The Round-Up 008: What's going on?
The end of the first quarter of the year is upon us, and what have we learnt from the biggest global events of 2021 so far?
Well, for starters, after the attack on the American capital, it is safe to say we need to adjust the phrase “It's just Twitter!” to something more true-to-life, like; “It's just Twitter, as long as it doesn't lead to a civil insurrection and loss of lives”; or “In the event that Twitter does lead to a civil insurrection and loss of lives, there should be consequences”.
Elsewhere in politics, a military coup deposed Myanmar's female president, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi on the first day of February 2021. Kyi was ousted from office by the military, due to allegations of election rigging following her landslide win of Burmese elections last November. Back in 2019, the BBC reported, Kyi's international reputation has suffered, since her silence on the Rohingya crisis. Hundreds of people from the minority tribe reportedly migrated to neighbouring Bangladesh, following army crackdowns back in 2017.
In Tanzania, Samia Suluhu Hassan has become the East-African country's first woman president. But she inherits a country marred by the effects of COVID-19. Her predecessor, the late President John Magufuli reportedly didn't take the whole corona- business too seriously. For months, his government downplayed the disease and refused to report on the number of infected cases. Bloomberg opinion columnist, Bobby Ghosh writes Magfuli health minister, Dorothy Gwajima “extolled the prophylactic qualities of vegetable smoothies, some of which she whipped up in a blender at a bizarre press conference”. Hassan's first order of business as she assumes office will be to roll back a lot of that administrative ambivalence towards the pandemic. This means while the rest of the world is already figuring mass-vaccination logistics, for Tanzanians things will move a lot slower. Except, of course, Hassan can perform magic tricks. Yay or yikes for equality? Happy International Women's Month 2021.
In more COVID-related news, while the development and distribution of vaccines are on-going globally, the global fatality count stands at 2.5 million, and over 100 million people have now been infected. Against the backdrop of remote work and the rise of the gig-economy, corporations are still unsure of how to approach the eventuality of a post-COVID world. A recent Microsoft survey revealed 73% of employees enjoyed the flexibility of working from home, but 41% were likely to leave their jobs within the year.
This weird ambiguity resulting from last year's global lockdowns is tilting the corporate world towards a 'hybrid' work model, where employees balance in-office and remote work hours. Experts however suggest this may blur work-life barriers, meaning more employees will be working longer hours. Consumer demands are going digital, which means employers will have to get creative with hiring practices because someone will have to be there round-the-clock to pick-up those phone calls, and reply to those messages and emails. For white-collar jobs and physical logistic work, all evidence points to the possibility that the future of work is more work. Are millennials going to ever be able to retire? Only time will tell, but many mid-90s to early 2000s middle-class kids probably knew the answer to that already.
The race to innovate humanity out of a climate crisis is taking off — all the way to friggin space!. Popular spaceman, Elon Musk, once said, “the alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization with multi-planetary species”. And has focused a lot of his cyber-punkish investments and evangelism on how moving to Mars may be the only way to save the earth from an on-going climate crisis. He is not alone, Jezz Bezos also similarly stepped back from Amazon, to focus on his new rocket venture, Blue Origin, because in his words, “we have to go to space to save Earth.”
Older Ecotech agitators like Bill Gates, are more grounded. The Microsoft founder thinks we should be building more greenhouses. Gates doesn't think we should abandon earth. He wants a multi-stakeholder approach with government intervention and thinks we should be accelerating green-innovation. The best part about these billionaire tech-innovators suggesting how to save the planet is that it means, people who have the resources to impact solutions, are now taking climate change seriously. If he's successful, Bill Gates' legacy will be creating an equitable distribution of technology that rolls-back the effects of climate change in real-time. That may not be the wildest idea if we're to avoid a future where rising temperatures makes the earth inhabitable. And after a year like 2020, crazier things have happened.
Spaceman Elon Musk has been buying up a lot of cryptocurrency as pop-culture's obsession with the crypto-world continues. Digital art is currently seeing a blockchain revolution through NFT art, for example. Hard to say if non-fungible tokens are another pop-crypto bubble, but since Beeple sold an art piece for a whopping $69.3 million earlier this month, the crypto world has sort of been freaking out. Beeple's landmark valuation may not signal stability for NFTs like many other cryptos but it increasingly shows how virtual communities continue to penetrate real-life global economies.
Back in January, GameStop shares peaked at nearly $483, following a Reddit-fueled buying rally. GameStop stocks have sort of levelled off since then at around $181, but not before the company off-set half of its debts with cash-in-hand and hired Ex-Amazon and Google executive, Jenna Owens, as a new CEO. Forbes reports GameStop had “$146.7 million debt coming due this year as of January 30 but paid off essentially half of it, $73.2 million”.
The core value proposition of many fintech services is to offer simplified payments. If there is continued growth in the number of fintech start-ups over the next decade, new products apps and services will continue to grow into virtual communities. The new race is to optimise the world's banked while capturing the unbanked through simplified payments and KYC-data.