Think Tech Tank: Touring the World in the Time of Pandemic

If I were to ask, what did I do during the quarantine period and at the peak of the viral and racial pandemic? I must say that I virtually toured the world with a big purpose. While some of us optimized the perks and privilege of staying at home, perhaps turning our own bubbles into productivity.

As I traveled round the world through the net, bearing the fume of our snail-pace internet speed and ramshackle internet service, my forbearance brought me to video conferencing beautiful minds in six continents and opening up with dialogues in 13 countries (Australia, Chile, Czech Republic, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Thailand, and the United States).

But still, Antartica remains in my bucket list, reserved in the same intellectual wanderlust for the next season of my podcasting on the effects of climate change.

The fulfillment of meeting my colleagues, old and new friends through Zoom, from abroad and locally, endeared the longing to share our talents and help the world in our own little ways.

Yes, I  successfully interviewed in my audio visual conversation 20 global experts, celebrated policy-makers, and top innovators who willingly shared their research, analyses, fears and forecasts amid our fight against the coronavirus disease, racial discrimination, and other important international development and security issues.  

While our medical frontline heroes wrestled with an unfair war, watching from television how people from different walks of life had fallen prey from a monstrous virus and why our world suddenly succumbed into economic recession and depression.

In my insatiable aspiration to contribute to the narratives beyond the world health crisis and chronicle foreign perspectives in our plight to squash the COVID-19, just like an armchair anthropologist poised for virtual ethnographic study, I assembled my small team from the International Development and Security Cooperation (IDSC), a non-profit organization, aimed at advancing development towards a secure world, as they fly with me in this once in a lifetime cognitive adventure in time of a global lockdown.

Capacitating on the knowledge-economy posited by contraction of globalization while embracing the new normal of information dissemination, knowledge production, and remote podcasting. I told my team to beat the handicap of blended learning as we prepare for an online global tour despite tight resources.

Amid the pandemic, we pursued an alternative, balance, independent platform and fair web content offering authentic home-based production in sharing intelligent conversations from premiere academics, analysts, and scientists from around the world. The beginning of a remote think tanking from a global perspective by not only reporting world events and sharing information but offering a plethora of in-depth analyses from expert-to-expert dialogues.  

In spite of serious recorded conversations with full consent from our special guests, a step forward to ethical standards, there were also bloopers and hilarious behind the scenes seen during the productions from technical glitches, internet disaster, sound system deficiency, wardrobe mismatch and to midnight podcasting due to time zone differences. 

We made sure that the content of every podcast conversation from six continents became the heart of our incredible and creative team. It inspired us to tell eclectic stories on international development and security that are not digested much in the media and other reading materials. 

I must commend my good colleague Al Feliciano, a net wizard and ‘E-numan’ buddy after every successful podcast production of the IDSC. 

I would care now how much journalists, researchers, producers and directors would feel every after sad and happy interview. I sobbed and couldn’t sleep after learning from the convo that seventy percent of Peru’s population got infected in public markets by economic reason that majority of them don’t own refrigerator. But by understanding the national culture of cooking daily the food fresh I made some reservations from my biases. 

I couldn't imagine how billion of Indians were barred from going out during the national lockdown as a preventive strategy to survive the pandemic. Happiness shrouded me after Italians waged an all-out war against the coronavirus and successfully flattened the medical curve and sent their message of hope of “andra tutto bene” to the world.

We shared the same disenchantment when Chileans suffered the same plot of cybersecurity crackdown during the COVID-19 or how MENA and South Asia regions wanted to reset its economy after the pandemic. 

Filipino sinologists analysed intently China’s [mis]behaviours on the US-China trade war, Taiwan’s successful mask diplomacy and Hong Kong protests. On the other side of the story, Filipino-American sociologist and criminal justice advocates brought out their inner voices against systemic racism and racial bias in the United States.

In other podcast episodes, our expert commended Vietnam’s proactive measures on contact tracing and sound policies in confronting China in the South China Sea. Another analyst talked about the Philippines’ aspiration for a military self-reliance while preemptive POST-VFA gave us a flat footed yet tough US-PH relations from an American strategist's views. 

It also drew comparative counterterrorism policymaking with an Indonesian terrorism thinker. We understood how Africans seriously dealt with emerging diseases and pandemic in their continent. We also valued how Czech Republic in Central Europe and Thailand in Southeast Asia set the bar on the new normal practices on tourism, business, and innovation.  

As the interviews got multiplied after producing 15 episodes, expanding my virtual travel from different continents, it spread out my horizon in viewing the world in multi-layered but divergent perspectives of our world system. The sizable soundbites can be translated into future online books, webinars, op-eds or news clips, incubation of prospective development projects, and to a certain point, collaborative works suitable for various platforms in online knowledge production.

Australia offered a view on the multiplexity of coalition, Europe saw a repolarization of alliances, Latin America cried for non-polarity of union in its region, Asia adhered to a staggering kind of multilateralism, while North America vied for the splintering of regional order. With all the fluidity of frameworks of the community of nations in post-pandemic, in the end what I wanted to see more is on how our country will cope up from changes of the Anthropogenic world. 

In time of uncertainties, we need to find solace in our will to survive the pandemic until we finally search the vaccine to heal the world altogether .

Finally, thank you to all your support to the IDSC. Looking forward to more talks with colleagues and friends from around the world. Hoping to see you all in SEASON 2 for engaging and enlightening academic conversations!