A backcasting exercise

In order to build the world where my short story is set, I’ve carried out a backcasting exercise to reconstruct how we could end up in such a scenario, given the present conditions. This exercise does not aim to be a future prediction, but it rather aims to describe plausible social, political, economic, cultural and environmental events that may lead us to that specific scenario. 2020 With the COVID-19 becoming a pandemic, various lockdowns follow one another all over the planet to fight the spread of the virus. The European Union approves NextGenerationEU, an impressive stimulus package meant to rebuild a post-COVID-19 Europe, with a strong focus on digitalization and the fight against climate change [1]. Homeschooling and homeworking become the new normality, with public and private organizations increasingly relying on booming private digital services (e.g., Zoom) [2] to operate. Ransomware globally hit at an unprecedented rate. According to conservative estimates of the group IB, the global financial damage from ransomware operations amounts to over US$1 billion, but the actual damage is likely to be much higher [3].