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I think people are driven by a very casual kind of determinism — gradually adopted in the course of their middlebrow educations (which blames capitalism, which blame structures of oppression, which gestures towards history without really articulating a theory of history, which references with history without actually understanding of the historical record, which references economics without really engaging and economics in a deeper way). So behavior during COVID is or was predictable based on what many actually believed going into COVID: that there are these big structures that make authentic life impossible and that we should all sort of just perpetually ride out the storm from a snug living room somewhere; and that, importantly, the government hates people and is trying to ruin their lives along with corporations, who really rule. All one can really do is submit complain—go along with things while inwardly feeling bad about it. Self quarantines are nihilists. What else could they be? They think of themselves as participating in upholding a social contract, but really, they’re retreating from it, retreating from bonds of mutual risk, from exposing themselves to other people’s corporeal humanity. Having already themselves in the web of information, having accepted a redefined ontology in which everything is information, people have no problem staying home, locked into and onto their screens. So it’s no wonder that people…
