(Harper’s Magazine) – What were we if not obsessive-compulsive, we who so often traced our origins to a people whose very name, the Puritans, epitomized the perfectionistic delusion underlying this illness? A people so committed to virtue that they’d risked life and limb traversing an ocean to do it their own way, finding refuge at last in the primordial safe space—the great Ball of Anxiety upon a Hill—from which we descend?

Now we’d created a machinery in tech that, abetted by COVID, brought mastery and order beyond the Puritans’ wildest imaginings. Here was control fit to send tremors up Winthrop’s thigh: reality filtered through feeds that weeded out what was noisome, bespoke news that flattered our priors, Ring cameras that screened out [###] people while we slouched indoors consuming it all. Here, starting in 2020, was a lifestyle that reinforced all my worst tendencies—every Zoomified interaction perfectly regimented and timed. (Read More)