The poster boy of Covid-19 lockdown, governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, has had an epiphany about how to reimagine New York post Coronavirus. A new post pandemic vision for economic and social reconstruction that we should all pay attention to.
His epiphany (not Tiphany – go read the Sun for that) is, though, less new green deal and more new big tech (side) deal so it looks like the only green stuff floating around New York’s gonna be the greenbacks heading for Bill Gates.
You see, what Corona has taught Cuomo is that human contact is a bit passe and robots are the new cool. After all, how many driverless cars caught the virus? And how many bats and pangolins have you seen infecting Amazon’s little robots stacking boxes in the warehouse?
In a flashdrive of digi-genius Andy’s decided that teacherless schools, nurseries and colleges alongside doctorless hospitals, pharmacistless pharmacies (try saying that after a few drinks) and general peopleless everything (check Amazon) is the way to go. His endless drive to win Governor of the Planet 2020 means he’s gonna do everything possible to hit the ultimate Corona target of zero infections, hospitalizations and deaths by taking the human part right out of the equation.
The government of New York’s takeaway (proving they too can do it better than any restaurant) is that the way to hit this target is to keep EVERYONE at home for ever and to invest in twitter cos they just announced that their workers can work from home ‘for ever’ which means they must also have discovered a vaccine against death.
And what twitter has taught them is that everyone in New York should now work, shop, exercise, eat, prey and make love – yep, you guessed it, at home. Period. Until death do us part. After all, there’s a nifty little Microsoft, Google or Facebook for everything else.
Wanna go to a park? Zoom up your local friggin park warden. Wanna visit the museum? Hit up Google Arts and Culture. Wanna date? May as well do the whole thing online until there’s a robot for that. Want privacy? How very 90’s of you. And wanna do some gardening? Come on! There’s astro turf for that.
Cuomo’s new big tech wheeze will work right up until the day that he wakes up, smells the coffee and realises that the good ol days of the Coronavirus might have been a walk in the virtual park compared to a cyber virus that crashes a delivery drone up his ass, turns Bezos’ robots into a bunch of smart little organised droids who want a tonne more money for taking over humankind and has robo cops out robbing every bank in New York at the click of a Tesla chopper.
So Andy, next time you wanna reinvent your planet, maybe let Dave-boy-Attenborough bend your ear away from Schmidt-I-promise-I’m-not-a-plant-sent-by-Google-or-is-it-Alphabet-now and play it safe. Stick with rewilding Central Park. Just make sure to keep the bat’s and pangolins at bay.
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Philip Letts 