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When youre fighting a war, you want to know as much about the enemy as possible. But its easy, in the rush of crisis, to put in place surveillance tools without thinking about the long-term harm they might do. The scholar Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, reminded me that, prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasnt used. In the course of a few days, Zuboff says, the concern shifted from How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights to How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?

For governments looking to monitor their citizens even more closely, and companies looking to get rich by doing the same, it would be hard to imagine a more perfect crisis than a global pandemic. In China today, drones search for people without facemasks; when they are found, the drones built-in speakers broadcast scoldings from police. Germany, Austria, Italy and Belgium are all using data anonymised, for now from major telecommunications companies to track peoples movement. In Israel, the national security agency is now allowed to access infected individuals phone records. South Korea sends texts to the public identifying potentially infected individuals and sharing information about where theyve been.

Not all surveillance is inherently malign, and new tech tools very well might end up playing a role in fighting the virus, but Zuboff worries that these emergency measures will become permanent, so enmeshed in daily life that we forget their original purpose. Lockdowns have made many of us, sitting at home glued to our computers and phones, more dependent than ever on big tech companies. Many of these same companies are actively pitching themselves to government as a vital part of the solution. It is worth asking what they stand to gain. People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when theyre trying to deal with something like a pandemic, says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.

The prime ministers of both Israel and Hungary have effectively been given the power to rule by decree, without interference from courts or legislature. The UKs recently rolled-out coronavirus bill gives police and immigration officers the authority in place for the next two years to arrest and detain people suspected of carrying the virus, so that they can be tested. The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object. Those of us who follow the police know how this goes, said Kevin Blowe of Netpol, a UK group focused on protest rights. These powers get put in place, and it sounds reasonable enough at the time and then very quickly theyre applied for other purposes that have nothing to do with democracy and nothing to do with public safety.

In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals. This suspicious mindset, they argued, ended up most affecting racial minorities and the poor. Tactics like these can make fighting the disease harder, by driving a hard wedge of distrust between government and citizens. As the report put it: People, rather than the disease, become the enemy.

Theres another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility. For thinkers in this camp, the example of the 2008 financial crash looms large. But where, from their view, 2008 led to defeat with the broad public giving up a great deal while a small few profited Covid-19 might open the door to political progress.

I think were just so different to how we were before we saw the aftermath of the 2008 crash, said the American writer Rebecca Solnit, one of todays most eloquent investigators of crises and their implications. Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. Theres room for change that there wasnt beforehand. Its an opening.

The argument, in its simplest form, is this: Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them. At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.

For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution. Instead, we have been told that what works best are marketplace solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like the public good but by a desire to make a profit. But then the virus started spreading, governments spent trillions in days even going so far as to write cheques directly to citizens and suddenly the question of what was feasible felt different.

From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.

In her 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit used case studies of disasters including the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the 2001 terror attacks and Hurricane Katrina to argue that emergencies arent just moments when bad things get worse, or when people inevitably become more scared, suspicious and self-centred. Instead she foregrounded the ways in which disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain. The book was not a call to celebrate disaster but to pay attention to the possibilities it might contain, and how it might shake us loose from old ways. In Solnits telling, official disaster responses had a tendency to muck things up by treating people as part of the problem to be managed, not an invaluable part of the solution.

Sometimes this mismanagement is a result of mere incompetence other times it is more sinister. In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Kleins view, there is always Disaster 1 the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump and Disaster 2 the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice. (In fact, Klein argued, these people sometimes engineer Disaster 1 to get the process started.)

Unlike Solnits book, The Shock Doctrine doesnt have much to say about the resilience of everyday people when everything goes horribly wrong. (Indeed, Solnit directly criticised Klein for this omission.) But the two books fit together like puzzle pieces. Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably or naturally happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash.

In 2008, days after Barack Obamas election, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously said: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Todays leftists, for whom Obama mostly represents disappointment, are prone to agree. They feel that, in the wake of recent crises, they lost, and now is the time to make amends. If, facing a pandemic, we can change this much in a few weeks, then how much might we change in a year?

For anyone making this argument, the contrast between 2008 and the present crisis is striking. Compared to the opaque financial crisis, with its credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations, the coronavirus is relatively easy to understand. It is a dozen crises tangled into one, and theyre all unfolding immediately, in ways that cannot be missed. Politicians are getting infected. Wealthy celebrities are getting infected. Your friends and relatives are getting infected. We may not quite all be in it together as always, the poor are hit worse but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.

In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently. Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.

More people are in a position to connect the dots, Klein said. It has to do with peoples experiences; for people of a certain age, their only experience of capitalism has been one of crisis. And they want things to be different.

That screaming buzzsaw noise in the background of this conversation is the sound of the climate crisis. If 2008 is the disaster that Klein and like-minded thinkers want to avoid repeating, climate change is the much bigger disaster they see coming that they know is already here and that they want to fight off. Indeed, in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.

Although Covid-19 is likely the biggest global crisis since the second world war, it is still dwarfed in the long term by climate change. Yet the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarters growth statistics. Accordingly, both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment. In other words, to think of this new level of state intervention as a temporary requirement is to ensure that we continue barrelling down the path to climate disaster.

Weve been trying for years to get people out of normal mode and into emergency mode, said Margaret Klein Salamon, a former psychologist who now heads the advocacy group The Climate Mobilization. What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode when they fundamentally accept that theres danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And its been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus. Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We cant think were going to go back to normal, because things werent normal.

The analogy between the two crises only goes so far. There is no getting around the fact that the impacts of climate change are more gradual than those of Covid-19. Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain. As Salamon pointed out to me, if we truly accepted we were in a climate emergency, then every day the news would lead with updates about which countries were reducing their emissions the fastest, and people would be clamouring to make sure their leaders were adopting the policies that worked.

But it is not unimaginable that the experience of Covid-19 could help us understand climate change differently. As the virus has reduced industrial activity and road traffic, air pollution has plummeted. In early March, the Stanford University scientist Marshall Burke used pollution data from four Chinese cities to measure changes in the level of PM2.5, a particularly harmful pollutant that attacks the heart and lungs. He estimated that, in China alone, emission reductions since the start of the pandemic had in effect saved the lives of at least 1,400 children under five and 51,700 adults over 70. Meanwhile, people around the world have been sharing their own anecdotal findings online stories of sweet-smelling breezes, expanded bike lanes and birdsong returning to neighbourhoods in a way that almost resembles a digitally distributed Rebecca Solnit project: people catching glimpses, in the midst of a disaster, of a future they know they want and need.

Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Kleins shock doctrine framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment. On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemics effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. Chinas environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilities. And advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags. Looking back at the crisis of 2008, we can see that emissions dropped then, too only to rebound drastically in 2010 and 2011.

Salamon believes that one lesson of the coronavirus crisis is the power of shared emotion, which has helped make possible radical action to slow the pandemic. Im not talking about people giving each other medical expertise. Im talking about people calling each other up and saying: How are you doing? Are you scared? Im scared. I want you to be OK, I want us to be OK. And thats what we want for climate, too. We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what were terrified about. Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act. Its good that were entering emergency mode about the pandemic, she said. But unless we also do it for climate She didnt finish the sentence.

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What kind of actions would it take for the optimists vision to materialise? The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy, he told me. And it wasnt obvious to everyone, and the left lost. How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?

The political outcome of the epidemic, said Mike Davis, will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can. One major obstacle, of course, is social distancing, which certainly hinders many time-tested methods of waging such struggles, such as political canvassing and street protest. The biggest risk for all of us, said Klein, is going to be frittering away this time sitting at home on our social media feeds, living the extremely limited forms of politics that get enabled there.

Davis hoped protesters would find their way into the streets sooner rather than later, and speculated that a street action with all the sign-holding participants spaced 10 or 15 feet apart would make a dramatic media image. He lives in Ppaaloa, a small community in Hawaii, and as our conversation wrapped up, he mentioned that he was planning to spend part of the afternoon doing his part by standing by himself on a street corner, holding a sign. He hadnt decided what to write on it yet, but was thinking about SUPPORT THE NURSES UNION or DEMAND PAID SICK LEAVE.

Solnit told me she was taking heart from all the new ways people were finding to connect and help each other around the world, ranging from the neighbourhood delivery networks that had sprung up to bring groceries to people who couldnt get out, to more symbolic interventions, such as kids playing music on an older neighbours porch. The Italian political scientist Alessandro Delfanti said he was finding hope from a post-outbreak wave of strikes roiling Amazon warehouses in the US and Europe, and also the steps that workers across different sectors of the Italian economy were taking to help each other secure equipment they needed to stay safe.

What happens next might depend on the optimists ability to transport such moments of solidarity into the broader political sphere, arguing that it makes no sense to address Covid-19 without at least trying to fix everything else, too, creating a world where our shared resources do more for more people. We dont even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear. We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological, Solnit wrote in A Paradise Built in Hell.

The world feels awfully strange right now, but not because or not just because it is changing so fast and any one of us could fall ill at any time, or could already be carrying the virus and not know it. It feels strange because the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. Were not watching a movie: were writing one, together, until the end.

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