Right now in the 21st century, as the stock market climbs to all-time highs, as the Wall Street machine peddles the “sto

Not that people aren’t trying. The ultimate digital escape fantasy would require some seriously perverse enforcement of privilege. Anything to prevent the unwashed masses — the folks working in the meat processing plants, Amazon warehouses, UPS trucks, or not at all — from violating the sacred bounds of our virtual amnionic sacs. Sure, we can replace the factory workers with robots and the delivery people with drones, but then they’ll even have less at stake in maintaining our digital retreats.

He went on to explain his core problem with the Media Lab and the digital universe these technology pioneers were envisioning: “They want to recreate the womb.” As Leary the psychologist saw it, the boys building our digital future were developing technology to simulate the ideal woman — the one their mothers could never be. Unlike their human mothers, a predictive algorithm could anticipate their every need in advance and deliver it directly, removing every trace of friction and longing. These guys would be able to float in their virtual bubbles — what the Media Lab called “artificial ecology” — and never have to face the messy, harsh reality demanded of people living in a real world with women and people of color and even those with differing views.

No, of course we’ll never get there. Climate, poverty, disease, and famine don’t respect the “guardian boundary” play space defined by the Oculus VR’s user preferences. Just as the billionaires can never, ever truly leave humanity behind, none of us can climb back into the womb. When times are hard, sure, take what peace and comfort you can afford. Use whatever tech you can get your hands on to make your kid’s online education work a bit better. Enjoy the glut of streaming media left over from the heyday of the Netflix-Amazon-HBO wars.

I can’t help but see the dismantling of the Post Office as a last-ditch attempt to keep the majority from piercing the bubbles of digital privilege through something as simple as voting. Climb to safety and then pull the ladder up after ourselves. No more voting, no more subsidized delivery of alternative journalism (that was the original constitutional purpose for a fully funded post office). So much the better for the algorithms streaming us the picture of the world we want to see, uncorrupted by imagery of what’s really happening out there. (And if it does come through, just swipe left, and the algorithms will know never to interrupt your dream state with such real news again.)

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vered in the Drimolen Paleo Cave System showed no indication of any violence between the three, indicating that they lived in peace and harmony. The coincidence of three species living in the area could be because of the migration of one or more species due to environmental factors. Much later they could have shifted to other faraway places, scattering their populations across the globe.

But what if we don’t have to know about the chaos in the world? That’s the real promise of digital technology. We can choose which cable news, Twitter feeds, and YouTube channels to stream — the ones that acknowledge the virus and its impacts or the ones that don’t. We can choose to continue wrestling with the civic challenges of the moment, such as whether to send kids back to school full-time, hybrid, or remotely. Or — like some of the wealthiest people in my own town — we can form private “pods,” hire tutors, and offer our kids the kind of customized, elite education we could never justify otherwise. “Yes, we are in a pandemic,” one pod education provider explained to the Times. “But when it comes to education, we also feel some good may even come out of this.”

Looking back at history, it’s no surprise that today’s economic system produces a vast array of hardships, injustices, and inequalities. Century after century, dictators, bureaucrats, even convicted murderers, have commandeered the financial system, abolishing sound money principles to siphon off wealth for themselves. But no matter what empire, state, or nation the elites have come to rule over, each time, they lay the foundations for an inevitable collapse, corrupting the value of money, and destroying the currency they have bent to their will.

I remember back around 1990, when psychedelics philosopher Timothy Leary first read Stewart Brand’s book The Media Lab, about the new digital technology center MIT had created in its architecture department. Leary devoured the book cover to cover over the course of one long day. Around sunset, just as he was finishing, he threw it across the living room in disgust. “Look at the index,” he said, “of all the names, less than 3% are women. That’ll tell you something.”

For there’s the real rub with digital isolation — the problem those billionaires identified when we were gaming out their bunker strategies. The people and things we’d be leaving behind are still out there. And the more we ask them to service our bubbles, the more oppressed and angry they’re going to get. No, no matter how far Ray Kurzweil gets with his artificial intelligence project at Google, we cannot simply rise from the chrysalis of matter as pure consciousness. There’s no Dropbox plan that will let us upload body and soul to the cloud. We are still here on the ground, with the same people and on the same planet we are being encouraged to leave behind. There’s no escape from the others.

But don’t let this passing — yes, passing — crisis fool you into buying technology’s false promise of escaping from humanity to play video games alone in perpetuity. Our Covid-19 isolation is giving us a rare opportunity to see where this road takes us and to choose to use our technologies to take a very different one.

I get it. And if I had younger children and could afford these things, I might even be tempted to avail myself of them. But all of these “solutions” favor those who have already accepted the promise of digital technology to provide what the real world has failed to do. Day traders, for instance, had already discovered the power of the internet to let them earn incomes safely from home using nothing but a laptop and some capital. Under the pandemic, more people are opening up online trading accounts than ever, hoping to participate in the video game version of the marketplace. Meanwhile, some of the world’s most successful social media posses are moving into luxurious “hype houses” in Los Angeles and Hawaii, where they can livestream their lifestyles, exercise routines, and sex advice — as well the products of their sponsors — to their millions of followers. And maybe it’s these young social media enthusiasts, thriving more than ever under pandemic conditions, who most explicitly embody the original promise of digital technology to provide for our every need.

Many of us once swore off Amazon after learning of the way it evades taxes, engages in anti-competitive practices, or abuses labor. But here we are, reluctantly re-upping our Prime delivery memberships to get the cables, webcams, and Bluetooth headsets we need to attend the Zoom meetings that now constitute our own work. Others are reactivating their long-forgotten Facebook accounts to connect with friends, all sharing highly curated depictions of their newfound appreciation for nature, sunsets, and family. And as we do, many of us are lulled further into digital isolation — being rewarded the more we accept the logic of the fully wired home, cut off from the rest of the world.

But don’t let this passing — yes, passing — crisis fool you into buying technology’s false promise of escaping from humanity to play video games alone in perpetuity. Our Covid-19 isolation is giving us a rare opportunity to see where this road takes us and to choose to use our technologies to take a very different one.

The pool for my daughter wouldn’t have gotten here were it not for legions of Amazon workers behind the scenes, getting infected in warehouses or risking their health driving delivery trucks all summer. As with FreshDirect or Instacart, the externalized harm to people and places is kept out of sight. These apps are designed to be addictively fast and self-contained — push-button access to stuff that can be left at the front door without any human contact. The delivery people don’t even ring the bell; a photo of the package on the stoop automagically arrives in the inbox. Like with Thomas Jefferson’s ingenious dumbwaiter, there are no signs of the human labor that brought it.

And so the New York Times is busy running photo spreads of wealthy families “retreating