https://www.wired.com/story/the-new-intimacy-brought-to-you-by-covid-19/

More than a century ago, the British writer E. M. Forster published a parable about the solitary endgame of technological progress. In his story, “The Machine Stops,” the humans of the far future live underground in isolated cells, with all of life mediated through an omnipotent computer—the Machine. In this hive-like complex, Forster writes, “people never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete.” Contact with others is controlled through buttons in one’s cell, which activate Forster’s prescient vision of video calling. He describes how one inhabitant’s room, “though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.”

We haven’t climbed inside Forster’s Machine just yet, but Covid-19 and the necessary strategies to contain it have certainly narrowed the sensuous aspects of our lives. Touch—contagion’s fast lane—has become the most ominous of the five senses. Outside the precious seal of the home, every touch must be considered carefully: Do I pick up the basket in the grocery store or stagger quickly around, cradling my canned goods as though they’re a restless baby? Yet we also miss touch’s consolations, all those gentle moments of physical contact. We remember the last person we hugged, unthinkingly, outside a bar or leaving a party, drawn together into unexpected intimacy.