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+Another lockdown, another bonanza for Amazon and Co. Will we hear soon how the government will be introducing a windfall tax to help pay for the losses on the high street? What will Labour say about this?
 
+I seem to have spent the best part of this weekend on the laptop, on Zoom in particular. On Friday I participated in the final session of a CityLit online course called Religion and Nothingness, the Kyoto School, which was enjoyable and testing at the same time, and interestingly resonated somewhat with my dipping in and out of the Freiraum Festival, hosted by the Goethe Institute from its Greek outpost in Thessaloniki. This, over the weekend considered issues relating to the state of democracy in a digital/pandemic period, and how art may respond. I also ‘attended’ a Zoom Labour Grassroots meeting which dealt with Corbyn’s suspension. All in all, lots to think about, but I’m not going to dwell on it now since I think I need to stop staring at a bright screen and give the eyes a rest. But perhaps the one question that arises from all this is what—when and if it comes about—will the ‘new normal’ look like? With technologies like Zoom, will there be the same incentive to physically go to meetings? Not least if we get used to the idea that people from different countries and continents can interact at the same time? Then there is the issue of how such interactions will be increasingly monetised and surveilled. The pandemic is the great digital accelerator. Some of the consequences of this digital atomisation of society, if that is indeed the prevailing trend was well foreseen by E.M. Forster in his short story The Machine Stops. We might do well to reread it.