[London, 15 May 2020]

The tragic global outbreak of covid-19 has already taught us many severe lessons in pandemic preparedness and response. Rapid innovation and product TTM, distributed collaboration, infection modelling, additive manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE), artificial intelligence (AI) powered vaccine and anti-viral drug development and clinical trials, sharing of real-time research data, scenario modelling and contact tracing. All of these elements, and many more, harness the power and the universal ubiquity of digital. Digital technology is thus at the heart of our fight against the virus. 

Digital is a powerful weapon against the covid-19 pandemic and a technology that is clearly capable of revolutionising our lives (and is doing so already). The pandemic has already shown many new opportunities and improved models of industry and behaviour thanks to digital. In this third article of this series, I argue that its utility is not constrained by available technology, but by its societal acceptance and adoption, and political courage. We have the technology, but are we ready to use it positively and creatively to transform society? Our political structures and the old social contract, which they evolved to support, are likely to prove no longer fit-for-purpose in the post-pandemic, post-Brexit, post-oil, and hopefully post-reckless globalisation, world. This article is a call to action to the British public to help co-create a new, digital age-appropriate social contract!

Indoors while the sun shines 

April 2020 in the UK was the sunniest on record. Sadly, most other current records, whether related to the economic crash, workers furloughing or the death toll in peacetime, remain tragic. Most Brits enjoyed little of the sunny outdoors. The public here has proven strikingly compliant to the Government’s lockdown and social distancing guidelines. Yet as the sunny weeks continue, frustration and financial pressures are likely to intensify, and tempt more individuals out of their homes into danger. What then?

The UK’s lockdown exit strategy, a phased approach to reopening workplaces, schools, gyms, services and shops, is still being formulated. As part of the exit deal, we are likely strongly to be encouraged to accept new obligations, such as accepting an increased level of social surveillance, maintaining social distance, wearing masks and regularly submitting to testing. 

An instrumental element of any exit strategy from lockdown will be digital technology, such as mobile tracking apps and behavioural modelling. I discuss such specific solutions in more detail in another article in this series. But as we are individually deciding whether or how to comply with the exit strategy, what apps to download, or what information to disclose, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this technology is only useful if it is accepted, trusted and actively adopted in our community. We are about to embark on a perilous social experiment.

Underlying our collective response to covid-19 is our complex social contract, which inter alia reflects the explicit and tacit agreements of individuals to submit some of their freedoms to authority, in exchange for the state’s protection and for the greater good of society. 

So how much are we willing to trade our privacy and freedoms for safety and protection of the state? What should the role of government be in such a time of national crisis? What is the optimal balance between directive and persuasive strategies? In a totalitarian country, like China, or in highly collectivist cultures such as Singapore or South Korea, individuals (usually) accept that remote and opaque decisions about their lives and liberties are made outside of their direct influence, and then enforced by their governments. In the liberal democratic tradition, our social contract is complex, nuanced and a product of generations of sensitive negotiation.

This has been the playground for philosophers, politicians and lawyers for hundreds of years. The inherent tension between natural and legal entitlement has been argued over in Europe since ancient times, becoming a keynote of the Enlightenment. In C17th/C18th, the likes of Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, produced seminal discourses that still keep PPE students debating into the early hours (does anyone else remember that pre-pandemic, PPE stood innocently for Philosophy, Politics and Economics?). 

The classical liberal approach in Anglophone societies, with the Magna Carta embedded firmly within our DNA, promotes guaranteed property and civil rights, while limiting the powers of government. No sovereign or government is above the rule of law, or should act outside of the strict mandate loaned to them by those whom they govern. 

But as Richard Epstein, a professor of law and himself an influential liberal at the Hoover Institute points out, this theory, like most socio-political constructs, does not hold fully in times of national emergencies, such as war, famine or an epidemic [i] . It is not anti-liberal in such circumstances to propose, respectively, general conscription, centralised food rationing and distribution and epidemiological tracking and tracing, all for the public good. 

Hobbes, Locke and many others held often contrasting perspectives of human nature, of the nature of morality, and defined their idealised civil society in distinct ways. One common philosophical foundation is that a nation, as per Edmund Burke’s characterisation, is ultimately a moral structure, a group of people with a shared moral code. A nation’s social contract, explicitly defined in constitutions or otherwise, or implicit through tradition and common law as it is in Britain, describes these agreed moral principles. 

For a country to prosper, adapting the former Chairman of General Electric Jack Welch’s famous maxim, the social contract needs to be fit-for-purpose for the world as it is, not as it was or as we wish it to be. 

I argue that it is currently not fit-for-purpose in today’s digital age, and that the pandemic, as well as other social dynamics and political developments in Britain, such as Brexit, have brought this to a head. The agreed social contract can also only be stable and effective, when it is underpinned by mutual trust between individuals and their government, and crystal clarity of what our civic freedoms and obligations are. It demands unambiguous communication at every level. 

If an individual is proud and clear about their place in the society, and trusts its agencies, there is much less need for the traditional command-and-control policies of sticks and carrots to drive compliance and behavioural congruence in the public. A sense of community, so lucidly demonstrated regularly during the pandemic, becomes the driving national energy. 

Britain’s (still) relatively high level of trust in our politicians, civil servants and scientific advisers, and our steadfast loyalty to the NHS, has so far underwritten the widespread compliance with the Government’s lockdown and social distancing guidelines. An anti-lockdown protest organised in Trafalgar Square last week attracted just seven (yes, seven) slightly embarrassed activists. Though some more significant rallies are being planned for this weekend, our anti-lockdown revolution to-date can be described as marginal and anaemic. 

By contrast, in the USA, a country with over a 1.3 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 80 thousand deaths, armed protesters took to the streets. In Lansing, Michigan, dissenters draped confederate flags, swastikas and nooses inside the state capitol building. Walmart employees across several states have stopped asking customers to wear its freely available PPE in fear of being assaulted. A security guard was tragically shot dead in Michigan because he asked a young woman to leave the store as she was not complying with the governor’s lawful executive order that all customers and employees must wear face coverings inside stores. Even in usually peaceful Hawaii, violent clashes with the police are taking place.

Our Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, has appealed to the British that social distancing and the wearing a face covering in public are our new civic duties. Brits are likely to comply. In much of today’s America, self-centred individualism Trumps (pun intended) John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, where individuals can do what they will, unless they risk harming others. In social science, the inability of the state to rein in harmful behaviours is the classic issue of moral hazard, where the cost of irresponsible behaviour is largely borne by others. Left unchecked, this encourages increasingly risky behaviours that exponentially can spiral out of control, like the virus itself. Community self-control thus needs to be firmly backed by pragmatic top-down interventions when needed.

Trust should also not become a restraint from criticism where this is due. Public Health England (PHE), for example, has proven itself incompetent in the face of the pandemic. It did not engage adequately either with local authorities and communities, or with the NHS. Its guidance on PPE had been late and confused. In early March, its failure to organise adequate virus testing capacity forced the Government to abandon its testing-and-tracing approach, as adopted successfully by other countries such as South Korea. Many of our most vulnerable were thus removed from hospital beds to care homes without being testing first. This has directly led to many thousands of deaths. Sharon Peacock, its director, when asked later by Greg Clark, the chairman of a House of Commons committee, why PHE had not partnered with private sector laboratories to expand its public testing capacity (as did South Korea) replied merely, “That’s a good question!”. 

Similarly, our national loyalty and deep gratitude to, and trust in, our NHS front-line workers, should not prevent us from challenging some of the religious zealotry in many political circles around the NHS as an institution. NHS, as an influential inside observer recently shared with me, sadly continues to be in “bureaucratic shambles”. It needs urgent fixing.

In these drastic times, our society needs to consider drastic measures. There should not be any sacred cows. The social contract is no longer just a philosophical concept to be theoretically debated in student common rooms. It has tragically become a matter of life and death, our collective wellbeing as a society, our empowerment to redefine our social norms and rules, and our ability to effectively leverage digital technology to help us emerge from this pandemic. 

No solutions, only trade-offs

Most expect that when there is a clear and present danger of widespread death and suffering, a strong government armed with appropriate and temporary emergency measures should step up and protect us. It is during such existential threats, that Cicero’s maxim “salus populi suprema lex esto” (the welfare of the people should be the supreme law) becomes the mandate. 

What is now playing out in our society and the media is a skirmish over a common consensus of what these “appropriate and temporary emergency measures” should be, and for how long these are needed. Liberals are particularly sensitive to Milton Friedman’s observation that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program”. They readily point out to numerous precedents.

Let’s first consider appropriate. Few deny that the mandatory lockdown of the entire population, save for very specific exceptions such as front-line workers, has been a great success in ‘flattening the curve’ of infection. It made sense to most as an emergency, short term measure. The bounded rationality of the British public, assailed with so much uncertainty and contradictory advice in time of crisis, prepared them to lend their trust to the Government and allow some of their basic civil liberties to be curtailed. Most people around the world have followed similar guidance from their governments.

Yet such an enforced, rather than voluntary, isolation becomes an illiberal imposition, when individuals judge it to have exceeded the temporary criterion. It disempowers individuals from voluntarily assessing and taking a risk. The personal burden of reduction or elimination of income, limited social interaction, sport and other pleasurable or beneficial activities, for many people now outweighs the risk of them contracting covid-19. 

Thomas Sowell famously said that in economics, there are “no solutions, only trade-offs”. Every intervention has a cost, a risk, and an estimated benefit. Politics, and management, is primarily the art (note, not the science!) of balancing these trade-offs.

Digital social platforms and apps have had a questionable track record. Most are aware of the risk of our personal data being hijacked by opaque actors for their nefarious purposes. Our digital footprints can follow us throughout our lifetimes. That joint rolling snap taken during freshers’ week, can disqualify one from a job shortlist in twenty years’ time. 

In totalitarian regimes, governments treat personal data as a state asset. They exercise the authority to implement coercive and intrusive policies such as obliging people to wear tracking bracelets or analyse your credit card records to confirm your movements. The ePrivacy Directive and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of data protection and privacy in the digital age, embedded into our law by the Data Protection Act 2018, have gone some way to eliminate many egregious practices and redefined our personal rights here in the UK. But as a society, we understandably remain highly protective of our privacy, and suspicious of the creeping surveillance capitalism so passionately and articulately portrayed by Shoshana Zuboff in her recent magnum opus [ii]. 

Many people are conscious that invisible forces are continually trying to modify our preferences and actions. Behavioural economics now firmly steers our daily lives. One of the fathers of libertarian paternalism, the concept of nudging people to make ‘better’ decisions, the economist Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017. Previously shadowy nudge units have since entered increased public awareness. We are aware of big data mining, customer insight and digital marketing teams of global corporations. We read of similar political units, such as the Behavioural Insights Team, now part of our Cabinet Office. Many of these and of course big data teams in academia, such as Oxford University’s Big Data Institute (BDI), now find themselves in the spotlight of our collective focus on the covid-19 pandemic. 

What many people do not realise, is that exemptions from regulatory safeguards during public health emergencies, such as the current pandemic, are already written into EU and national laws. EU governments and institutions have the lawful authority to use individuals’ data for the public good, providing that this is proportionate to the threat and temporary, i.e. this should last no longer than the threat itself. This is rational, even in a liberal democracy. But again, to keep the vox populi onside, any such emergency use of our private data needs to be sensitively communicated, and some broad public consensus first explicitly secured. This is a political, rather than a technological or legal challenge. It is also one critical trade-off that we need to discuss much more overtly as a society. We have yet to begin addressing this seriously in this pandemic.

The dialogue on data protection has to-date been between the tech giants, and the EU politicians, lawmakers and bureaucrats, who are naturally hostile to their growing global influence and power. The public, save for some self-interested pressure groups, have largely been left out of the debate. Cross-industry security, privacy and data protection legislations give Brussels a huge stick to beat the tech giants with and keep them in line. But I argue that it may be time now to consult the public about what the optimal trade-off between privacy and data protection should be. Many people have been severely impacted by the pandemic, and many have lost loved ones to it. An increased level of state intrusion into our lives as a temporary measure, evidently for our safety and wellbeing, is likely to be acceptable by many. We won’t know until we ask.

Many economists argue that a freer sharing of personal data would have a significant economic benefit. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) formally estimates realistic marginal gains of 2.5% of GDP. The resource based view sees data as having distinctive properties that make it an especially attractive competitive asset, whether at corporate or national level, such as its ability to simultaneously support multiple users and that it does not deplete with use. Its aggregation opens up opportunities for more accurate forecasting, modelling and algorithm building, in short for much smarter, evidence-driven public policy and investment.

The industrial society imposed social order through the allocation of patronage, work and resources. The information society, its detractors claim, seeks to impose collective order through monitoring and deeply influencing individual human experience. Zuboff defines this as “a global system of behaviour modification that threatens human nature in twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth”.

Perhaps her claim that civil liberties are being eroded by an increasingly invasive surveillance technology is correct and yesterday’s sci-fi dystopia is indeed becoming our reality. Is this a new normal that we should accept to escape the pandemic or will the cure in the longer term prove more socially destructive than the disease? 

Calibrating an exit strategy

To facilitate any sensible exit from lockdown, we need a combination of antigen testing (to show whether you are currently infected) and antibody testing (to show if you’ve had coronavirus in the past, and are thus likely to have developed increased immunity). The former is currently available in the UK only for front-line workers and some high risk people with covid-19 symptoms. The latter is not yet available at all. 

The ideal scenario, where everyone can home test themselves instantly on a daily basis in a non-invasive way, analogous to the self-monitoring of blood glucose by diabetics, is likely to be many months away. Saliva sampling, being investigated at Rutgers University in New Jersey and elsewhere, would be even more comfortable than pricking a finger with a lancet to obtain a blood sample for glycaemic control.

Until a reliable vaccine is universally available, a cautious exit strategy from the current lockdown would mandate individuals to self-test themselves every time before leaving home. The results should be automatically synchronised with the movement tracing app. So not only would self-testing give the individual a ‘digital day pass’ to engage safely with the community, but should it prove positive, it would automatically trigger an alarm and automated tracing of all recent close contacts. We are very far from such a simple, closed-loop digital monitoring regime. The tracking and tracing app, which is being trialled on the Isle of Wight, for example, is based on self-reporting of symptoms, which is obviously its Achilles’ heel, as many infected people remain asymptomatic for several days (and many forever). 

I will discuss tracking apps and other technologies in more depth in upcoming articles. Here, I am merely raising the issue of what we are likely to accept as part of the post-pandemic social contract. For example, the active and reliable uptake of any tracking solution needs to be over 60% of the population to be useful. Trials will show how this mass-scale prisoner’s dilemma will play out. They may reveal to what extent self-testing, tracking and tracing could be left to individual choice, and what behaviours will need to be commanded by law. Again, we should already be discussing the idea that some impositions on our privacy may need to be temporarily mandated. The Government has so far shied away from this public debate.

To keep it proportional to the threat, the self-test driven digital day pass above could also be made mandatory only before the individual is allowed to enter a high-risk environment, such as a hospital, school, care home or public transport. Trials and public consultation should also propose how this regime should best deal with exceptions, such as some elderly people and others who find themselves unable to self-test or unable to use smartphone apps.

It is obvious that the pandemic would be much more manageable if we had some way of micromonitoring every individual, their symptoms, movements, behaviour and social contexts. The point is that we have! The universal rollout of such monitoring is not constrained by technology, but by the social acceptance of its implications. My simple digital day pass idea would immediately lead to a two-tiered society. Scientifically rational stratifications based on the above attributes, are likely to be overwhelmed by our cultural sensitivities around racism, ageism and other forms of discrimination. No matter how well-intentioned such policies may be, to make them socially tolerable would require an unprejudiced public dialogue and a significant shift in our common interpretation of our British social contract.

A new preparedness

Rahm Emanuel, a former mayor of Chicago and President Obama’s adviser during the 2008 financial crunch, has recently reapplied his Churchillian  “never let a crisis go to waste” catchphrase to the covid-19 pandemic. Emanuel said recently on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, “Start planning for the future. This has to be the last pandemic that creates an economic depression. We're going to have more pandemics, but this has to be the last economic depression.” 

The world was far too slow and disjointed in its effort against the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009 and Ebola some five years later. We have not improved much since. We thus need to address many underlying structural weaknesses as a society, if we are to become better prepared for the next global health threat. Most obviously, we need to develop systemic agility to rapidly respond to such threats. This implies putting in place action-ready procedures, resources, decision making processes, communication channels, research and testing facilities and production (drugs, PPE, medical equipment) capacity. The core NHS and other critical entities need to be renewed. 

As I already proposed in a previous article, the response structures emerging from covid-19 should persist and be regularly rehearsed for any future pandemic, as well as any nuclear, chemical and bioterrorism threats. In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security led a pandemic simulation exercise called Event 201 together with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This modelled a fictional coronavirus pandemic. They concluded that, “Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global - a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences.” Our entire society should drill for such eventualities, similar to Japan’s coastal communities rehearsing tsunami preparedness. There is also no reason why individuals should not stock approved PPE and other helpful resources at home. During WWII, most citizens were issued with gas masks.

It is not that the covid-19 pandemic has proven particularly deadly that should trigger us critically to revisit our attitude to, and investment in, national preparedness. In fact, at some 34,000 deaths (at the time of writing) in the UK, covid-19 is not significantly more deadly that some resent outbreaks of winter flu. Allowing for undiagnosed and the asymptomatic carriers, probably 99% of carriers will survive covid-19 disease. 

The point is that covid-19 highlights our persistent vulnerability to new viruses and threats. Imagine if the initial reports from China and Italy, which suggested a death rate of up to 15%, similar to the Spanish flu of 1918/1920, held true. As the spread of infection was increasing exponentially, this extrapolated to death rates that would have overwhelmed every healthcare system in the world. The Spanish flu is likely to have infected about one in four of the world’s population and resulted in some 50 million deaths. There is no reason to suppose that our next global zoonotic viral threat could not prove even more virulent. 

Increasing availability of sophisticated technology, such as synthetic biology and genome editing, makes deadly pathogen production by state actors or terrorists more likely. This includes engineering existing pathogens, including coronaviruses, more dangerous and even reverse engineering known deadly viruses which thankfully we have defeated, such as smallpox. Blueprints for such nefarious activities are regularly published in scientific literature, and discussed in chat rooms and conferences.

It should be noted that pre-pandemic, biothreat preparedness in many democracies had recently weakened. The Trump administration had recently shut down the National Security Council’s directorate on biodefence, and reduced funding for biosecurity preparedness and the lab capacity needed to test for it. We should now weaponise the crisis to fix this, and make our public health and social care systems, and our emergency and front line services, more robust and resilient.

A new civil society

Across the globe, many autocratic regimes, such as China, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines, have brazenly seized covid-19 as an opportunity, through pseudo-temporary emergency laws and decrees, to grab more power and enforce tighter political control on its citizens. This includes unlimited coercion and surveillance, postponing elections, shutting down critical media and persecuting journalists. Nationalists have singled out some minorities as scapegoats, or even living biohazards, as in the case of India, where the Hindu dominated parliament has disproportionally targeted Muslims with blame for the outbreak. As a result, Muslims are being turned away from some hospitals and are being attacked by mobs on the streets. 

Millions of dollars are being corruptly handed over to cronies and friendly entities under the cover of the pandemic response. Even rudimentary checks and balances have been largely suspended in the emergency. Russia and China fund aggressive international disinformation campaigns through the traditional and social media. Covid-19 is an opportune present for corrupt tyrants and despots.

In our liberal and thankfully less corrupt democracy, Georg Hegel’s model of a rational civil society and its underlying order is also now under some serious scrutiny. Liberals maintain that only individuals should assess whether they would prefer a risk of illness to the certainty of lost opportunities and income. Different individuals should make different decisions, based on their own unique circumstances. 

Sensible trade-offs between different freedoms and obligations are critical. For example, granting the freedom for individuals to flex lockdown rules needs to be balanced by individuals having the right rigidly to follow these instead. So once a critical mass of people recommence using public transport, individuals need to be protected from being coerced by their employers to do the same, even when they deem this unsafe. Policies around extended furloughing and job protection will need to be appropriately refined, and the public ought to be consulted throughout.

The character of government is also under scrutiny. In terms of logistical leadership, “central planning has failed miserably in this pandemic. The last thing we need is more of it”, according to Professor Philip Booth, Senior Academic Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, who cites its suboptimal sourcing and distribution of PPE. Indeed, centralised models of command and control are not the most efficient and responsive for managing a fast-evolving pandemic, as I have already argued in my last article. However, it is only at the national level that we currently have the concentrated political power and resources to roll out strategic, structural changes. 

So to create a new, safer and prosperous civil society, we now need to force the Government to debate and then agree on how we should distribute decision making, power and resources, and how the modes of engagement from individuals, through their communities, up to the national level and beyond, should pragmatically function. A new, redistributive democratic consensus. 

While some may not quite be ready yet to start organising a people’s army and seizing control of the state, liberal revolutionaries need collectively to get off their armchairs and start loudly demanding this. We need to evolve a fresh, innovative governance paradigm, which is fit-for-purpose in today’s digitally-enabled, globalised, interdependent, and hyperconnected world, with all the opportunities and risks that this brings. We should not wait in some vain hope for the Government to lead this work. Carpe diem! A popular movement for renewal, even ultimately public dissent like the 'Extinction Rebellion', should now force this agenda.

In summary 

A reinvigorated social contract should encapsulate our vision for a sustainable, prosperous and fair society, and explicitly address the many fundamental challenges that humanity faces such as climate change, our ageing society, creaking institutions, and broken health and financial systems.

Britain is now uniquely positioned to synchronise the Brexit, pandemic response, and environmental strategies, and our post-pandemic economic policy, to drive a coherent vision of a newly independent Britain, with its renewed purpose, clarity of its citizens’ freedoms and obligations, and of Britain’s chosen position in the world. This new social contract needs to be co-created with us, the people, and based on transparent information and mutual trust. 

Without this moral, legal and ethical framework empowering Britain to become a more innovative, technology-enabled, productive, resilient and self-sufficient society – as well as more empathetic and sharing – we shall remain unprepared as a society to thrive in the increasingly threatening, digitised and complex world.

 i. “Playing Politics With Coronavirus”, Richard A. Epstein, Hoover Institution, 09 March 2020

 ii. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Science”, Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books, 2019

Dr Piotr Ney is an energetic promoter of innovation, digital transformation, customer and operational excellence, and sustainability, with some thirty five years of change leadership, consultancy and senior executive experience. He has an MBA in International Business and a PhD in Economics and Management, lectures part-time in Innovation Management and Disruptive Strategy and is a popular speaker at global business events. Piotr works in London and internationally as an independent consultant and educator.

Copyright © 2020 by Piotr Ney. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be published, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.