Russian futurologist Sergey Pereslegin says Covid was a critical turning point for humanity, insisting that the pandemic response amounted to a vast social experiment rather than a normal public-health intervention.
Pereslegin claims Covid was “a flu like any other,” more serious than the Hong Kong flu but less severe than the Spanish flu, and that previous pandemics never led governments to “shut down the whole world” or confine people to their homes.
He says the lockdown era revealed two things: first, that new industries such as remote work had become powerful enough to make mass shutdowns physically possible; and second, that many freedoms associated with the industrial era, including democratic rights and freedom of movement, could be suspended “with one stroke of the pen.”
Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?