It was March 2020 and suddenly I had much more free time on my hands. Presumably you did, too.Â
All the hours we’d otherwise have spent commuting, traveling, or socializing were suddenly ours to fill with other diversions. In hindsight, it’s striking how much we gave over to screentime. That includes all the restless evenings wiled away in the infinite scroll. But even bringing our favorite hobbies and goods and services home entailed logging on.Â
How do you make sourdough starter? Ask the internet.Â
What’s the best recipe for your favorite cocktail? Ask the internet.Â
How do you exercise in your living room with bodyweight or minimal equipment? Ask the internet.Â
With these questions, we gave precious details about ourselves over to the companies that control the information our computers feed to us.Â
And it was through this give and take that I eventually realized our information ecosystem had undergone a transformation. Where the digital-media universe had, for most of its existence, resembled a content archipelago divided by niche, somewhere along the line it had become an amorphous blob, and politics had suffused everything — often in subliminal, insidious ways.
