Social distancing started a long time before the threat of contagion, sometime around 2005 with the spread of high-speed internet.

In the previous decade, technologists shared a utopian vision of the digital world as a space where, freed from prejudice, mind could meet mind.

John Perry Barlow's stirring 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace described it as a world "both everywhere and nowhere … not where bodies live". The unmooring of mind from body has left people adrift, navigating a turbulent online world without the reassuring markers humans evolved to recognise.

Infamously in 2014 Facebook changed the site to offer 72 "gender options" rather than the two sexes. Brielle Harrison, a software engineer quoted at the time, claimed:

"People are given this binary option, do you want to be male or female? What is your gender? And it's kind of disheartening because none of those let us tell others who we really are."

It seems "who we really are" is now determined by how one chooses to present on social media, what we "want" rather than what we are. One year later and Facebook changed the "gender" option to an open text box for self-description: the ultimate individualised identity.