Canonical q-deformations in arithmetic geometry

In recent work with Bhatt and Morrow, we defined a new integral p-adic cohomology theory interpolating between etale and de Rham cohomology. An unexpected feature of this cohomology is that in coordinates, it can be computed by a q-deformation of the de Rham complex, which is thus canonical, at least in the derived category. In this short survey, we try to explain what we know about this phenomenon, and what can be conjectured to hold.