Apocalypse Salon: Sharing Art and Ideas During Lockdown

A popular coronavirus meme floating around online this week went something like this: “As we self-quarantines from coronavirus, we spend much of our time watching movies, reading novels, and listening to music. This is a reminder that, in times of crisis, we turn to artists.”

But that’s only partly true. A better aphorism would be: “In times of crisis, we turn to technology to give us access to artists’ content.” Especially now, we’re not going to the town square to hear a poetry reading or a live music performance. Instead, we’re downloading ebooks from Amazon and logging into Netflix.

That could be the end of the story, but it’s not. Technology is also bringing back the proverbial town square itself, giving us virtual meeting places where we can interact with artists in real time. This technology has existed for a while now. Skype was launched in 2003, FaceTime in 2010, Facebook Live and Instagram Stories in 2016. But I’ve never before seen such an explosion of enthusiasm, among artists and audiences, to join together in virtual town squares.

On March 25th, for example, while working from home, I jumped into a virtual town square for the inaugural Apocalypse Salon. Hosted by futurists Rachel Haywire and Brittney Mickel, Apocalypse Salon was a gathering of artists and thinkers on Zoom. The…