How Will Humanity Change After the Covid-19 Pandemic (with Philosopher Reza Negarestani)

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Once this thing is over, there would be a different sort of Cold War. We don't need to think about how the virus affects the future world, but its trajectories. We don't need to speculate about COVID-19 at this point. We can simply learn from history. Thinking about the Spanish flu, it led effectively…

• 00:00:39

  So you can't choke a nation, because if you do that, then the populist factions will rise. So the Treaty of Versailles created Nazis. There are, at the very least, three different narratives. One would be that this is just... A pandemic. It doesn't have any sort of traction to create significant socio-political…

• 00:01:16

  It moves, spreads fast, like goods on a global supply chain. But it also disrupts the structure of globalization. Number three is what you might call to be the communist critique. The real cause for this pandemic being so vicious is precisely because maldistribution of healthcare, maldistribution of resources. All…

• 00:01:53

  We are all children, and we ought to be collectively... educated. Imagine you are in a cottage at the end of the world. Apocalypse has already taken place. What are you going to do? A survivalist might create a garden, but that's not easy. If you do not take the idea of fear seriously, and you don't make something…