The ATOB Event

Everything felt the same until the day of the ATOB.

Politicians were still corrupt, nepotism, autocracy, constitutional crisis were  still there worldwide.
People still had enemies to fear. By then, Democratic Socialist Networks were the threat; Demoretia became the new enemy.

After the Trumpism era, smarter minds than you and me came up with the idea of creating an online decision making platform which could help citizens vote, contribute, and come to a consensus in a very dynamic and faster way than traditional policy making. Politicians called it Modern Neo-Communism. And after the catastrophe, they started calling it the Yellow scare. Of course at the beginning it was pretty small, an extreme leftist movement that no one took seriously. Until they came up with a business model to coach and replace traditional decision making processes in everyday businesses.
Slowly, they joined other movements like Lean, Agile, Design Thinking, Holacracy, and other frameworks trying to help large corporations be less autocratic and tyrannical, and be able to adapt faster to the trends of the future, delivering quickly by giving back power to their teams.
It was all about collaborating, not competing. By that time, they were still taught at school the highest scores and recognitions went to those who were the smartest and pulled themselves through the toughest of tests. They were all avoiding the fact that their slowest links would always drag them down. A few schools were more collaborative and dynamic, but again, they were few and not really scaled up to colleges and graduate classes. They preferred designing mechanisms to discard the students that were the slowest, to deter them from collaborating, even when they worked hard enough to earn the same recognition of their peers.

Back then, it was always about being the best, the richest, the most certified, the most qualified. Attributes such as fast learning, fast failure, emotional intelligence, introspection, teamwork, and coaching were always left on a second plane. Little by little, corporations, organizations, colleges, schools, agencies, all started highly appreciating those extra skills over the previous ones.
The results were more humble leaders, and productive teams, more coaches looking to help one another instead of beating them out of the game.

Collaboration is what saved us.

We mustn't forget that year was the worst of the past decades for chaotic extreme weather. Records broke everywhere, from methane gases in the atmosphere, CO2 levels, prolonged ice cap disappearance, the year for most hurricanes and typhoons out of traditional scales, the most blizzards in a year. Even before the catastrophe happened, it was still being called the most destructive year in the 21st century due to the monetary losses and properties destroyed worldwide. It was still part of the new normal, people and politicians expected them with bills and special funds and charity events.

That year was also the most destructive in nature; as fires razed forests, nearby buildings and small towns, illegal and unreported deforestation spilled millions of metric tones of CO2 in one of the worst Greenhouse gas leaks of recent years.
Humanity still had to pay for the death and destruction that super hurricanes, hyper typhoons, floods, wildfires, and mega blizzards were causing worldwide. The sunk costs were irrefutable. It was becoming more and more expensive to repair and rebuild than to actually invest in mitigating extreme weather sooner rather than later.

The was until the catastrophe happened, after that, it became the most destructive year in all of recorded human history.

Humanity was barely surviving it. New laws were passed, others rejected. But there was no global or local institution that enforced them. Europe and Asia were still pretty advanced towards their caping of greenhouse emissions, with the Americas slowly trailing behind. The food industry was moving slowly towards Cultured foods, most of the European meat industry was being pushed by these new policies, but they were being rejected by other countries that depended heavily on their factory farming industries.
Renewable Energy technology was already proven to efficiently provide as much energy for large countries as from non-renewable sources, however some large countries still discarded renewable energy laws even as it was established as a basic Human Right at the United Nations.
New agreements appeared, corporate lobbying was banned in some places, new laws passed to give more power to the people, but at the end humanity already had passed their point of no return a long time ago. What used to be called Climate change and Global warming was not alarming enough to the largest countries of the world.