Never mind The Great Reset. Here comes The Great Reject.

It occurred to me that I never did finish the final instalment of last summer's Jackpot Chronicles, wherein I posited four possible post-Covid scenarios.

For a quick refresher, The Jackpot is concept I cribbed from William Gibson. It's a term he uses across a few of his near-future cyberpunk novels that describes a series of rolling global catastrophes that set in sometime around 2016 (his stories span multiverses, and timelines, but the common theme is that somewhere around 2016, some kind of irrevocable glitch in the matrix occurred that put a permanent end to normalcy as it has been understood up until that point).

If there was a Jackpot, whatever it was, it could arguably have happened at many points throughout the 20th century, or if we wanted to confine our speculation to the 21st century then, 9/11 or the GFC would do. Everything after that being symptomatic as opposed to causal.

And then… 2020 and COVID hit. That's when the fabric of time cleaves us into the before times and The Jackpot.

The other post-pandemic scenarios from the rest of my Jackpot series were:

Force Majeure: The wheels come off completely and the system comes unglued. Mad Max.

Tin Foil Hat: It really is one Big Conspiracy and we're into a New World Order.

The Great Bifurcation: The middle class gets wiped out and we get a two-tier society

I had thought the fourth scenario would be the one themed Deglobalization, and to a certain extent it still is. In the original outline I described that Deglobalization:

"Is where multi-national corporations, so shaken from this Near Death Experience, realizing their error of betting the farm on just-in-time supply chains, labour cost arbitrage and having zero buffers, begin pulling manufacturing back home.