Issue 3: Late Pandemic Aesthetics

A friend recently sent me a picture snapped outside a posh toy store in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Sitting front-and-center in the shop’s window was a most curious toy: a ring light, camera, and selfie-stick tripod, all rendered in composite wood. Plan Toys is an aspirational kids’ brand for the anti-screen set, the parents who lost their minds the fastest and most acutely during the first months of lockdown as the press began to fret over the impact of screens on children’s socio-cognitive development. It couldn’t have been more than six weeks into the pandemic work-from-home odyssey when my fellow parent coworkers and I began covertly admitting to one another that our kids, sitting quietly just off-camera, were actually being placated by screens. 

Eighteen months later, we’ve given up. The kids are all addicts now and the toy industrial complex, even the Waldorf-approved toy industrial complex, has clearly caught on. The relentless self-documentation of (forced) domestic life that characterized the pandemic’s first blush — my shitty sourdough; your DIY tie-dyed socks — is now a life skill for children to acquire through dramatic play. 

While we continue to perform the pandemic on social media, deepening our already-entrenched addiction to screens, start-up companies clamor to capitalize on our ongoing confinement as the Delta variant ripples its way across the country. The apps themselves — Instagram, in particular — are specifically designed to generate addictive behavior. Targeted ads, however, are doing the real job on us by hawking goods and services that barely existed in virtual form prior to the onset of the pandemic. Soothing, pastel-hued ads for text message-based psychotherapy and psychiatry, for example, are aimed specifically at women. Women just like me.