Everything Must Change! brings together prominent commentators from around the world to present a rich and nuanced weighing of progressive possibilities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In these pages you’ll encounter influential voices across the left, ranging from Roger Waters to Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek to Saskia Sassen. Gael García Bernal, Brian Eno, and Larry Charles examine the pandemic’s more cultural and artistic consequences, touching on topics of love, play, comedy, dreaming, and time. Their words sit alongside analyses of the paradoxes and possibilities of debt, internationalism, and solidarity by Astra Taylor, David Graeber, Vijay Prashad, and Stephanie Kelton.
Burgeoning surveillance and control measures in the name of public health are a concern for many of the contributors here, including Shoshana Zuboff and Evgeny Morozov, as are the opportunities presented by the crisis for exploitation by financiers, technocrats, and the far right.
Against a return to the normal and, indeed, the notion that there ever was such a thing, these conversations insist that urgent, systemic change is needed to tackle not only the pandemics arising from the human destruction of nature, but also the ceaseless debilitations of contemporary global capitalism.
About the author
Renata Ávila is a Guatemalan international human rights lawyer and author. She co-founded and is a Council member of the Progressive International and is a member of Di EM25’s Coordinating Collective. She also co-founded the
Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms. An expert in digital rights, she studies the politics of data, the evolution of transparency, and their implications on trade, democracy, and society, highlighting a phenomenon she describes as digital colonialism. Srećko Horvat is a philosopher born in Croatia (former Yugoslavia) in 1983. He has published over a dozen books, most recently After the Apocalypse (Polity Press, 2021) and Poetry from the Future (Penguin, 2019) and has been active in various social movements. He was one of the founders of the Subversive Festival in Zagreb and is a co-founder of Di EM25.