The advent of endless streaming content, high-speed internet, and screens everywhere, means that confinement is far less unpleasant than it would otherwise be. This seems dangerous, because it makes people far more complacent about forced isolation, forced separation, and forced quarantine. They’ve got their screens, so the loss of freedom doesn’t sting as much as it could and should. And for the people screaming the loudest for endless lockdowns, they were shut-ins to begin with.
The writers for corporate press, the social media addicts, the people whose existence is spent almost entirely in front of a screen, who make their living do so, are the ones providing support for unending pandemic authoritarianism. It doesn’t cost them anything, they feel the deprivation, and they may even have resented all along the people who have actual lives away from screens, a life lived at least partly outdoors, with friends and family and face-to-face interactions.
And these people with real lives in turn have a far less active online presence, which means that their opinions about the entire charade are not made widely known. They don’t have time to troll social media, enforcing a hollow appearance of virtue with inexhaustible vitriol.
The people providing a faux consent for endless lockdowns are the ones for whom “lockdown” means absolutely nothing.
