I like to listen to music while putting a post together, it tends to help me with ideas and this post is no exception. It was Lucero's 'Everything Has Changed' (see below) that inspired this post, even though it's a couple years old it seems rather fitting for the year 2020 has been so far. I feel like the photo above is rather representative of 2020 as well, with all the changes covid has wrought and then the turbulence of the protests and the police response to those (the photo is of a window of the CVS Pharmacy downtown after the protests got a little lively).
Back in January a friend sent me a news article that they were a bit spooked by about a couple cases of bubonic plague in China. Having had a bit too much coffee and feeling like being a smartass I let them know that they'd be better served worrying about the ebola outbreak in the DRC or this new virus in China that the government was still denying spread from person to person despite thousands of cases. While I generally enjoy being proven right it has been of little consolation in this case (it has also far exceeded my expectations, I thought we would see something akin to the ebola outbreak a few years back, not this mass amount of death and distruption).
Covid and the lockdown definitely turned my world upside down, left me with no income coming in and way too much time on my hands. This ain't a doom and gloom post though, to quote Sun Tzu, “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”, and I am hoping to make the most of it. How has the pandemic affected you? Have you found yourself doing things you never would have expected prior to it? I have a bad tendency of letting making a living get in the way of doing what I want, the pandemic took away my excuses and has allowed (forced?) me to refocus on my photography with a vengeance (after years of procrastinating have prints for sale! Now I just have to sell them :-s ).
With an abundance of time on my hands and a penchant for getting distracted, I've found myself doing a good bit of reading and pondering when I should have been attending to my photography. One line of thinking and reading that I kept returning to was "How are things going to change because of this?" (if you can frontrun trends you get rich, right?). How many of the 'temporary' changes covid has caused are going to wind up being permanent? What norms, conventions, activities will fall by the wayside, and what will replace them? What do you reading this think will happen?
Personally, I think this will be looked back upon as the time when the digital revolution finally kicked into high gear as well as when widespread failures in governing led to many more political sorts of revolutions. While the concept of 'digital goods' is nothing new in the crypto community, with the movement of so many things online due to covid I think we're beginning to see a much more widespread acceptance of the idea. I'm still trying to figure out how to exploit this (aside from lensy type tokenizing of art), y'all have any ideas? For creators I feel like this is an amazing opportunity, not only is your stuff more accessible but it cuts out most of the middlemen and makes for considerably less postproduction costs.
In addition to the more mundane changes to life, there seems to have been profound changes in peoples' tolerance of governmental corruption, inequity, oppression, and incompetence, as evidenced by the protests occurring worldwide. Are we on the cusp of the outbreak of a pandemic of revolutions and governing on a more hospitable basis or are we in the death throes of justice and human rights, as governments greet these protests with even more oppression and violence?
I know I don't have the answers, I'm just curious what y'all here on the hive think of all this. Until next time, keep your head down and your powder dry!
(Obligatory mention of 
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