Illustrations: Jon Han

After the Virus

How works from the Bible to ‘Epidemics and Society’ to ‘The Shock Doctrine’ can help predict our post-pandemic future

Brian Merchant
Published in
35 min readMay 27, 2020

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According to the Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, there have been only four phenomena in the course of modern human history that have ever rendered our societies more equal in any sustainable fashion. Three of the four involve violent…

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Brian Merchant

Senior editor, OneZero, books, futures, fiction. Author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, founder of Terraform @ Motherboard @ VICE.