individuals largely unscathed by the pandemic.”  

It all shouts dysfunction. We could have paid people to stay home and saved countless lives. We chose not to. 

Of course, people were struggling before COVID. The pandemic made clear how little help is available for those who need it. If a deadly pandemic can’t change that — where helping people isolate safely with money would clearly help us all immediately — then how could we expect things to change moving forward?

It’s a society and, frankly, a government unwilling or unable to care for its citizens that are dying, or sick, or jobless, or overworked, or broke, or some combination of the above. The pandemic widened cracks that were already visible in our foundation. American billionaires got $931 billion richer during the pandemic while 26 million Americans went hungry. And yet we’re somehow surprised holiday shopping figures are down? Consumerism can only patch over so much.

Alternative facts

You’d think with more than 300,000 Americans dead — and more than 1.6 million global deaths — we’d at least be able to agree on some basic principals about the pandemic. You already know that’s not the case. 

Outgoing President Donald Trump has downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic time and again. Large swaths of people incorrectly believe the whole thing is an elaborate hoax. 

I realize it’s cliché for a media person to rant about actual fake news. But thousands of bodies are literally piling up every day and we can’t even agree on the premise that the virus is a serious problem. If we cannot agree on such a simple fact, imagine our future. Trump set a precedent: Lying is OK if it benefits you. Well, that might’ve always been the case, but he was so obvious about it. For some in power, making shit up is not just ignored, it’s now the standard. The president can hardly post a tweet without it being labeled as incorrect. Roughly half of the U.S. is indoctrinated by a political party remade in that image. 

The pandemic laid bare that our future will be defined by different sets of facts. The real world vs. the world where mass death can be ignored. It’s one thing to ratfuck and muck-up elections, it’s a whole different thing to do it to reality. If we can’t get people to believe a pandemic exists as the ambulances wail — and the graves are dug — how can we possibly work together against something that’s avoidable in the moment, like climate change?

Where do we go from here?

So that’s our future? Distant, overworked, impersonal, underpaid, divided, misinformed? 

Here’s where I pull a little sleight of hand. Of course our future is not written in stone. Things don’t have to be this way — 2020 could be provocation for fixing the awful crap it laid bare, instead of an accelerant. Although I doubt work, or even socialization, is going to become less screen-based. 

2020 was an exceptional time, in all the worst ways. It was history, again, in a bad way. 

There’s some hope it’ll shock folks into action, into building a better, more equitable, more sustainable future. Early signs aren’t promising: our political future looks like a reverse to the status quo instead of wholesale change. Lots of people would probably love to Go Back to Brunch. 

That’s not to discount the people who actively seek to make the world better. One of the most inspiring things to come from 2020 is the active, dedicated protest movement working to tackle racism, police violence, climate change, political misdeeds, and other societal issues. 

The world is full of good people. People who protest, people who work to effect change, people who deliver your packages, people who risk their lives for your food, people who care for those sick with a highly contagious, deadly virus. But we also have no shortage of problems. 

You might tell me 2020 was an anomaly. That it was an exceptionally bad year. You might tell me 2020 was defined by a once-in-a-generation pandemic and to extrapolate a sucky future from that is misguided. 

I concede I have no crystal ball. Sure, the future could still be bright. This could be a bad pandemic year followed by decades of improvement.

But one last thing. Remember that pesky climate change? It’s a big factor in spreading infectious disease. As remote areas have been destroyed, natural barriers were broken that helped mitigate the spread of rare diseases to civilization. Animals that carry these viruses crept ever closer to where we live. Outbreaks were bound to become more common and more serious. 

In the future pandemics might not be so rare. They might even be worse.