The Before Times

March 2020 was barely over when people started talking about the `Before Times’ when, so it was rumoured, people were allowed to leave their houses or flats for more than thirty minutes a day, and could invite as many people as they liked into said flats and houses, and furthermore could gather together in public spaces, public transport, offices, cinemas, theatres and other such places for the purpose of, well, anything. The propaganda at the time was intense: this was going to change everything for ever, and we were never going to have family Christmas dinners again. Let alone picking up attractive women in crowded bars for the purposes of… oh no, none of that. There were months in 2020 when the British Government made sex illegal unless you were already in a relationship. Seriously. And everyone went along with it - which either meant they were ignoring it, or all the rumours about nobody getting laid these days were true. Or both.

Most people agree that something has changed since then, but cannot say exactly what, except that it is for the worse.

I’ll take a shot at it.

Part the First. Transferring To The Internet.

At the start of 2008, the world and its Old Ways was still out there. Just over 11 years later most of the Internet had migrated to dedicated apps on our phones, connected by 5G wireless, which brought speeds some broadband services could not provide in 2010. By 2020 many broadband providers were offering FTTH. Everything we really needed to do, from reading a newspaper to renewing a driving license, from paying bills and ordinary shopping, to presenting airline and train tickets, and all our non-IRL communications were done on the phone. Or maybe a laptop or tablet. Nobody read a newspaper in public, or used an A-Z (ask your grandfather) to navigate anywhere. Nobody sat at home hangin’ on the telephone

and everybody turned up for social events because there was no way to flake out in the last hour, when everyone was travelling to the meeting-point. Dating apps replaced going out on the pull, or taking a chance on the Personals in the papers and Private Eye.

This happened over a period of time. The applications mostly appeared in the mid-late 2000’s. The iPhone with 3G and apps appeared in late 2008. 3G was not the experience people needed, which came with 4G in 2013 (in the UK) and 5G in 2019. We had got used to the apps, and after 2013 could swipe left and right real fast. By 2019, a lot of people had migrated a lot of their transactions onto the Mobile Internet. But not everything and not everyone. And the Old Ways were still there. Banks still had branches. Pret A Manger still took cash. Amazon deliveries during the working week could be tricky. The big companies would have waited a couple more years to make sure that the Mobile Internet was not a fad that we would tire of, before they started cutting back the Old Ways over a period of maybe five years.

The Lockdowns did that for them. In. An. Instant.

The Old Ways were closed and banned and could kill you if you stood too close to someone in a queue, and the transfer of our lives to the Internet and our phones was complete by the end of March 2020. We got used to it, and the Old Ways could be and were shut down much faster.

That’s part of why March 2020 is the dividing line.

Part The Second. What You Didn’t Know You Learned From The Lockdowns

Before March 2020, you thought you knew about yourself and the people around you. By March 2022 you knew it was all an illusion.

You now know things about the people around you that you kinda wish you didn’t. They are curtain-twitching grasses. They are irresponsible killers because they did not believe masks are effective, nor stood six feet away, took walks that lasted more than thirty minutes, and ignored The Rule of Six. They are super-gullible people who understand nothing about how to identify a deadly killer virus, and how a Government should report its effects. They are fools who think they know better than the Government Experts and the BBC. And worse, you know you fell for it, at least for a while. Unless you didn’t, and snuck round to your girlfriend’s place at night, because to hell with it. You know that the Experts are not, that your Government thinks nothing of hiring Behavioural so-called Scientists to scare you with lies and exaggeration. You know the BBC is not an independent news service, but a stooge of the State. You know that nearly all the academics, journalists and other assorted intellectuals will say whatever the Government tells them to say, because they cannot afford to stop sucking on the teat of Government grants. All those psychotherapists, psychologists and online content creators telling you that human contact and presence and relationships are so important, and how bad for us isolation is? Where were they? Not a peep. You know that no-one stands between you and the arbitrary power of the State, because you have felt that power exercised and seen millions go along with it. You have no idea if there will be a next time, and if there is, if you will fold like a cheap suit, or call it out for the BS that it is. You know that it does not matter what you believe or try to do, because the State will close the shops, the libraries, the churches, the cafes and restaurants, or whatever it is they need to close to make our beliefs and actions pointless. There were more restrictions put on the British public between March 2020 and March 2022 than in the Second World War, and nobody protested for a moment.

These are not things we are supposed to know about ourselves and others. Which is why a lot of people have stuffed the Lockdowns down a memory-hole. It was an emergency, the NHS was at risk, and every country was doing it. It will never happen again. There is nothing to see here. Let’s move on. The unconscious never forgets, and the people around us don’t either.

That’s why there are the Before Times. We were innocents in the Before Times, and now we are not.