I HAVE LONG described the internet as my ‘home’. As an anthropologist who used to constantly be on the road, the internet was my comfort and my constant amid the chaos of travel. But the risk of going online during this era of late-stage capitalism is that calamity is always nearby.

I remember in the mid 2000s when my cohort started to abandon the instant messaging platform IRC in favour of MSN Messenger. The large online communities I had fostered and invested in with other pseudonymous strangers across several IRC channels were replaced by dyadic chats and small groups of mutual friends curated in my contact list. (I still miss the intimacy of pseudonymity. I treasure my IRC handles to this day.)