You Already Live in Quarantine

Against the backdrop of coronavirus uncertainty, the banal normalcy of this reality finally hit me over the weekend: I live this way by default now. I ordered wallpaper online, so I can redecorate my home without even leaving it. A week earlier, Best Buy had already delivered my new television, an irresponsibly huge apparatus I mounted on the wall. I fired it up and loaded in all my accounts: Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime—enough content for a lifetime of excellent, let alone compromised, respiratory health.

Read: I prepared for everything, but not coronavirus on a cruise ship

From the next room, I’ve uploaded this story to Google Docs, where my editor and I have revised it by wire, across whole states. I didn’t meet, or even talk on the phone, with any of my colleagues at The Atlantic who were involved in the process. Like the employees of many media companies, we communicate with one another on Slack, one of O’Hara’s stay-at-home stocks. Together, from afar, we quietly tap away at stories, which you can then read on a screen in any setting you wish—from atop a Peloton saddle, perhaps, or while Netflix streams on the television.

Not everyone gets to make that choice. As my colleague Alexis Madrigal noted last week, the gig workers who handle DoorDash or Amazon deliveries actually have to risk entry into the material world, putting them at far greater risk of contagion. Service-sector workers in retail, health-care, transit, teaching, and housekeeping have even less ability to choose when and where they do their jobs. From the beginning, the safety and security of service and flex workers has taken a back seat to that of the knowledge-economy elites who are their customers. A massive power imbalance is at work here.

There’s peril for white-collar workers, too. Homeboundedness risks becoming an excuse for further belt-tightening, a version of disaster capitalism inspired by contagion rather than economic crisis. If remote learning, work, and leisure prove more profitable or more easily controlled than their in-person equivalents, employers with the means to make temporary shifts permanent might attempt to do so. Eventually, an unseen worker might be seen as an unnecessary one.

Even so, the benefits of a life online have begun to outweigh the costs for some Americans. The flip side of quarantine’s threat is technology’s promise—we have been preparing for the end of in-person work for some time. As this week began, one of my Georgia Tech school chairs encouraged faculty to consider how we might conduct our classes remotely should the need arise. But that possibility is already daily practice. Canvas, an online courseware platform, powers our classes. We hold institutional licenses to videoconferencing services similar to Zoom. And we are invested in large-scale online education, including online degrees that enroll thousands of students all around the world.  

Never before in human history has it been so easy to do so much without going anywhere. Cinema box-office receipts fell sharply in 2019, as streaming entertainment became more plentiful and high quality. Apps and games and podcasts and digitally delivered matter of all kinds have followed suit. Now, absolutely drowning in it, the last thing anyone might worry about is getting bored at home.

Ian Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His latest book is Play Anything.