We are in a time of mankind that is as close to the dark future Sci-Fi downfall that leads to a Cyberpunk world as it can get. Last time a major epidemic triggered an economic crisis two world wars struck. The difference is that back than industrialisation took over and enabled mass production and mass mobility. Instead of all of us coming closer turning into a new mass we killed each other in masses.
Today a normal secondary skill on all labour markets are language skills. Everybody speaks English, at least on paper.
Tomorrow social skills need to be of value.
Major companies have four stake holders. The management, the work force, the shareholder and the customer. All equally participate in the overall success of the economic enterprise. Depending on the position certain specialised skills are required and if this is a major internationally operating company they all speak additionally to their mothertongue today's lingua franca: English.
Just sharing is not on the list. Sharing is the plain English word for the latin root of Social.
There are no rules in place anywhere world wide that a company has to have any employee participate in the company success relative to his input. If a chemist creates a formula worth billions to the company his coworker and managers high school drinking buddy still can make more cash even being quite useless for all other stakeholders and the overal company success only based on his relationship to the manager responsible for signing the pay check. That is called contract freedom, but is anarchy actually.
Humans like me never get fair pay, because we were in high school outsiders already.
Corona hits hard and I bet that it will hit even harder and that more is to come, if we don't turn into a social homo sapiens. Making a living on miss-information, blunt theft, position abuse and ignorance is way to easy until here.
All major projects in the leading European economic nation in the last decade have been either delayed or almost failed. This is nation is Germany living still on a reputation of efficiency and quality being a Republic, not a Reich anymore.
The idea that the better is the enemy of the good took over here and pretty much everywhere else and turned deadly towards our progress as humans and in further developing our societies. In corporate world it is better for the individual to hide and hold back information than to share. Managers can succeed by using information as a legacy and weapon against others instead of actually living the usual human resources marketing encouraging collaboration and team effort messages on LinkedIn and the hallway and progress by exploiting others based on their position instead of brain power.
The Cyberpunk utopias so, are based on other grounds so. In most dark future utopias mankind exploded in population and tecnological development when nature had homo sapiens mutate into real different races from Dwarf and Troll to Ork and Elf while today we still did not understand that homo is the species and sapiens the race that comes in different pigmentations of one organ with many hardly different skulls, eye forms and sizes of all other equal body parts. We keep buying the same technologies since the last 40 years that are the backbone of our mobility which is core of our societies from wheel based to digital, just over and over again in shorter time periods.
We don't fix problems being strong we shift them to the weak.
Most unfortunately, based on the history of mankind change does not come easy. Dramatic change is called a revolution per definition of the word revolution. Revolution literally means dramatic change, mate.
Those don't have to be violant, they are just most of the time.
We still have in the U.S. from CIA to General Electric and IBM and worst from political think tanks believing in hegemony to media managers ideologies like those of the Falks, humans in leading postions that have the very same attitude like those that gave the Weapon SS, Gestapo and NSDAP members free passage avoiding their prosecution and putting them into leading positions to build up both Germanies. The Sowjets did the same on the other side. We still have capital in a capitalist society in the hands of families that actively, but not openly try to get their slaves back into their farms and todays factories. We are tolerant to the intolerant. We let the unbeliever live and prosper even so the Nazi Reich and Sowjets are defeated and slaves are in no chains nomore.
If this society keeps going ahead on this road there will be more likely a Mad Max world coming than a Cyberpunk future in which biotechnology enhances bodies with smart links conncting into any computer network and certainly no magic will be around.
Google the definition of utopia, fool.
