It’s possible that the nightmare of being too online lifted only temporarily, while we were trapped at our computers, and that the tech backlash might resume its prior course once life returns to “normal.” But I can’t help feeling as though the pandemic has forced us to confront—and overcome—some of the fears that animated the urge to drown our phones in 2019. “The pandemic accelerated how much you can do online,” Maya Georgieva, the director of the XReality Center at the New School, told me recently. Virtual academic gatherings or social events in Second Life didn’t make anybody less human, they just made human interaction more accessible and the day’s demands more manageable. I am so tired of looking at this computer, but I also feel a level of comfort about the internet that I didn’t have before. The difference is that I’ve learned what being online can do for me, and what it can’t. Before the pandemic, my relationship with the internet was defined by compulsion—checking Twitter every time I opened a new tab on my computer, toggling to a burner account to look at my ex-boyfriend’s Instagram Story whenever I had an extra glass of wine. Now I see the internet as a utility, an essential service, but one I use only for specific purposes. If the internet has turned into my gym and my conference room and a concert hall, that means it no longer is a dungeon.