Naomi Klein, I want to ask if you can comment
on all of this, and particularly lay out your
piece in The Intercept, called “Screen New
Deal: Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo
Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia.”
Lay out your thesis.
Well, the billionaires I was referring to
is, he didn’t just announce that partnership
with Eric Schmidt, who will be chairing this
blue-ribbon commission to, quote-unquote,
“reopen” New York state with an emphasis
on telehealth, remote learning, working from
home, increased broadband.
That’s what they announced during that briefing.
He also announced that he would be kind of
outsourcing the tracing of the virus to Michael
Bloomberg, another megabillionaire.
And the day before, at the briefing, Cuomo
announced a partnership with the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation to, quote-unquote, “reimagine”
education.
And during all of these announcements, there’s
just been
sort of effusive praise heaped on these billionaires.
They’re called “visionaries” over and
over again.
And the governor talks about how this is an
unprecedented opportunity
to put their preexisting ideas into action.
And this is what I’ve described as the shock
doctrine previously.
And we have talked on the show during the
pandemic about what I would describe as kind
of lower-tech shock doctrines of the kind
we’ve seen before — immediately going
after Social Security, immediately bailing
out fossil fuel companies.
And I want to stress that all of this is still
happening, right?
The suspending of EPA regulations.
So, there’s still this kind of lower-tech
shock doctrine underway with the bailout of
these industries, the suspending of regulations
they didn’t want anyway.
But there is something else going on, that
Eric Schmidt really epitomizes.
And this is this, what I’m calling a “Screen
New Deal.”
And this is an idea that treats our months
in isolation, those of us who are privileged
enough to be self-isolating — and that,
in and of itself, is an enormous privilege,
because we have seen this sharpening and widening
of a class dichotomy.
And this relates to the calls to open up the
economy, right?
The people who are making these calls are
not the people who are going to be most at risk.
They’re calling for other people to be putting
themselves at great risk, and there is a feeling
of being immune to the worst impacts of the
virus.
But that’s another issue.
What this, what I’m calling a “Screen
New Deal,” really does is treat this period
of isolation not as what we have needed to
do in order to save lives — this is what
we thought we were doing, right?
— flattening the curve, but rather — and
Eric Schmidt has said this elsewhere.
He said it in April in a video call with the
Economic Club of New York.
He described what was happening now as a “grand
experiment in remote learning.”
So, all the parents out there who are listening
or watching, you’ve been struggling with
supporting your kids on Google Classroom and
Zoom calls, and you thought you were just
trying to get through the day.
Well, according to Google, you’ve been engaged
in a “grand experiment in remote learning,”
where they are getting a great deal of data
and figuring out how to do this permanently,
because they actually believe this is a better
way of educating kids, or at least, and coming
back to our earlier conversation, a more profitable
way.
Eric Schmidt talked, in that clip that you
just played there, Amy, about all of the opportunities
for public-private partnerships.
And what he is really talking about is public
money going to tech firms, like Google, like
Amazon, to perform public functions.
So, once again, a bonanza for the tech companies
— who, by the way, have been doing very
well during the pandemic already — where
they see huge opportunities in telehealth,
in the educational market in public schools,
in supporting us working from 
home and learning from home.
And they’re not looking for a kind of a
traditional reopening, but, rather, a new
paradigm, where the privileged classes, who
are able to isolate themselves, basically
get everything that we need either delivered
through digital streaming or by drone, by
driverless vehicle.
And we’re seeing a massive rebranding effort
going on in Silicon Valley, where all of these
technologies that were very, very controversial,
and where there was a lot of pushback way
back in February — whether it’s driverless
vehicles, because there have been all kinds
of accidents, or drones delivering packages,
or telehealth, because of concerns about security
for patients’ sensitive information, or
the benefit of having our kids in front of
screens all day.
I mean, I could go on and on.
