The novel coronavirus and COVID-19 quite simply is accelerating a profound cycle shift. Looking back historically at the industrial system, cyclical crises have always helped new lead sectors, propulsion technologies and labor regimes to break through. Today, with robotics and artificial intelligence already waiting in the wings, the comprehensive digitalization of all areas of life and the introduction of self-regulating systems, a new production regime is emerging – one centered around the human being herself in her biological existence and behaviors.
The “long waves of the economy” are embedded in two other cyclical changes. In the hegemonic cycle, we are experiencing the decline of Western hegemony in the shape of the USA and the rise of countries of the Global South, which have ultimately been able free themselves from their role as extended workbenches, to become new global centers. China is emerging as the primary candidate for hegemonic succession in the new cycle. The second change concerns the replacement of the industrial by the cybernetic principle of production. Up to now, mankind has experienced two great revolutions in the evolution: interrupting the hunter-gatherer existence, the Neolithic revolution brought about agriculture and handicrafts as humans abandoned nomadism and settled, and the industrial revolution helped the factory principle to break through with specialization in work organization and mechanization. Computerization heralded the advent of the cybernetic principle as early as the 1950s, which, with the self-regulation of communication and information-generating technologies, ushered in a new state of aggregation for humanity.
According to the Russian risk research and foresight analysts Grinin and Korotayev, the future belongs to those technologies that ensure maximum adaptability and communication capabilities, self-regulation, controllability, miniaturization, individual and situational adaptation, and economical use of resources and energy. Against the backdrop of the corona crisis, these scenarios are the very core of the response. Grinin and Korotayev speak of the MBNRIC complex (Medicine, Bio, Nano, Robo, Info, Cognitive) as the launch vehicle of cybernetic production. The shift will not only generate new products (e.g. artificial body parts, drugs, vaccines, control and monitoring devices) but also new demand for optimization (health, fitness, beauty aesthetics, genetic modeling) and tailored life support. It goes without saying that the idea of optimization opens the door to control, security and surveillance technologies that also pursue other objectives.
Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault have shown that the acceptance of such behavior does not require any state coercion whatsoever, but can creep into the body and psyche of the individual as the very promise of civilization. As a mass psychological phenomenon, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have researched the willingness of people to adapt to authoritarian dictates – fascism being merely their text case. All of this shows us where we are headed – the decrees issued in recent months and, even more so, the new social (engineering) techniques will be retained and ingrained as the “new normal” after the crisis subsides. It may be thought of as a test phase. In effect, the rules are training people to best fulfil their role in dealing with the self-regulating and optimizing systems of the future. Corona, in its life-and-death urgency, has provided the opportunity to accelerate this transition, and virus management is already anticipating the future.