Don't Go Back To Normal: some powerful ideas about the changes we should keep from the pandemic
We hope you’ve been returning to our Before& Now app, refreshing your sense of what shifts the Coronavirus period has brought. Courtesy of Phoebe Tickell and Stephen Reid, here’s a very clear and simple tool to turn that into options for living, working, eating, deciding and much else.
Don’t Go Back To Normal is a list of apps, services and options that will help you to make regular and routine some of the new insights that Covid has generated for us. The categories they invite us to “do differently” are below, along with their own rationale:
Food - “Try local and alternative food sources that are more resilient and sustainable”
Social media - “Share safely, take your data with you, and build trusted relationships without big corporations watching in. Decentralisation supports localisation, while protocols enable interoperability”
Video and messaging - “Fully encrypted, without backdoors, where privacy and security are prioritised”
Decision-making - “These platforms and approaches offer more empowering and participatory ways to gather perspectives, make decisions, and take action together”
Work - “Work without bosses”
Budgeting - “How we share money and resources to do great things together”
Ownership - “Starting a new project? Look into some of the longstanding and novel legal structures that enable fairer and more participatory ways to incentivize collective wealth creation”
Banking - “Banks and financial institutions owned by their customers or dedicated to ecological regeneration”
Money - “Money is a measure of what we value. Current monetary systems are programmed to deliver continual growth in production and consumption, while externalising resource degradation and environmental destruction onto the most vulnerable and voiceless. Here are some projects seeking to change that”
If you want to suggest your own “alternative”, within their categories, they provide an easy form for you to do so. And they’re also up for this happening in different languages - explore further here.