My friends often ask me what life is like in Madrid. It is not easy to respond, above all because I have moved from being a Lezo citizen of six thousand inhabitants to being an anonymous citizen more than a city of three million inhabitants. In general, metropolis has a special “spearhead” effect. That is, what is happening in these cities will begin to reach cities and towns in four or five years, causing a delayed wave effect. That is, perhaps, the most significant of the spaces like Madrid, which normally look like a window facing the near future.

I guess being looking from the peephole of the door offers us a unique opportunity to make a leap from the metropolis to the world. What's more, as a seer would look at the magic ball, I'm going to publish some hypothetical changes of the future.

The first images of this magic ball that I've just guessed show a society that lives in extreme digitalization. You've probably heard someone around you complaining about "when we go back to the previous format," right? Please tell them that, according to this magical ball, there is at least no turning back. Mixed formats (on-line/off-line) and extreme digitalisation are scenarios for the near future. But where do these readings come from?

It is clear that in recent months we have seen a massive migration from the offline world to the online world. This digitalization has spread to all areas of human activity and relationships, both intrafamilial and between friends, and has radically transformed both the university classes and all the infrastructures of companies. If something has demonstrated this digital experience, it is that we have at hand, more or less, the technological resources needed to be able to replicate the previous life model in the online world. This massive digitalization will radically transform life models: it will largely situate work and learning areas in homes, and incorporate the intermediation of artificial intelligence into most citizen-facing services through telephone announcements or digital bot.

To launch those hypotheses, I find three clues. Firstly, at present, the number of job vacancies for programmers and digital developers triples with the number of other job vacancies. Programmers are inevitably the desired workers of this decade, while the field of Information and Communication Technologies is the unexplored gold mine.

The second runway is the European Union Aid Plan (EU) Next Generation EU. In the budget of EUR 140,446 million allocated to Spain for crisis management, reference is made to two fundamental axes as a condition of mandatory compliance: environmentalism and digitalisation. Experts call Smart City sustainable cities that are expected to be in the future. In them, all public-private services and all relationships interact with digital applications, which will transform ways of understanding transport, health, education and leisure.

The third indication is that companies, both public and private, have benefited financially in recent months. On the one hand, it has been possible to reduce the costs of electricity, wifi or rentals, with a unique formula of “working at home”, expenses that have been assumed by the workers, which has meant a displacement and individualization of costs. On the other hand, the level of productivity has increased overall, and not just because we've brought the workplace into our makeshift home office. In fact, fear and the state of shock are another fundamental variable to consider; the feeling of not having control over everything that happens in the environment has meant an increase in dedication to what we can control, under the logic of “at least not losing the job”.

Going back to my magic ball, I see the images of a society in which unstable life models are the norm. The other day I talked about the loss of stable lives, and a friend of Orereta told me that that “loss” has been a fantasy or an invention of the generations of the last few years, that the generations of their parents and grandparents only knew about instability. A Venezuelan friend said the biggest chaos has been that COVID-19 has reached countries that are not used to living day by day. Episodes of anxiety, dizziness, depression, extreme anger, violence… The social distancing caused by this crisis is having physical and mental consequences for all generations. We have a harsh reality at the extremes: in this new era of communication technologies, no one really feels that they are taking care of him.