I downloaded Google Photos years ago, during the era that I’ve only half-jokingly started to call the Before Times. It was the eve of my college graduation. My family had just flown in on a plane. The next day, I would shake hands with my professors and then eat a slice of cheese with those same hands. In the procession lineup, a friend and I would hug, bringing our faces as close as the rigid squares of our graduation caps would allow, one dyad among thousands of embraces.
At the time, I just wanted to take lots of pictures. I downloaded Google’s free photo-storage app, set it to autosave from my phone’s camera roll, and hardly thought about it for the next three years.
The world has been radically upended since then. This spring, the coronavirus pandemic shut down college campuses and canceled gatherings across the country. For those of us so privileged that our only diagnosis is to stay home, long stretches of isolation and anxiety spirals still take a mental toll. The idea that there might be an escape hatch from the fear and grief many of us are feeling, however temporary, has never been more seductive. My own colleagues have found escapist respite in Animal Crossing and reality TV, ASMR and a Barbie Polaroid camera. On sleep-starved nights, I’ve tapped through each one of my apps, in search of solace within the safe perimeter of my phone screen.
This was how I opened my long-dormant Google Photos app—and unleashed the most potent diversion of them all. After an errant tap, my screen flooded with snapshots of trees, ice cream cones, and blurry San Francisco vistas. In the Before Times, I would close the app after I backed up my camera roll to the cloud. Now, I can’t stop scrolling.
I pore through Google Photos with the avidity of an archeologist at the richest dig of her life. Look, a dog! I used to pet those at the park. Here are ten thousand permutations of a book and a mug of coffee, painstakingly arranged on a cafe table. This is a poorly lit bar. My friends dragged me to it; I was irritable and sleepy that night, but now I’m elated to at least have this memento of a night spent out on the town with people I care about. More than any fantastical virtual world, I realized that there is actually nowhere