A Year of Zoom Genitals, Bourbon Bottles & Child-Rearing
Five Memorable URLs from COVID Season One (aka the last 12 months)
March 11th was “COVID Day One” for many folks, or at least when it crossed from “will this be a big deal?” to “this is a big deal” for America. While much of Silicon Valley was already curtailing travel and starting to work from home, zeitgeist watchers note a perfect storm of the NBA suspending their season, Tom Hanks being diagnosed as positive, WHO declaring a global pandemic and He Which Shall Not Be Named implementing a travel ban (actually a good idea) as the starting point for “this isn’t just the flu.”
Reading Maya Kosoff’s ‘Lost Year’ essay as part of Medium’s Pandemic Reflections made me consider my own past 12 months. Because of my love for this thing we call the World Wide Web, I’m going to do my own reminiscing via Five Links.
The COVID Tracking Project
An oasis in a misinformation desert, the COVID Tracking Project started very ad hoc but was always authoritative and reliable in trying to understand the illness’ spread. Good data helped put so much in perspective: that this thing was running wild, that it was disproportionately impacting vulnerable communities and geographies and that outside of vaccines, the spread *could* be managed via safety practices.
As the numbers got larger and we almost numbed to the milestones, I stopped focusing on the quantitative and transitioned to the qualitative, namely how to emotionally support my family and my community. The COVID Tracking Project will discontinue updating on its first anniversary (March 7, 2021) but it was one of the URLs that defined my first year of COVID.
When Casey Newton & I Got Zoombombed
Early on this whole WFH thing was kinda silly and fun in the tech industry. People were adjusting to a life of video conferencing (remember when dogs and babies jumping into the frame was novel!), and along with my friend Casey, there were two weeks we ran 5pm Zoom Happy Hours with guests and fun and surprises.
One memorable happy hour involved a Zoombombing where, because we’d left the event link public, some troll took control of the screen and started showing really graphic porn videos. Subsequently Zoom ended up changing a bunch of meeting defaults to prevent this sort of misbehavior and I turned down all…
