As we are increasingly prompted to convert all our social and interpersonal dealings into a virtual, through-the-internet verisimilitude replication of the lives that we used to lead, some kind of existence that is ethereally Matrix-like, it is important to remember how the internet was built for data-scraping and surveillance. Amazon, with its strange history and ties to the U.S. Military and intelligence communities, already knows far too much about everyone already, and our encouraged wholesale retreat into manifesting our interactions in exclusively digitally ways will only be making the big internet monopolies more formidably ginormous and powerful. A lot of us now find ourselves on Zoom conferencing discovering its merits as one of the prime candidates for virtual meeting options– Zoom sends your data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account– And Facebook has a record of coordinating, Big Brother style, with groups like the Atlantic Council and Cambridge Analytica that affected the 2016 election. Let’s also remember that internet technology, knowing what it knows about us as it collects information about us for that purpose, can manipulate us as well. It is routinely hired out to do so.
Heretofore, some of the antidote for the control of control and ubiquity of the internet was to take a break and go where the internet’s reach and influence might peter out: Have face-to-face, peer-to-peer personal interactions, read physical vs. digital books, assemble together in real meetings, assemblies and forums, listen to and support the kind of live radio that the internet cannot squelch, censor or take away. It is part of the reason that I, as a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries have been fighting for the continuation of traditional libraries with physical books and trained human being librarians. . . It is part of the reason I support WBAI radio, 99.5 FM, the Pacifica station in New York that is New York City's only truly listener supported public radio station.
. . . You may have noticed that a spin-off of the coronaviris effects has been the closure of most libraries. We would hope that this is not subsequently cited as additional evidence that this public commons is a public asset society can now dispense with. Meanwhile, the public’s habits of hanging out in the shallower digital internet world will, perforce, be reinforced as we live protecting ourselves from the virus.
. . . With the emphasis on digital substitution you may not have noticed that lock downs and new rules against groups of more than a certain number of people gathering, for instance restricting groups to no more than ten, leaves by the wayside the First Amendment right of assembly guaranteed by the Constitution. Why was the right of public assembly one of the first enumerated rights? Seasoned activists are well acquainted with the fact that when opposing war, or agitating for rights including, for instance, healthcare, the clicking of Facebook posts to like them or even generating acerbically astute and insightful Tweets, just doesn’t cut it and hardly equals the impact of crowds getting out into the streets.
We are also in the middle of a national election. I recently joked (before some of the new really strict new controls) that those in power were coming up with a prohibition on future Bernie Sanders’s rallies, but that they weren’t bothering with an equivalent rule for Joe Biden rallies because Biden doesn’t draw any crowds. Is there a virtual substitute for the formidably energetic Bernie troops knocking on doors; something they will not now be able to do? Telephone calls are not the same as face-to-face knocking on doors.
Nothing is the same as face-to-face and knocking on doors because human beings were not built for virtual existences. We are social animals designed for the social bonds that come from real interactions. When we are infants, the mother holding the child generates the hormone oxytocin, which promotes the bond between the mother and child. Same thing when a father holds the baby. It is a physical thing. The same hormones are generated when owners pet their pets, in both the pet owner and the pet.
Oxytocin from human closeness not only generates, builds and strengthens the bonds between human beings, it actually confers benefits like building up the immune system, calming us, and making us more capable. It is ironic that, as we go into isolation to avoid getting sick with the coronavirus, we may actually, through our isolation and physical separation, be weakening our immune system’s ability to respond to and for us to survive the virus if we get infected. . . Thinking about how important human physical touch is, holding a hand, giving and receiving a hug, I feel, in depth and achingly for the afflicted patients who must recover separated and physically apart from their loved ones.
When email took over as the new default method of communication, the phenomenon of “flaming” was widely recognized as an unfortunate byproduct. Email communications, and some internet communications can be launched instantaneously with the press of a button. It’s not like a letter that sits around to be mailed the next day when more sober instincts might prevail. With the disinhibition of not dealing with another person face to face, communications can be extra harsh, especially if exchanges back and forth escalate into a “flame war.” Even face-to-face communication can be hard; you have to realize and know what you want to say; you have to say what you actually mean; other people have to hear what you actually say and they have to understand, without misinterpretation or incorrect filled-in suppositions, what you actually mean. All of these things are harder over the internet without all the moment-to-moment micro-adjustments you can make speaking to somebody face to face as you intuitively sense from another’s physical body in the room responding, the ongoing success as opposed to misdirection of your communication.
Added to this is the way that our ongoing fear-based enforced physical separation from others can enhance our suspicions of others. We walk through the streets now socially distancing each other and maintaining six-feet gaps like wary gunslingers in a Hollywood western. Fear turns on our lizard brains, and these distances can enhance the instincts toward unhealthy “othering.” This comes just at a time when the obvious solution to get through our current crisis is more community cross-support for resilience. Covid-19 could not be a more perfect and obvious “my health is your health/your health is my health” argument for Medicare for all. With massive, nationwide layoffs because of the Covid-19 health crisis, millions of Americans are now losing their “if you like your private employer health plan, you can keep it,” health insurance right at the time when they need it most. This is notwithstanding Joe Biden’s very recent statement that if the Democrats pass Medicare for all he will veto it if he is elected president. . .
In many ways, Americans are now in a particularly vulnerable time if anyone wants to deploy the typical kind of divide and conquer tactics that neutralize the public’s ability to organize for common goals and make our democracy work. One of the most valuable big picture overviews available right now about the way things stand is Naomi Klein's Intercept video about the fork in the road decisions ahead of us as we face the Coronavirus crisis (Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It): Either we could go the route of improving and making our society more resilient the way FDR did in dealing with the Depression of the 1930s, or, instead, another round of disaster capitalism maneuvers could be effected. We know that the 2008 financial crisis was mishandled by pumping money into wealthy investment funds, banks, and corporations at exactly the time that asset prices were low and temporarily suppressed, prices for things like the homes of people in the Main Street economy, and those assets and homes were then bought up by those hedge funds, banks and corporations. . . It was one of the greatest wealth transfers ever, increasing wealth inequality in America. Plus it was paid for with taxpayer money. The people who lost their homes paid the taxes that financed those tilted economy buy ups that deprived them of ownership.
It's exceedingly hard to maintain a big picture consciousness when news about the virus is frenetically reported with rotating reports of the very latest statistics in different countries, different cities, different regions of different countries, the world, and then starting over again at the beginning for updates because by the time the end of the list is reached, the numbers have already up-ticked. Alternatively, a fairly good big picture overview doesn't require drowning in the latest moment to moment statistical data: our health care system is at the point of being overwhelmed, the United States is in many ways inexcusably ill prepared for such a pandemic; and, additionally, we are not doing many of the sensible things we could be doing, and yes. . . people should be cautious One day, a time may come when we look back at 2020 and say, "that was a very peculiar election–how do that ever happen?"; and if, as we might hope, the virus finally exits center stage and exact memories of it recede just the way we now have to work to remind ourselves of the 1918 flu (which occurred during the Midterm elections of President Woodrow Wilson's wartime presidential tenure), we may answer: "Oh, that's right, that was during the coronavirus crisis when we were so all distracted and worried about other things."
The coronavirus crisis feels a lot like the 2008 financial crisis and 9/11 wrapped up into one. It is worth remembering how with the distractions of 9/11 (and the tag-team Anthrax attacks that closely followed), we, as a nation, just as with the 2008 financial crisis, also made a series of really bad decisions as we were distracted from big picture truths.
There are silver linings to our new world. Families where parents are now working at home are spending more time together, building stronger bonds. They are experiencing the opposite effect of the separation and isolation that is making our larger world feel so relentlessly dystopian these days. Some may even experience the new quieting down as meditative, and it may feel as if there is also some shift away from things materialistic. We may feel closer to some essential truths about what is truly valuable. That is not to say that all family groups have equal tools to deal with what could feel like a pressure cooker of forced togetherness.
Not everybody has a family that they live with, and that can be unfortunate. For many their sense ongoing family and human togetherness was achieved by getting out in the world and physically spending time communing with other people. The virtual is an inferior substitute: Before the virus ever arrived, it has been noted how often people who spend a great deal of their time on platforms like Facebook for their companionship and for their “friends” can wind up depressed.
One last good thing to note is that it does seem that we are, for the most part, presently being good to each other despite the human separations being forced on us and the digital substitutions being offered for our existence. Hopefully, still being good to each other, we will all be communally together again, in a real physical sense, soon.
