The weekend before bars and restaurants closed in New York, I sat on the ground in the park with three friends in a creepy circle—six feet away, six feet away, six feet away. We were just going around saying things we were newly shocked by, really. “I don’t care about anything I cared about a week ago,” I said. “I love Instagram now! And it’s my job not to love Instagram.” I’m supposed to be somewhat critical of basically everything about the internet, but I didn’t think I could do it anymore, given that it was the only thing tethering me to my loved ones, none of whom live in my tiny apartment with me. I said, “Elbow bump! See you later!” to my former roommate as we left the park, and I next saw him on FaceTime.
Everybody loves the internet now. As traditional public life has shut down for much of the population, we’re moving online to stay connected to people we miss, and to raise money for people who need it, and to coordinate all kinds of collective action that can no longer happen in physical places. Since stay-at-home orders began in the United States, use of online platforms has ballooned to the point of absurdity: In a recent blog post, the Zoom CEO, Eric Yuan, said that the service’s number of daily meeting participants had gone from 10 million in December to 200 million in March. Daily usage of Google’s videoconferencing platform is 25 times higher now than it was in January. According to Facebook, messaging across its services was up 50 percent at the end of March in the countries hit h ..
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