Chapter Sixty-Eight - Pandemic, AI, and the Metaverse

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

Pandemic, AI, and the Metaverse

WE THOUGHT WE were cruising into a normal decade.
And then, cough cough.
2020.

The virus didn’t look like much at first.
A few cases in China.
Then clusters.
Then cities locked down.
Then… the world stopped.

Borders closed.
Planes grounded.
Hospitals flooded.
Toilet paper gone.
And for the first time in modern memory, everyone went inside.

The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t just a health crisis.
It was a systemic stress test.
And most systems failed.

Supply chains cracked.
Nursing homes shattered.
Governments scrambled.
Science got politicized.
Essential workers were praised, underpaid, and overexposed.
Rich people Zoomed.
Poor people delivered.

Millions died.
Billions suffered.
And the rest just scrolled through it.

But out of that chaos came a weird acceleration.

Working from home became normal.
Education moved online.
Entire jobs vanished while new ones appeared overnight.

And that’s when tech made its move.

Artificial Intelligence started waking up.

Language models.
Voice cloning.
Image generation.
Deepfakes.
Automation.

The robots weren’t coming.
They were already here and writing emails better than you.

Meanwhile, Facebook rebranded as Meta and pitched a virtual reality future.
Avatars. Headsets. Crypto economies.
A world without pants, just pixels.

It didn’t quite work.
But the metaverse conversation cracked open a bigger question:
What even is “real life” anymore?

By the early 2020s, everything was melting together.

Biology. Technology. Capital. Consciousness.

We had influencers selling brain pills, billionaires launching rockets for clout, and teenagers trading meme stocks from their phones while the climate boiled in the background.

Oh, right.
The planet’s still on fire.

The 2020s became a decade of contradictions.

Isolation and connection.
Collapse and innovation.
Fear and breakthrough.
Shutdown and scroll.

We survived a plague.
Invented miracles.
And somehow came out more divided than ever.

But maybe that’s the point.

Because before you rewrite the code the old one has to crash.