Imagine for a second that it’s the late 20th century. William Gibson published Neuromancer, propelling “cyberspace” into the cultural lexicon just as his impossibly cool universe of CyberPunk hackers threatened to digitize their consciousness onto your Lenovo ThinkPad with the next leap of Moore's Law. Jerone Lanier, dreadlocked, vatic, designs the first commercial VR headset a year later. The first ISP arrived shortly after. As Sean Monohan put it, instead of “checking our socials,” we would be “surfing the web” and BlackMirror wouldn’t air its first episode on BBC’s Channel 4 until 2011.

In 3 BC (Before Corona, 2017), Geert Lovink wrote: “our disillusionment with the internet is fact.” The earnest buzz around digital detoxing seemed to capture a cultural malaise in which most users had long since abandoned the illusion of a truly social, social media. Facebook had seen a terminal decline in active posting and most Millenials I know in their twenties were using Instagram to graze content rather than create it. Gen-Z, immersed in the digital wilderness since birth in some cases, retreated into the safety of Snapchat’s disappearing message. Living online during the twenty-teens could feel like a bad case of digital-Stockholm syndrome.

But In 0 AC? not so much. The internet is 1989 again and it’s time to party -- at a distance. Though we might still slide into feed-scrolling in our idle hours, the story of the internet during COVID is the story of live chats, live streams, video calls, and open-world gaming. When was the last time you were such an active user? Stuck inside, each of us gravitates towards the best simulation of the thing we miss. It came as a surprise to me that isolation and the subsequent infrastructure of Discord channels erected by friends brought me closer to many of them than I’ve been in years. But the new intimacy graphs like an asymptote: the paradox of closing the distance with people you never actually touch.

Some writers have witnessed the great pilgrimage back to the screen with horror. The normative concern for whether tech mediated communication ever can (or ever should) replace face-to-face contact is well taken, even if it misses the opportunity to see this moment as an inventory of effects. When technology is relied on for all social functions, as it is now, our relationship to it becomes far more complex and certainly more interesting.

Video games in late April of 2020 are a spectacular macrocosm of escape. As IRL shrinks to the size of a house, apartment, room, games are the teeth by which to bite a hole in the world and climb out. Animal Crossing’s explosive sales numbers and the resurgence of the open-world survival genre (Space Engineers, Minecraft) demonstrate an emotional demand not just for connection, but for propriety and the routine of work. Those living alone or forced back into homes with family -- and many who couldn’t leave in the first place, trapped by rising rents and student debt -- reprise a simulated ownership through the sweat equity of grinding. No backyard for gardening? Harvest shiny little fruits off the floor of your Animal Crossing island and revel in the therapy that comes with watching the crops grow. If you can’t afford a house, you can still build one out of Minecraft’s voxel cubes. My Minecraft house is beautiful, too. It’s immaculate and spacious, unlike the room my body lives in. The trouble is you can’t sleep there.

By this time Sunday (the 26th), the stay-at-home order will be lifted (prematurely according to medical professionals) and the weeks spent indoors will lose their immediacy, replaced by the reality of a post-pandemic recession. Perhaps this brief, involuntary experience of virtualized social life will inspire a new set of priorities for the kinds of platforms and online communities we inhabit; or extend beyond the digital to an appreciation of public space and renewed interest in local forms of community. I hope so. But what’s also certain is that economic fallout radiating from the contagion will demand our sustained activism and organizing, not escape. Artificial approximations of core material needs -- homeownership, a job -- while serviceable stand-ins under the unique conditions of lockdown, were always a short-term survival strategy at best. At worst, a seductive opiate reached for again and again.

The American Dream with Chinese Characteristics