When a new decade began a few short months ago, few suspected the world would look like this. The coronavirus pandemic is bewildering because it turns on a paradox. Helping others could be deadly; doing nothing can be the best way to do something; apocalyptic events, it turns out, can feel crushingly monotonous. But not everything has changed. One of the most unwelcome continuities from the world we’re leaving behind us is the relentless growth of platform giants and the app-driven future they have sold us under the guise of heightened convenience. As small businesses went bankrupt and workers were laid off, Amazon announced it was hiring an additional 100,000 workers, its founder on course to become the world’s first trillionaire.‍ Tesla defied state laws to put its factory back into production while a deadly virus crept across North America. Palantir partnered with NHSX to create a store of aggregated patient data that is likely to outlive the pandemic. These companies appear not just immune to the virus, but strengthened by it.

A state of exception can quickly become the state of play. In a recent report for the Intercept, Naomi Klein described how, rather than seeing our altered reality of physical isolation as an unfortunate but necessary protection against further deaths, tech companies are treating it as a “living laboratory for a permanent – and highly profitable – no-touch future.” This future is one in which our living rooms, already turned into our offices, become our gyms, our GP surgeries, our schools, our therapist couches; where medicine, teaching and exercise instruction are conducted remotely. It’s a future where employees shelter in place and bosses use software to monitor their keystrokes and GPS coordinates. It’s a future of bad jobs – of gig work rebranded as “self-employment”, of a hidden army of ghost workers and content moderators tucked away across the world, standing in for “artificial intelligence” and intervening when the algorithms trip up. Crucially, it’s a future in which our every action is trackable and traceable – a level of information gathering that initially seemed justified by the threat of a deadly virus, but later became an extension of the same “convenience” that gave us Deliveroo.

We already have the tools to build this future. What it relies upon is access – to us, to our public services, our cities, our societies and communities. The pandemic presents an unprecedented opportunity for tech companies to claim this access is the price of safety from another outbreak. It’s no surprise that Apple and Google have put themselves forward to assist with the development of an NHS contact tracing app, nor that individuals like Eric Schmitt, executive chair of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, sees China’s boundless appetite for mass surveillance and data collection as a blueprint for our post-Coronavirus future. At this point in time, it’s crucial to ask what a more equitable tech future might look like: one where data is collected and stewarded in common based on consent, where the purpose of technologies is democratically discussed and their limits collectively agreed upon, where workers could use data to build shared power and solidarity – and where the tools we build are in service of a common good.

Among the areas of life affected by the pandemic, work is perhaps the sphere that has been most radically reshaped. In March, when workplace closures and self-isolation became government policies, the world began to trial an unprecedented experiment in working from home. But as middle class occupations and “knowledge workers” stayed home, the people who service our supermarkets, hospitals and transport network kept going to work, often without protection against contagion. And of course, the home has always been a site of work: sharply gendered and typically unwaged, our reliance on the work of social reproduction within the home to sustain the wider economy has been thrown into sharp relief. Work is where inequalities are exposed and amplified, between those who have the ability to shelter in place, and those who have no choice but to put their lives on the line; between those who have the security blanket of a permanent contract and pension, and those who have no insulation against economic downturns. Our workplaces are also where new technologies are trialed and inequalities are laid bare – but also where power is built and exercised, where progress can be made and where vested interests can be challenged. So it seems appropriate that, in sketching a path to a better technological future, we start here, with work.