Thread by @SamAdlerBell

I’ve thought a lot over the past few years about the relationship between privacy and justice, selfhood and community. Tried to summarize some of that in here. ssense.com/en-us/editoria…

I’ve wondered from the beginning of the pandemic how to derive solidarity from an ethical demand for isolation. I think a similar problem has dogged tech-lash debates about social media. A mismatch between our desires (and needs) and the ethos of digital privacy.

When it comes to online, we clearly want what makes us sick. But the healthier practices often seem to sublimate rather than alleviate our symptoms, a new way of experiencing our sickness.

Like Carole White in Todd Haynes’s SAFE, we find ourselves embracing cures that exacerbate our real predicament (loneliness, estrangement, fear of contamination by the other). ssense.com/en-us/editoria…

Anyway, I didn’t get to talk about it much in the essay (and it’s difficult to do), but I see some of the same thing in the way some of us, especially people of means, are dealing with the pandemic — where obsessive fear of infection can be both prudent and neurotic.

A pandemic whose worst effects were the consequence of segregation and inequality, a society that disdains weakness and fragility, cannot be solved by rich folks in the suburbs becoming more fearful of other people, more self-satisfied in their solipsism.

The cure isn’t worse than the disease, but it is exacerbating the conditions that gave it rise. The only term or ethic that feels capable of escaping this trap, to me, is “care.” Care for others, embracing our vulnerability and theirs.

(Whereas “safety,” like “privacy,” feels totally inadequate. Neither were really available to most of us before or since, and often, the preservation of both — for the wealthy and ensconced — has come at our expense.)