We talk about the essential workers. But I think if we were to drill down deeper, what we would see is all life is essential.
SPEAKER_00I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking with Zaya Tong. Zaya is the author of The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions That Shape Our World. She was the co-host of Discovery Channel's science news program, Daily Planet. She also serves on the board of World Wildlife Fund International and was the Vice Chair of World Wildlife Fund in Canada. She's also on the board of the Narwhal. Today we'll be speaking about how COVID 19 must be used to break our own reality bubbles about the world that we live in and to usher us into a better future. Tech Won's Save Us is a new podcast. So if you do like what you hear, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow the podcast on Twitter where it its handle is at TechWon't Save Us. My handle is at ParisMarks. And you can find Zaya Tong at at Zia Tong. Enjoy the interview. Zaya Tong, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
SPEAKER_02Thank you very much, Paris. It's uh great to be on your podcast.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's great to speak with you. Um so obviously I wanted to talk to talk to you because uh your book, The Reality Bubble, seems really relevant in this moment that we're in right now. Um obviously we're seeing a ton of people losing their jobs right now, over twenty two million people in the United States. And I'm sure that number will be even higher or um you know, by the time that this episode gets released. Or we're seeing long food lines of people waiting to get food in their cars, or um like it's it's a very different image than sort of we saw during the Great Depression. Or um we're seeing the numbers of uh cases and of deaths continuing to go up around the world. And uh there are increasing warnings about uh what might happen once this really starts to hit uh um parts of Africa, parts of Latin America, other parts of Asia. So I was just wondering, you know, before we really get into talking about your book, what your kind of responses to this virus so far and what you're sort of thinking and seeing as this all plays out.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that people have been asking me is, you know, has the reality bubble itself burst, right? This idea of being in a bubble, like I know we all have heard of stock, uh stock market bubbles, tech bubbles, of course, real estate bubbles. But this bubble in particular, I would say that it's only the outermost perimeter of the bubble that has actually burst, right? There's much deeper layers to mix metaphors. It's almost like uh onion skin, right? Like you can get further and further with the amount of bubbles that you can burst. But this outermost layer is uh a very important one because it sort of shows us how the system that we inhabit works, how it operates, how it functions, and who has been sustaining it for a long period of time. So this realization that people are having for the first time is oh my gosh, there are people who are essential to, you know, the engine of the system. We're calling them essential workers now, right? You know, these are the people that we really dismiss, that we have not paid well over the years, but these are the people who are responsible for our food, our energy, and our waste, our life support system. So um it's just this most, this one little part, this first pinprick that we've kind of um that has sort of rattled us, right? And put us into a new frame of mind. But yeah, I mean, obviously we're starting to see shocks all around the world when you're talking about these food lines. That is something that we really need to start to pay attention to, right? Like the food supply chain, all these sorts of things now are um a lot more brittle and a lot more fragile than we had previously imagined.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and of course, you say that I think you describe the reality bubble really well in the book when you say just as rocks hurtling at supersonic speed find it hard to penetrate Earth's atmosphere, unwelcome facts and unfamiliar ideas almost never make it through the membrane of the reality bubble. It shields us from thinking about forces out there that are seemingly beyond our control and lets us get on with our lives. So, how did you realize this idea of the reality bubble that we all kind of experience in our lives?
SPEAKER_02Um, I think that we have a sense of that. We all have a sense, and the reason why I think people loved movies like The Matrix, right, is kind of we know that there is a bit of this other kind of alternate reality that controls a lot of our behavior. You know, if you're looking at, you know, the nine to five system that we work in, or sort of the absurdity of how we've structured space and like why is it that some people, you know, make you know a million dollars an hour and some people make 20 cents, right?
SPEAKER_00This is a and we're seeing that kind of getting even worse right now, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's really like political philosophers and stoners who are always aware of and children, right? And the elderly. There's people that are kind of outside of this bubble at all times that are like, wait a second, this is bullshit. What's going on? But at the same time, there's this tremendous sense of normalcy that we all inhabit, you know, the way in which we go about our lives. And, you know, we're we're species, we're primates, we we're primed to sort of conform to one another. And we've created a large sort of um global organism right now that that is built and based on a tremendous amount of conformity. And we're happy to do it because for the most part, it feeds us, for the most part, it gives us this energy and these superpowers. We have a lot of independence and freedom. So there's lots of good reasons to not rock the boat. But at the same time, as you know, the book is also a science book. It's a science and sort of political book. It blends those two things together. And I was also realizing more on the cosmos, like the TV series end of things, that scientists were able to see this other world in a very different way, right? And I've, you know, working at Daily Planet, I was always interviewing scientists, and whether they were rocket scientists or microbiologists or soil scientists, through their lens, you would see one aspect of the world that would reveal sometimes wondrous, sometimes horror, horror, horrifying things about the way in which our planet is currently functioning. And, you know, the example I often give is the fact that, you know, not too long ago, scientists were able to image a supermassive black hole. Now, this thing has been there the whole time, but our eyes couldn't see it, just as our eyes typically can't see atoms. But with a scientific lens, we can begin to see these things. So I wanted to start to apply this scientific lens to the world around me and start to see what I would see if I looked through this sort of prism, looked through all these different lenses of science. And oh, don't mind me while I'm homebound and it seems like an aircraft is actually flying over, which is so unusual.
SPEAKER_00That's okay. We're all stuck at home now, right?
SPEAKER_02Oh, I know, exactly, exactly. Normally, if you're filming, like when we were filming on Daily Planet, you'd stop everything when a plane went by. And uh, this would be ideal filming times because they're so rare. But anyway, so so yeah, uh, I hope that kind of gives you a sense of of what I mean in terms of of the bubble and being able to see it through a scientific lens.
SPEAKER_00It certainly does. And I thought that was one of the really powerful parts of the book because for me, I'm not someone who has uh much of a science background. But then you really start the book by like you you explain the reality bubble, obviously, but then you kind of go into taking us into space to kind of uh see beyond Earth and and these systems that we don't usually learn so much about, and then to kind of go right down to the microscopic level as well. And and like there were just some things that you were talking about in the book, like how the water that we're all drinking is like the same water that's been around for billions of years and just been cycling around the planet. Like it's so it's so obvious, but it's just small things like that that you don't really think about when we're just like in the system and and living our daily lives and not so much thinking about how nature impacts us.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think that there's an aspect to that. The reason why, you know, I really wanted to blend awe and enchantment in there is because you know, there's a wonder to being connected and being a part of nature and not being separate from it, right? And, you know, knowing that this water that is older than the sun is that ordinary stuff that comes out of your tap that becomes a part of you, you know? And you know, the the beginning of the book is really a look at human exceptionalism, in a sense, right? It's like, how did we become the species that kind of thinks that it's better than everything else, that kind of thinks that it's the center of the universe, and also simultaneously thinks that it's separate from any everything. But if you're actually to look at that scientifically, it's not true, for one, but secondarily, the political ramifications of this human exceptionalism are dramatic and they impact the planet upon which we live. And it's the reason why we're in such deep shit today, really, right? You know, it's because we're like us human beings, all powerful, you know, like we have dominion over the earth. And um, it's uh what's shocking, of course, right now is that a tiny invisible speck of a virus has just shut us all down. So the other key thing that this book is really about, as you know, because you've read it, is it's about invisible threats and invisible threats surround us everywhere. But inside a bubble, inside of the bubble, you can't necessarily feel them. Right now, you and I are, you know, I saw somebody post this and I thought it was quite clever. The four classes that exist during COVID, right? 19. There's the billionaires, there's the zoomer class, there's the essential workers, and there's the unemployed, right? That's basically the four classes right now. And you and I are the Zoomer class, right? Or the Skype class or whatever. We're able to sit here and it seems like, you know, we are still in safe bubbles, because just by virtue of the fact that you and I can sit here and have a conversation means that all of our necessities are being taken care of by another class.
SPEAKER_00And it's a very privileged position for us to be in, of course. Because we are able to stay safe because these other people are putting their lives at risk. And and as you said, you know, earlier on, it's many of those uh people who are now saying are essential workers but who are up until a couple months ago or we had kind of denigrated and treated as though they didn't deserve a living wage or benefits or employment security or any of these things, right? Because they were seen as not having skills or um not having the kind of skills that are deemed as important in the society that we have built.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And so I hope, you know, there's one thing that is positive, or there's many actually positive things that have come from this in a way, and that is that human beings are nimble and we're able to shift our thinking and perception really quickly. Like, I mean, if you think about it, in February, we were all living normal lives. Within a month, you know, you have 7.7 billion primates completely in lockdown. I mean, that's insanely uh vast. It's incredible that we were able to do that. But I also think that we'll hopefully, for a lot of people, have a deeper sense of gratitude and appreciation for different forms of work. Um, hopefully a little less um adulation and lavishing all that ridiculousness upon celebrities and and you know, like I mean, there was an immediate backlash as we saw when all those celebrities decided to get out and sing Imagine from their mansions, because it's all apparent now. The illusions are starting to crack and break open a little bit. And all those things that we were kind of suckered by in the past, we're we're not as suckered by now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And and I wonder now if if these illusions are co going to be broken and if we're going to start sort of breaking down some of these reality bubbles. Obviously, there are a number of them that you talk about in the book that are are very relevant to this moment, right? And I think uh one of the biggest ones that stands out to me is uh we're hearing so much discussion now uh in the media and among political leaders about like these wet markets in China and where this kind of perception that the virus has come from these wet markets when there's actually been a lot of reporting that suggests that it's not as simple as kind of pointing the blame at uh wet markets or whatever, because it's kind of like what we would consider the equivalent to a farmer's market if I'm kind of understanding it properly. Um but there's been a lot of reporting that uh that suggests that uh a lot of these viruses actually spring from uh the way that we've built our food system or um, especially the industrialization of the food system over the past number of decades. Um and and but the food system in particular is one of the reality bubbles that you talk about in the book. So could you discuss a I guess how we don't really see what actually goes on with our food system um and how that's really affecting us right now.
SPEAKER_02Sure. Well, I mean, again, to to bring it back down to the fact that we're just animals and we're one species amongst 8.7 million other of these animals, and we're this animal that thinks that we're kind of um dominant over the rest, that we have rights that none of these other animals should have, and that we're the only sentiment, sentient and intelligent ones. And you know, a lot of what's been happening, and my friend Astra Taylor wrote a great article in The Guardian yesterday about this, is it has a lot to do, yeah, it has a lot to do with just our eating meat, eating animals. We eat a lot of different animals, and like every year we eat about 66 billion land animals, right? 66 billion, this is not even counting fish. I mean, think of all the fish that that that you know that that get killed or murdered or, you know, what nobody likes using those words though, right? Nobody likes saying that. Because when when it's our sustenance, it's actually um, you know, we don't think of the fact that we're taking up another body that doesn't want to necessarily be eaten. You get thrown into the vegan category or whatever. But I think it's really important that we discuss it because, you know, we've got these industrialized systems, as you mentioned, that are largely invisible to most of us. People love pandas, they love all these, you know, you know, I know, you know, I work with the World Wildlife Fund, so I know you know you put a you put a cat on the internet and people lose their freaking minds. They love animals, right? But, you know, at the same time, the way in which we've created our food system is really rather horrifying to most of them. Whether we're talking about the ones in the industrialized factory farms, whether we're talking about the ones that have had their homes raised in the Amazon, like all those jaguars and sloths, all those cute animals are disappearing so that we can have hamburgers. And then there's other wild animals, right, that aren't part of that traditional system that maybe some other cultures may eat. And we we kind of raise their environment too, so that our habitat bubbles are really close to those wildlife areas. And basically, most of our problems right now, a lot of these sort of pandemics, whether it's avian flus that we're looking at or whether we're looking at the situation that we're in today, this has to do with eating meat. And, you know, one of the things that people don't often talk about is the antibiotic resistance. Like that one keeps me up at night because that's worse than what we're facing right now, potentially, right? Imagine not being able to take antibiotics, and that's starting. Um, a good friend of mine, her son, had surgery in France, and you know, he he developed, you know, some problems that antibiotics couldn't fix very easily anymore because of antibiotic resistance. And that has a lot to do with all of the antibiotics that were pumping into the animals. So again, it's more about the fact that there's so many different animal species out there, but the way in which we uh assume dominion is incredibly unhealthy to them and then um you know reactively to us as well.
SPEAKER_00Of course. And you you talk about in the book how like j just the way that not only do we treat these animals in often this really terrible way. Um but then to make the meat and kind of uh the products that come from these animals appear more uh palatable to most people. Like uh you talk about fish being gassed with carbon monoxide so that the color is something that uh we would expect to see when we go to the supermarket or or eggs who have which have their yolks uh uh colored so that they're the right color yellow that we would expect to see or birds soaked in chlorine. So not only is it bad for the animals, of course, at the start. And not only is it uh putting us at risk by making it easier for these viruses to develop and to jump to humans or through animals. Um it's making us less healthy and the the kind of terrible parts of it have to be hidden from us either by dying, by using these different gases or whatnot. But there are also these laws, of course, in the United States, I'm not sure in other jurisdictions that hides us from really knowing the full extent of what's going on.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. Those ag laws that we're getting here in Ontario as well. So yeah, I think you know that there's there's one thing that I I mentioned a little bit with the book, because the book is essentially about blind spots, right? When you're in a bubble, you can't see clearly. And I had a sort of you know, shower thought one day, which is in the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere, except where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes, right? So these critical, critical sort of landscapes that allow us to survive are the things that we don't see. And yeah, you're right. When you talk about the carbon monoxide on the tuna to puff it up so that it turns like that bright orange, um, these are forms of chemical blindness in a way, right? And there's no harm in actually doing that. What's harmful is you you may think that you're buying fresh fish, but that fish is not fresh. That fish is killed a couple times, you know, you have no idea. And the same thing when you're looking at the salmon, all that salmon that's farmed, of course, isn't naturally pink. It's also, you know, given food additives to give it that pink color because most people wouldn't find gray salmon particularly palatable. And so we're constantly deceiving ourselves. We live in a world that is is is kind of created to deceive us. I mean, people who work in advertising and marketing, you know, and lots of people do, because you know what? When people are getting out of school, and I can, you know, speak for lots of people that I know, and especially because I worked in that field for a time. I did create um an ethical media division that advertised for Greenpeace, but that's a thing. So I was like, I'm gonna advertise. I want to do something that I want to sort of work with. But it's it's a place where people who are creative, um, that's where they get hired, right? It's it's actually very hard and it takes a tremendous amount of courage in this world to be an artist because that's that's where you're creating a gift, and um, it doesn't necessarily fit into the economic model or the world. And if you want to be able to feed yourself and if you want to have kids and do all that sort of stuff, you you have to move into a different landscape. And I find that advertising and marketing is one of the easiest places for people who are creative to go. But then your job is essentially to dupe other people into hyper consumption and this crazy model that has us buying shit that none of us actually need at a hyper speed so that we can create growth in our economy and then throw all that stuff away. And then then we have all these environmental problems that we have. But what a different world it would be if we had all these brilliant minds working in advertising and marketing, but getting us to think differently, getting us to make those big shifts in how we need to see the world, getting us to embrace things like quality again and having things for a long time. You know what I mean? Like these ideas that we have of a disposable culture are so brand new. They basically date back to the 50s, which is like my parents' generation. That's one generation. And we can we can flip it, we can flip the script, but we have to really shift some of our work models. And that's what COVID gives us an opportunity to do right now. You know, it's collapsed so many things, it's collapsed so many businesses, so many fields. And the people who are going to come out of this, well, I mean, there's a couple situations here. One, there's always um industry and big corporations and think tanks right now that are already doing their best to, you know, sort of a la Naomi Klein's shock doctrine method of pushing through things and processes and getting rid of, you know, EPA, that all that sort of stuff can happen right now, right? Environmental protections, et cetera. But at the same time, this is an opportunity for people to really rethink the systems that sustain us. Um, you know, right now, for the first time, people are starting to understand why being able to give people, you know, universal income might actually make sense, right? This is something that was seen as absurd and utterly left wing having a basic income. Sure doesn't seem that way right now. So so there's competing interests that are gonna come out, come out of this. And I've been seeing it kind of like a Scooby-Doo ending, right? Like we have to uh We have to unmask the corporate evil a little bit here and um and and shift our strategies.
SPEAKER_00I just have to let you know, Scooby-Doo is one of my favorite cartoons growing up. So I love that you brought up Scooby-Doo. Um You know, I I think that's exactly right, right? We we do need to change the way that we're thinking about what's happening. And obviously, for people like us in this Zoomer class that you talk about, we are kind of existing in this world where um everything that we're doing now is kind of dependent on technology, right? But even uh essential workers and everyone else are kind of depending on technology to talk to their family, talk to their friends more than they would have in the past. Um we're we're reliant on technology so much more than just a few weeks ago, but that doesn't mean that um even then uh the influence of technology in our lives wasn't massive. And and we see technology companies right now, Amazon in particular is the most obvious one or um that is trying to take advantage of this crisis in a very Naomi client sort of way. Um Brian Merchant called it like a techified shock doctrine. Um like tech and especially tech's relationship to uh surveillance is uh another of the things that uh you talked about in the book. And I feel like that's uh one piece that is particularly worrying right now as well. Because uh obviously everyone's relying on Zoom. We're seeing these stories of how Zoom doesn't have kind of the um security that you might expect. But then we're also seeing that governments and companies are using uh new tools in order to track where everyone is going or to see or if they encountered other people or and may have sped or spread coronavirus to them. Um when it comes to technology, um what what are the aspects of it that we should be particularly concerned about, especially with how coronavirus might change the way that we use technology and the power of technology in our lives?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think that um when you're looking at Zoom, it's been very interesting because of course the discussions about Zoom and issues to do with privacy take place on the internet. And there's a lot of privacy nerds on the internet. So um I've been glad to see that Zoom has been quick to respond to that. You know, they're they're and and they seem to be a somewhat patchable system. I I'm not seeing people too much about Zoom, a little bit, you know. Obviously, you don't want to uh there's a lot of things you don't want to do on Zoom. For example, you don't want to private message people on Zoom because you can export the text chat and then you can see what everybody's sending to each other. There's lots of things like that. Uh the contact tracing stuff is also another interesting thing. I I mean, I I have serious problems with the deep surveillance state that we live in. And and while I didn't listen to Edward Stones' recent talk, he is talking about the fact that this is a clear moment for that turnkey tyranny that he's been worrying, worrying about for a long time, which has you know taken place to a large degree. Um but with the contact tracing, in terms of some of the stuff that I've seen right now, some of the um, some of the ways that they're going about using it, I think with Bluetooth and the MIT developed stuff, they're trying to develop it in such a way that um doesn't reveal too much about you. Like people are being thoughtful about it. There's problems with false positives, for example. So if you're if you're using even Bluetooth, it can go through your your apartment building, right? So you might be, you know, you might be saying, hey, I was in touch with my neighbor when you never necessarily were in touch with your neighbor. So there's always gonna be problems with technology. I don't know if you're familiar with Barrillio, who's the um political philosopher from Italy, but he always wrote about this notion of every technology within every technology is the accident, right? Like if you design a bus, you've got a bus accident. You design a plane, it's gonna, it's gonna fall out of the sky. Like, you know, there's gonna be problems with any form of technology that we develop. So, um, like you, I'm not a technological determinist. I don't necessarily believe that technology can save the day. But God help me, am I not happy that I have the ability to talk to people right now over the internet um in the middle of this bizarre isolating time? Because I simply could not imagine how how harsh those conditions would be. But this provides us with a really opportune time to rethink and reorganize. You know, these are structures that human beings have built. And I'm a little bit older than you, and I know that certainly my generation is the one that actually created the infrastructure, didn't develop the internet, but certainly built it in that phase one dot com situation, right? And we we always have the ability when we shift our thinking to build and rebuild. And everybody is going to become, you're gonna have a lot more tech workers. What would be nice is if it wasn't so opaque and transparent and everybody wasn't just sitting on, you know, three platforms like Facebook or Twitter or freaking Instagram anymore. You know, the internet used to be a real wild west because everybody was involved and everybody had a website and it was a lot cooler because it wasn't so homogeneous. And what I would hope is we can break away from the homogeneity of the internet so that it's not just, you know, a corporate landscape and it has some human spice and flavor in it again. And maybe that's a way in which we can start a different form of community building that we've lost in the last decade.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I would love to see that. I I guess I started using the internet like right as we were kind of starting to leave that phase of it, you know.
SPEAKER_01Right, right.
SPEAKER_00I I was reading Joanne McNeil's new book, Lurking. I'm not sure if you've read it. Um but it it kind of goes through that progression and kind of like the experience of the user on the internet from that stage that you're talking about up to what we're experiencing right now and how like the way we've with the the way we use the internet has changed, but also how that kind of changes us and affects us as well. It's a really fascinating read.
SPEAKER_02I really, I really wonder actually, this is like just a side thought, but I have a VR headset and um I put it on a little while ago and I went into one of those chat rooms, and it was really interesting for me because it for the first time ever, I felt like I was in like I felt like I was in 1997 internet because it was back there, right? Because it's not developed in like you know, certain aspects of it are super slick, but the chat rooms are like super weird, um weirdly human designed, clunky, bizarre. And there was a part of it that I just fell in love with because I was like, oh, this is awful.
SPEAKER_00This is great, you know, like the corporations haven't completely taken it over yet.
SPEAKER_02So there's a bit more no, I mean it's it's definitely owned by a corporation. There's definitely it's all corporate entities, but it it has it because not everybody has hopped on board yet, just like just like gay areas and gay neighborhoods. You're like, come on, gays, come in, and then all of a sudden you've got like a beautiful neighborhood. It's the same thing with with like our arts artists, right? You bring in artists and the same thing with like a VR landscape. You can invite all those people, but what pisses me off is once it gets great, sometimes the people who originally built those structures are eked out of it. You know what I mean? You don't you no longer have this wonderful landscape for artists um inside of the internet like we used to. I know it's a little bit of a side rant, but yeah, I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_00Side rants are welcome.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Um like in the book, you were also talking about kind of these systems that are that are being developed. Um, you know, there's there's often a lot of focus, I think, on the the Chinese social credit system that they're trying to develop um to kind of rank like everything that people are doing and potentially creating blacklists for some people and benefits for others who potentially have a a good or negative um social credit score. But like there are these kind of potentially really oppressive uh technological systems being developed around the world. And and I feel like obviously a lot of people who talk about that often ignore the degree to which surveillance has expanded in the United States and other Western countries as well, right? Um and and obviously you talked about uh Edward Snowden and after 911 we saw this massive expansion in uh the powers of the surveillance state. Or um I'm talking about the United States, but uh obviously that happened around the world. Do you worry that governments uh might try to uh do something similar um after the after coronavirus, especially when we're seeing say companies like Amazon and Palantir and these other ones like trying to sell these facial recognition and surveillance technologies to um massive government agencies like the Pentagon?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, I mean I think definitely. I think that there's several things about that. One is the unexpected results of what can happen with something like coronavirus. So here we've been worried about facial recognition for ages, and now we have masks, right? So everything's masked for the first time. That's pretty amazing. Um but yeah, no, it's it's definitely um we're in a situation where we have to be quite careful because governments, at the same time, right now, they're very well aware that uh and have been preparing for social unrest for some time, right? Ultimately, when you're in the government, you're like, just despite the fact that I think that people who get elected don't want to think this way, they realize that they they're in charge, quote unquote, of large populations of people, very large populations of people. If you're looking at China, what is it, 1.4, 1.57 billion people? That's a lot of freaking people to control, right? And when when there's disruptions like to food, oh my God, God help you if you're gonna be able to do anything without all hell breaking loose. And I think they're always trying to manage all hell breaking loose. But at the same time, what they do is they trap us in a system that makes us like that hamster wheel, right? So then we're stuck doing the same thing, which is ultimately very damaging in the end. And that's really one of the biggest problems with surveillance is that it forces, like it forces us to not look at where our food comes from, right? Like you can, those activists, I have a good friend who's an activist, who's a photojournalist, who goes and shows what's happening in factory farms, they get put in prison. Same thing that happened very recently, you know, um, even with the Witsuitan, right? When you're when you're looking at energy systems or you're blocking a pipeline, you end up going to jail too. Or even if you're even if you're an activist who's showing where the pollution is going. So surveillance is incredibly dangerous when it doesn't let us look at how our survival system operates. And it forces us to sort of continue with the status quo quo. And I think that, you know, with this huge loss of jobs that we're going to be seeing right now, we will start to see social unrest, you know, in many, many places around the world. And um ultimately, though, there, the eyes are there to stop us from gathering. And the problem is the coronavirus will also stop us from gathering. So we need to find new ways of gathering and we need to find new ways to protest um together, you know, because it's going to be very difficult for people to gather en masse without, without worrying about getting sick in the near future. So, how do you how do you fight for your rights when that is the case? Because traditionally we've always taken to the streets, right? So I think that um we need to be nimble and we need to think very, very differently in this in this next phase of activism.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I completely agree. And it certainly makes it more difficult when we think about, you know, obviously there's a lot of discussion now about what happens post-coronavirus, right? And and obviously there have been a lot of comparisons made because we are entering this really significant economic downturn right now about how it might be similar to uh the Great Depression and what happened in that over time. And of course we can remember that just a few months ago we were talking about uh a Green New Deal. We're still talking about it now, of course. Um but now Bernie Sanders has dropped out, so it seems like it's uh going to me about be a more difficult thing to achieve. Um and and if uh Joe Biden or hopefully not a re-elected Donald Trump um is going to take any action, um, there's going to need to be sustained pressure from below to uh make them adopt those sorts of policies, but that becomes a lot more difficult if uh, as you say, people can't turn out in the streets and and actually use their bodies to illustrate that they disagree and want something different.
SPEAKER_02What's interesting though is, you know, just even seeing the other day a different type of protest altogether, you know, America being America, people protesting in their cars and creating gridlock, you know, just getting in their cars, their little vehicle bubbles and protesting that way. I think we'll find different ways of protesting and different ways of um of putting things forward. Uh it's gonna be, but but we're about to enter some very, very, very hard times. So so yeah, I I definitely it's very discouraging, of course, that you know, another centrist has been elected, obviously, in the states. Um, but I do feel I feel grateful to be living in Canada right now, because despite my many criticisms of Justin Trudeau, I feel that this government has uh done a far better job than our neighbors down south. There's no question about that. And I still think that they do, I think that the question now is like, you know, this government here in Canada, because it it is science-based, um, it's been waiting for this opportunity, right? There's been a big leveler now. People are just as unemployed in Nova Scotia as they are in Alberta. Everybody needs um a new type of workforce and a new type of mobilization. And the book that I'm reading right now is Seth Klein's new book. It hasn't come out yet. Um, I'm very lucky to have a chance to read it. And you may want to interview him as well, because his book is really about um World War II scale mobilization and how Canada did it and how we can apply those lessons today. And I think that that's a really critical discussion for us to all be having because there's ways in which we can shift societies. We know it, we've done it before, um, but that needs to be made explicit. So we need to have a better sense of okay, we're in this moment now. We need to utilize uh some strategies to get us out of it and to employ people. What is the best way to employ people and do it in a way that um doesn't get us into the same old rut that we were in before?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm also really looking forward to Seth's book. I heard a talk by him last summer, I believe, where he was kind of giving the premise he was still working on at the time. And I think it sounds absolutely fascinating, and it does kind of I I feel like one of the pieces that is often really important to these discussions is the role of history, right? Because so often we uh forget really important parts of our history. And one of the things that Seth seems to be doing with this book is uh kind of reminding us what actually happened uh during World War II and uh the scale of the response that our governments are engaged in um and the degree to which they kind of put aside the market and really just started planning and organizing the economy to meet these goals that in that time they needed to win the war. But in the future we might need uh, you know, to transition away from fossil fuels to put people back to work to get the economy back to a place where people are not really struggling.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think that's the thing, right? Like you can tell that we're able to like they didn't even have a blueprint and they were able to do that back back then during the Second World War. Um, but I I just yeah, yeah, it's tricky. It's tricky for all of us. We have to, I think you're very, very right in like remarking on history and what we need to learn from it in this present moment. The thing though is that, you know, the threat needs to be palpable. And right now the threat is palpable. And one of the key things is we're seeing a level of urgency being delivered by the government. So despite the fact that all these countries around the world declared climate emergencies, none of them acted as if there was an emergency. Right now, we're seeing what it looks like when a government declares an emergency, you know, and we're like, okay, we'll listen to you, we'll do what you want to say. It's really an emergency. We believe you we believe it it's an emergency. Whereas with the climate emergency, it was like there's a climate emergency and that was it. You know what I mean? Trudeau didn't get up at 11:15 every single day and deliver a report to the country. That's what needs to be happening.
SPEAKER_00I I completely agree. And I had that same criticism when governments around the world started declaring these emergencies, and then it was like, but there's no like action, it's just words, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I mean it's you know, but the the threat again needs to be something sort of palpable. And, you know, here it's an invisible threat, but but I think that people, there's a really random element to it, right? Like anybody, anybody could die, anybody could die. And I think everybody feels that very personally. Whereas with climate threats, of course, a lot of that has been um well, and and the same with COVID, right? There's a lot of inequality that distributes death in a very different way. You know, um, black communities, obviously, poorer communities, indigenous communities are gonna feel both climate threats and COVID threats more intensely. But yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely uh quite the grand awakener for all of us.
SPEAKER_00It does illustrate the importance of recognizing how these threats um affect us in a way that's not equal, right? Because as as you began the conversation by saying, you know, we are in the Zoomer class, we are relatively protected compared to the essential workers um that are just now considered essential. Um and we're already seeing these stats come out of the United States showing that people in black communities or um or people who are Hispanic are dying a lot more often to a disproportionate degree from COVID-19. Um and that's also going to happen with climate change. It's going to hit the global south much more than the global north, even though we are the ones who primarily caused the change in the first place, right?
SPEAKER_02And then also, you know, when we talk about that that chain of what is essential, right? I think that being human-centric and being human exceptionalists, we tend to think of it from a human-centered way. We talk about the essential workers. But I think if we were to drill down deeper, what we would see is all life is essential. And until we recognize the essential nature of all the creatures that surround us and all the habitats and all the life forms, until we change our perspective with that, until we recognize that as essential, um, we're going to be stuck in the same situation. Business will continue as usual. That's the big shift that we have to make.
SPEAKER_00I think that's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much, Zia Tong.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much, Paris Marks.
SPEAKER_00Great to speak with you. It was published by Penguin Random House, and you can surely find it at your local bookstore, library, or anywhere else that sells books. Tech Won't Save Us is a new podcast, so if you did enjoy the episode, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and feel free to share it with anyone who you think would enjoy it. Thanks so much.