A Wave of Viral Anxiety Washes Over the Internet

I wonder what the “King Lear” of COVID-19 will be. Maybe the woman licking an airplane toilet seat on TikTok?

Shakespeare’s plague streak — he’s believed to have written “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra” in the space of a couple of years — coincided with London playhouses shuttering, acting troupes leaving town to play plague-free villages and the Bard hanging back at home, nothing to do but plot an elaborate series of tragic murders. But Shakespeare was not online. Four hundred years later, isolation doesn’t help to dispel creative distraction — it beckons it. We are sheltering in place with devices designed to amplify diversions and exploit obsessions.

As the virus has spread, it has also ravaged our outlets for sustained creative expression. Theaters have been darkened, exhibitions shuttered, wedding dances postponed, Eurovision canceled. People-watching is out. But bingeing and posting and thumbing incessantly through social media are open for business. In fact, a slavish devotion to our devices has come to feel like a practical necessity. Social media platforms have been unexpectedly reliable in spreading information about the pandemic, and in a time of social isolation, they have spontaneously delivered on their promise of community connectivity.

But they have also ensnared our attention with an alarming grip. The virus has clarified the dark bargain of these devices: We look to them to protect our bodies and soothe our nerves, and in return, we hand over our minds.

By Day 2 of a self-imposed kind-of quarantine, I was pacing my apartment, riding the crests of my anxiety, periodically sucking a thermometer and tapping idly through every content-emitting app on my phone. No crevice of the internet remained untouched by the virus. It has infected the content of beefcake influencers, wellness personalities and cat Twitter. There is surgical glove nail art and a masked makeup tutorial. Everybody is yelling about how to prepare beans and wash your hands. The impulses to signal awareness of the looming public health crisis and to reap the benefits of a coronavirus traffic bump align here. Even puppy rescue Instagrams are starting their captions with phrases like “In this time of uncertainty …”

New coronavirus personalities have been forged: a sophisticated Canadian boy forced to cancel a Disneyland vacation; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s indoor donkey Lulu; Arnold Schwarzenegger’s indoor minihorse Whiskey. Then there is the toilet licker, a TikToker named Ava Louise who once described herself to Dr. Phil as a “skinny legend” and then released a song capitalizing on the moment titled “Skinny Legend Anthem.” Her video represents the apotheosis of coronavirus trolling: a global crisis is filtered through the influencer machine and emerges as a purely self-serving spectacle. “We love a successful PR stunt,” she tweeted recently.

The virus’ effect on the celebrity reputation is wildly unpredictable. Grown-up charming teen actress Vanessa Hudgens turned instantly nefarious when she tousled her curls on Instagram, pitched her voice into a disturbingly cutesy register and said, “Yeah, people are gonna die, and that’s terrible, but also like … inevitable?” (She followed it with what may be the first Notes app apology of the pandemic.)

Meanwhile, Chet Hanks, the rapper son of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson who once called himself Chet Haze and most recently came to public attention after speaking in patois on the Golden Globes red carpet, appeared strangely lovable when he appeared shirtless on Instagram to address his parents’ COVID-19 diagnoses. (“What’s up everyone, it’s true, my parents got coronavirus, crazy.”)

Virus content finally reached Jared Leto’s feed Tuesday, when he emerged from a 12-day desert silent meditation retreat and tweeted, “Wow.”

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These offerings, under normal online conditions, might produce a spike of intellectual or emotional activity. Chet Hanks should prompt a reflection on the wonders of human reproduction; miniversions of regular-sized animals are thrilling. But they are all tied so inextricably to punishingly anxious online behavior that they seem to function purely on the level of stimulation. They evoke nothing but the low buzz of distraction from the invisible threat surrounding us.

Even flashes of online inspiration swiftly flicker and dim. The voraciousness of the meme, which instantly seizes fresh content and leaches it of meaning, has taken on an unsettling quality in the time of literal virality. Soon after quarantined Italians took to their balconies to sing the national anthem in unison, people made memes replacing the anthem with American pop songs. A doctored video of the Italians singing Katy Perry’s song “Roar” prompted Perry to tweet, “You cannot break the human spirit.” When she capped it with an emoji of the Hungarian flag, she just about broke mine.

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It’s interesting that those who are holed up with their phones, isolating themselves for the greater good, seem drawn to representations of the careless. Images of packed spring break beaches and New York City restaurants are bandied about Twitter with grotesque fascination. I’ve watched the video of the 21-year-old immunocompromised St. Patrick’s Day parade reveler who is “not even worried because I take supplements and I self-medicate” about 20 times. The toilet-licker haunts me. Sharing these images provides a vicarious thrill while making us feel as if we have done a public service.

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Any Instagram-induced envy we used to feel while lurking on vacationers’ feeds has been seamlessly converted into moral superiority. Though coronavirus content feels inescapable to the masses hunkering at home, unbothered crowds persist outside the sphere of influence of online scolds, which only drives some to scream louder into the void.

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A rare content oasis can be discovered on TikTok, a medium forged through a more quotidian kind of social isolation. The visual grammar of TikTok was developed by teenagers messing around alone in their childhood bedrooms, and so the platform has adapted easily to the quarantine, serving up videos of dogs running errands and unsettled house cats and “online learning” jokes that are oddly soothing in their effect. Whatever may be happening outside, life on TikTok feels oddly unchanged.

But life has changed, in ways we are only beginning to understand. One reason we are so consumed with representations of coronavirus, dousing our brains in it like a kind of mental sanitizer, is that the view from our homes is still so limited. We are mentally unprepared for the changes to daily life that will unfold over the next several months. The virus is weeks ahead of our testing capabilities and perhaps years ahead of a vaccine. The virus is invisible to us, but it can track us down seemingly anywhere.

Perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to this video of a penguin waddling around the halls of an aquarium, perusing its exhibits like a human being. When Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium closed to visitors, it let a penguin named Wellington out of his enclosure and introduced him to the other side. In the video, he looks stutteringly behind him at his handler, flaps his wings and ventures up to the glass, where he examines the fish of the Amazon. He is on dry land but has a full view of the water’s depths.

I don’t know how penguins think or what Wellington feels, but as a character in a video for human viewing, he imparts the sensation of vicarious enlightenment. He has leveled up to a new plane of aquarium knowledge. Finally, he can see the other animals as he himself was once seen. He can observe their patterns and movements from a vantage point of near omniscience. Watching Wellington gives the feeling of a vast unknown being spontaneously revealed. Must be nice.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .