Metaversed

Chapter 5A Great Reset

How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.

—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

In June 2020, the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), also known as the Davos summit, was held under the ethos of a “Great Reset” for the global economy. The WEF's founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab, announced how the COVID-19 crisis had demonstrated just how broken our socioeconomic system is and how climate and social change demands that we improve our relationships with one another and with our climate. The UK's now King Charles, during that same event, stressed this message: “We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis. Its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change.”¹

That Davos summit highlighted the fact that with the pandemic raging, the climate crisis, and the economy at a crossroads of pressures and uncertainties, new models of work were changing our ability to connect and work remotely. In record time, teams of scientists worldwide developed vaccines, and global distribution systems ensured its timely distribution; real-time statistics kept us on track as to how we were taming the beast; and our smartphones became gatekeepers of health certificates and apps that determined our freedom of moving, traveling, and entering public buildings.

At the same time, this Great Reset taught us how to communicate ...