What should have been

What should have been said, what should have been done
Forgotten, forgotten
What should have been said, what should have been done
Denied, denied

(Above lyrics from Dark Tranquility's "Identical To None")

On March 23rd 2020, a week after France locked down, the (plenty canceled, I'm aware, thanks) French leftist youtuber Usul released one of his regular chroniques on Médiapart's Youtube channel: "Faced with the coronavirus, what is the best political regime?". In a brisk nine minutes, he demonstrates how the French government failed to build consent for lockdown measures due to a pre-existing lack of trust and widespread absurdity, and how the solution is more democracy, not more authoritarian policing.

On April 3rd 2020, Arundhati Roy published "The pandemic is a portal" in the Financial Times. It dives deep into India's early catastrophic failures when faced with the virus, and posits that despite it all, the horror forms a portal: "we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."

On May 4th 2020, the same French youtuber released another chronique, this time about what comes next: "The world of tomorrow will be altermondialiste or will not be". In another brisk nine minutes, he covers a set of political proposals agreed upon by various progressive organizations, a quick history of the altermondialiste movement as a constellation of diverse collectives working in the same direction, and how covid opens an avenue for those very ideas. There was, in fact, a fantastic opportunity to be seized. Working together, grabbing power in a time of crisis, taking advantage of all the previous work done over decades, we could finally build a better world.

Fuck.

Those of us still holding the line against covid tend to be perceived as authoritarian killjoys. That comes with the gig - we're portents of disasters, trying again and again to drag people back to traumatic times. It's easier to paint us as worrywarts with a nostalgia for fascism than to consider we might have a point. It's easier to think we're hypochondriacs than to contemplate the fact that the traumatic times are ongoing. In gamedev, we often say that "August 2014 never ended", as Gamergate forever reshaped our industry. March 2020 never ended either.

Let us try and put that aside for a moment. Let us try and put aside the scientific studies, the anxiety, the zines, the nervous breakdowns, the air purifiers, the crushing loneliness, the stashes of masks, the comrades lost to suicide, the neverending back-to-basics explainers, the trust that can never be mended. Let us put aside the armor and the burden both, and look back to 2020. Let us, for a moment, imagine not just what could have been, but what should have been.

Remember

Do you remember when all the talk was of "flattening the curve" and "lowering the R-number"?

Flattening the curve was about keeping hospitals from overloading. They got overloaded anyway - budget cuts tend to cause that. The R-number, R for Reproduction, is how many people, on average, every infected person will go on to infect further. If R is below one, eventually the virus dies out. Elimination was, in fact, possible and should have been the goal. How to push that number down, then?

Do you remember the lockdowns? If you had one, that is. I was in Sweden.

Every broken chain of transmission brings down the R-number. In times of uncertainty, before we knew how the virus spreads and how to stop that spread, isolation was the most accessible blunt tool to break those chains en masse.

Lockdowns did not need police enforcement. They needed trust. They needed understanding. They needed us to "yes-and" our way into full-blown automated gay luxury space communism. People stuck in unliveable small apartments? Claim every unoccupied building under the sun. People with no money? Seize cash from billionaires and make shit free.

Abusive families? Claim more housing, build support networks. Build community. Figure out how to arrange mass deliveries of free food. How to entertain at scale with minimal to no risk. Make the school year a blank one, it does not fucking matter, lives come first. Close the goddamn factories for a while, we'll manage. Literally every problem with lockdowns is solvable with more socialism.

Do you remember how much mutual aid kicked into gear? Do you remember how "the planet is healing" became a meme? Do you remember how everything we did (not) really need was suddenly cast in sharp relief, through all the fear and grief and death? Do you remember how every theory we had about solidarity, democracy, ecology was vindicated in a brutal, darkly beautiful moment?

Do you even remember the George Floyd protests for Black liberation of summer 2020 and how it felt that maybe, maybe this time things were about to change at long last?

Do you remember how for a few precious weeks or months, you actually believed this could be our chance to create a better world? Do you remember how everything looked like a wide-opened gateway for the left back then, even through police violence and repression?

I mean, I don't. I was in Sweden. But I kept tabs on other countries while going insane.

Passing through the portal

On July 22nd 2025, Julia Doubleday wrote an essay based on Arundhati Roy's piece: "The Pandemic Has Been a Portal (for a few of us)". Arundhati Roy had posited that we would be forced into walking through the portal between the old world and the new, no matter what, and that we only got to decide whether or not to bring our luggage with us. Julia Doubleday yes-ands that thesis: not only did most people refuse to put down their heavy bags, "back to normal" translated to pretending the portal was never there to begin with.

I passed through the portal alone in 2020 because Sweden gave me no choice. My pre-existing politics, my run-ins with the Swedish healthcare system and my knowledge of ME/CFS combined into the horrified realization that I could either keep myself safe or expect to be left to die penniless and alone. Like everyone, I was afraid of dying of acute covid - briefly. That fear soon gave way to the much deeper terror that I could contract long covid. If my brain stops working, as it did at the worst of my years of burnout, then I can't code. If I can't code, then I can't make money. If I can't make money, then I can't survive independently, and Försäkringskassan sure as fuck won't soften the landing. Unlike acute covid, that death would be long, painful and drawn out.

I passed through the portal alone in 2020 because there was no one to protect me. I watched as a country I already knew to be all-too-fond of turning sick leave into a full-time job left the undesirables to die. I watched as a country I already knew to hate immigrants failed to craft policies designed for anyone other than the middle-class native white Swede with a single-household home. I watched as the Swedish left party mostly shrugged and let it all happen. I read the foreign press which I was told was the only reason I felt any fear, and hoped that maybe other countries would pass through the portal.

By the time I became eligible for the vaccine in summer 2021, breakthrough infections were well-documented. By the time I moved back to France in late October 2021, I was only granted a few months of respite before all pretense of prevention was dropped. I was lucky to eventually find a few people who had also passed through the portal, at least. There was never any hope of that in Stockholm.

What if?

Imagine, then.

Imagine if suppression had been the goal. Not "flattening the curve", not keeping capitalism churning, but full suppression. Every other priority gone. Yes-and'ing the lockdowns into the cause of a lifetime, valuing life above all else. "At any cost", as Macron said, except in the name of life rather than funneling public funds to the private sector.

Imagine if this ambitious goal had been reached not through police violence and borders absurdity, but solidarity, public education, trusting in the people's ability to govern ourselves. The mutual aid efforts that popped up everywhere show well enough that deep down, we want to care for one another. I refuse to believe that human nature is fundamentally cruel and selfish. Sweden focused on "strong recommendations" rather than policing - had it made the right choices, it could have been one of the most beautiful success stories in the world.

Imagine if the left, rather than getting mired in its load-bearing ableism and workforce fetish, had raced down the highway opened by the crisis. Bringing decades of thinking to bear, it could have had a ready-made dream to sell to people suddenly much keener on listening. Beyond even winning elections, it could have woven itself deep into the fabric of society, giving guidance and theory to structure all that self-started solidarity into a durable new world.

We'd likely be living better. Breathing more easily - likely maskless, suppression achieved. Working together on a million projects, tied to actual needs and joy, climate goals suddenly back in sight. Black people maybe, at last, free. Fascism kneecapped by the sheer power of folks just doing cool shit. Disabled and chronically ill people finally recognized as full members of society worth caring about and standing - or sitting! - proudly next to.

That world is what I have been mourning for five years.

Boulevard of broken dreams

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don't know where it goes
But it's home to me, and I walk alone

(The above courtesy of Green Day, that you could probably guess)

I keep returning to roadworks metaphores. An avenue, a gateway, a portal. A road not taken. A boulevard that's now all wasted hopes, shattered trust and, yes, broken dreams. It is extremely frustrating when the same people who decided that said boulevard was boring back in 2021 would rather work with protofascists than with those of us who kept going.

My continued stubbornness is primarily self-preservation, I won't lie. I still can't afford to lose my cognitive ability. It's deep concern for the people around me continuously playing Russian roulette, who I wish I could love without reservations (previously). It's having some fucking consistent politics of community care and valuing life.

But it's also that, to the bottom of my heart, I believe it is still worth striving towards such a world. I do, in fact, know where the lonely road goes. It's beautiful over there. I do not, I fact, walk alone. Won't you join us?