Sunday, 8.9.2020 The Throughline is your portal to tomorrow, a view of the Bay Area at the intersection of reality and possibility. Our nine-week journey continues with a look at how technology will influence our lives:
SAN FRANCISCO AT A CROSSROADS — ALTERED BY PANDEMIC AND PROTEST A SPECIAL REPORT BY CULTURE DESK WEEK FIVE: THE TECH SECTOR
1 Exploring free internet for all 1 Ranking pandemic tech, from sci-fi to reality
1 Beating back dining disruption, one burrito at a time Find more inside.
J2 | Sunday, August 9, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
SFChronicle.com | Sunday, August 9, 2020 |
THE TECH SECTOR
The Throughline will host a Zoom Q&A event at 4 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 13, with a panel of futurists answering your questions. Sign up at sfchronicle.com/membership
REA L I T Y
AV O I D I N G THE VIRUS: W H AT ’ S D O A B L E A N D W H AT ’ S SCIENCE FICTION?
AS K A F U T U R I ST
By Robert Morast
Throughline is a Culture Desk limited-series project exploring what the Bay Area of the near future could look like after the effects of the pandemic and protests take hold. How could we use this moment to reshape our region for the better? On the cover: Check back each week as we reveal another portion of visual development artist Pong Lertsachanant’s rendering of the future of the Bay Area.
STA F F Throughline Editors Sarah Feldberg Robert Morast Designer Alex K. Fong Deputy Photo Director Russell Yip Creative Director Danielle Mollette-Parks Contributing Editor Bernadette Fay Managing Editor, Features Michael Gray Advertising Kathy Castle Account Executive kcastle@ sfchronicle.com Follow us Twitter: @SFC_Culture Instagram: @sfchronicle_culture E-mail us culture@ sfchronicle.com
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We’re all waiting on technology. To develop a vaccine. Or a better mask. Maybe a time machine to take us back to those days before we knew what COVID-19 was. But rather than sit on our invention wish list and dream, the Throughline wants to know how viable it is. So we asked Paul Saffo, Bay Area futurist and technology forecaster, to tell us which pieces of our dreams are on the horizon and which are pure science fiction. ¶ Here are his feasibility reactions to a crowdsourced list of desired inventions. If you have something you’d like to ask Saffo, visit sfchronicle.com and sign up for Throughline’s Ask a Futurist virtual town hall at 4 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 13, featuring Saffo, UCSF physician Peter Chin-Hong and science-fiction author Annalee Newitz.
A radar device that will send a signal whenever someone comes within 6 feet of you. Saffo says: The enabling technology exists today in the form of MIR (micro-power impulse radar) sensors, etc. MIR chips are what are used in automobile parking systems, so it is just a matter of shrinking the total system and figuring out how/where to place the sensors, which is just a design issue. At-home rapid coronavirus tests cheap enough to use every day. Saffo says: There is a way the desire behind this question might arrive much sooner than expected — in the form of a home test using saliva or urine. This could be done with PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technology. I expect we will see home tests that ship to labs very soon, but behind that I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that someone comes up with a clever home test not unlike a pregnancy test in the next two years. More generally, the home toilet could become the most important diagnostic device in the home. Japan is way into this. One could sense temperature (from toilet seat), do bioassays (urine and feces), sense pulse, etc.
Robert Morast is a Throughline editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: robert.morast@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rmorast
A device that “sanitizes” us as we walk through a doorway, destroying any virus particles that would be on us. Saffo says: This is an area where we will see long-existing industrial technology redesigned and retro-fitted to commercial spaces. Think entries to Silicon Valley clean rooms where one steps through an entry chamber that brushes one’s shoes and blows filtered air. Maybe we will add U/V in critical environments, but this is nontrivial as people will have to wear something protective over their eyes. But the technology is available today to do this and will get better. A field generator that creates a virtual “hamster ball” to protect against airborne virus particulates. Saffo says: Neal Stephenson imagined this in his 1995 book, “The Diamond Age.” People walked around with a personal cloud of aerostatic micro-machines that intercepted dangerous aerosols. The technology behind this vision is pure sci-fi at this point.
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A positive airflow mask that not only gives me clean air but also doesn’t allow outside air in. Saffo says: Several companies are already attempting to sell this. The problem is that they look like something a miner would wear, with a filter pack attached to a belt and tube leading up to the face mask. Only issue is one of developing a decent design, and also whether people would actually wear these things in public. Otherwise, very doable today. A personal air filter (not a mask) that filters the air and blows cool, clean air into my face. Saffo says: Doable today, but absent some nanotech magic, it wouldn’t work very well. We do, however, have companies selling horseshoe-shaped air conditioners that fit around people’s necks, so someone will try this soon.
A reliable building-air circulation/filtration system that allows our time inside buildings to be safer. Saffo says: Under way now, both for buildings and aircraft. Look for systems that have intense ultraviolet lighting in ducts that kill off viruses.
SCIENCE FICTION
A B OU T T H I S S ECT I O N
A lightweight globe to put on your head so you can freely move about without a mask. Saffo says: Very doable today, and until we have “Diamond Age”-style micromachines, it’s the only way to create a definitively safe environment without a mask. But ... will people really wear this? Absent some serious electronics, it will also be hard for people to hear each other.
A coronavirus detector that monitors the air and sets off an alarm when coronavirus is in the air. Saffo says: Technology doesn’t exist today — viruses are very tiny buggers and very hard to detect. Maybe we will have it for the next global pandemic, provided that it doesn’t arrive for at least a decade. A wearable device that can detect viral infection. Saffo says: The basic technology does not exist to provide this in a consumer-friendly package. To work for consumers, it would have to be something noninvasive, like a pulse oximeter, as I doubt consumers would willingly have a device implanted under their skin. So I would put this in the sci-fi category.
SCREEN GRAB: OUR PHONES ARE THE NEW REALITY By Sam Whiting
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Josie Lepe / Special to The Chronicle
Byron Reeves has been watching the way people watch screens since the primitive 1990s, when the issue was that ever-expanding televisions were isolating people in their home theaters. Along the way, he has seen screens get bigger and bigger, and he has seen them get smaller and smaller. Most of what he studies now is on a screen that is 5 inches tall and 3 inches wide.
So when we went into lockdown in March, and our work, social and personal lives became even more dependent on screens than they had been, Reeves was in a perfect position to watch it play out. A professor of communication at Stanford University, he is the co-founder of the Screenomics Lab, a repository for tens of millions of screen grabs capturing people’s interactions with their mobile devices. These arrive from hundreds of smartphones worldwide, all programmed to send activity at 5-second intervals. The subjects are volunteers and are paid for their participation; screen shots are transferred from their phones to a lab video wall. This is highly personal information being enlarged and processed. As such, the dozen or so faculty and graduate students who operate the Screenomics Lab must pass through extremely tight cyber security to reach the control room on the third floor of McClatchy Hall, on the old Quad.
Professor Byron Reeves is the co-founder of the Screenomics Lab at Stanford University, which studies smartphone usage and habits. being like “Hollywood Squares,” but there are extreme emotions being felt online. There are people laughing and crying. We have overestimated the differences.
Like everything else on campus, the lab is in lockdown now. But screenshots are still arriving every five seconds, transmitting more digital activity than ever. That activity cannot leave the lab, so a skeleton crew has been granted access. Some of the lab’s results have been published as the Human Screenome Project. Results from the COVID period, though, won’t be published until sometime after the presidential election in November, as an analysis of what people do on their screens and how it affects their health and political choices during the pandemic. When that paper is released, maybe in early 2021, it will fulfill an online odyssey for Reeves, 70, who has been on the Stanford faculty since 1986. We caught up to him at his remote lab in Palo Alto to ask him what his work means, and what its findings say about us moving forward as we spend more time staring into a small piece of glass.
Q: What are the trends you’ve seen in screen time since March? A: Smartphones capture a bigger piece of this puzzle every day. I gather data and try to make comments about what people are doing, and it is increasingly a problem to try to get numbers that represent central tendencies. Almost anything you can say about my screen use is going to be different from your screen use, except for the fact that we are both doing more of it.
Your home irrigation is mediatized. Playing on a soccer team is mediatized because you couldn’t be on the team without a smartphone to tell you when practice is. When you think about even five or 10 years ago, the number of things you can do by the screen has just taken off. There is faster internet. Better pictures. The difference between being 84% good and 94% good is huge. These last increments in quality have accelerated the use of screens.
Q: Did you see this coming before the shelter-in-place orders imposed during the pandemic? A: One thing we could see coming is that more and more of life is now being “mediatized.” Everything you do now goes through the phone.
Q: Now that we can do workouts and go to parties and doctor appointments on the screen, what is left of interpersonal relationships? A: I think those screen meetings are more similar to real life than they are different. We complain about Zoom
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Q: Our phones report our weekly screen time. Is it telling us to increase our screen time or lower it? A: The answer is both. The longer you spend on your devices the more Facebook ads you are going to see. But social media companies also have an interest in helping people figure out how best to use their products. Everybody is talking about screen time. Can we get it down from 3 hours a day to 2 hours and 45 minutes? The problem with that information is that it is not the data that predict whether media is a good thing or a bad thing. Forget the fact that you spent 5 hours on your smartphone. How many different sessions did you have during those 5 hours? We are finding it is about 300 a day. Nobody is watching a movie from beginning to end on their phone. Probably nobody is going to read this interview from beginning to end on their phone. The average segment that people deal with is 10 to 15 seconds. Q: Why is the number of screen sessions important? A: We worry about being addicted to technology. That it is making us more anxious. We can’t contemplate ideas. All those things that we worry about are much more related to the fragmentation than to the total time spent. ... Some person will be on a work-video project, text a kid, buy something at Amazon and look at pornography all in one minute. Q: Which is worse for our minds — laptops or cell phones ? A: Right now the concern is that the fragmentation is more substantial on a smartphone. It is just made for going fast between a lot of different things. Q: How bad will it get? A: I don’t think we are at the end yet,
and it is not just for the younger generation either. As digital life gets faster and faster, we have the illusion that we have done more and more good thinking, but we haven’t. We’ve just looked at a lot more pictures. Pursuing a thought, even for a minute, is increasingly hard. Q: Can you summarize the results so far on the Human Screenome Project? A: We won’t be done with our research for a long time. But it suggests that so much of real life is lived through our technology, more and more each week. Media life equals real life right now. The boundary between the smartphone and the real world is just crumbling. Q: You are three years into your study. Where will we be with screens in three more years? A: We are just going to continue shortening the time we devote to any given piece of information. It is just going to be “Short.” That’s the title of the book I am not going to write. But I will still do the research. Q: Should we be worried? A: Yes. We won’t have the ability without interruption to contemplate how we should think about things. “Short” is much more conducive to habits like addiction and little meandering journeys that really lead nowhere. Q: What will the presidential election results tell you? A: Social media is going to be a big player in the election. What my friends think, what I see on social media, what celebrities are saying, is placed right next to hard information about voting and candidates. All the fragments are jumbled together and will affect how people vote and what they will tell other people about how they voted.
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@samwhitingsf
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J4 | Sunday, August 9, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
SFChronicle.com | Sunday, August 9, 2020 |
THE TECH SECTOR
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F E AS I B I L I T Y RAT I N G Green light: Most of the tech needed to boost our video lives is available today, meaning non-draining Zoom meetings are real. Plus, the pandemic is pushing innovation. It’s only going to get better.
H E Y P O R TA L , CALL GRAMMA: TO O L S F O R O U R A L L-V I D E O F U T U R E A R E H E R E N OW
07:30
By Emily Dreyfuss
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It’s 2022, but who’s counting? Since losing my job during the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve been a freelancer working from home near City College of San Francisco. Today I have three meetings. It’s one of the staggered schedule days when my 6-year-old has “real” school at Commodore Sloat and then a music lesson, and the 2½-year-old is home from preschool with a sniffle (he’s not that sick, but these days schools won’t let parents send kids in with even a runny nose). My husband, Seth Shipman, has to mentor biology students at the Gladstone Institute in Mission Bay. A rotating cast of grandparents is on tap to help babysit, and we’re having dinner and seeing a play tonight with friends. ¶ Mostly, none of us will be leaving the house. ¶ The kitchen Facebook Portal chimes. The little one runs in and answers it. “Hi Gramma!” My in-laws read an interactive book to the kids from their Portal in Massachusetts, the augmented reality distorting their faces and voices to the children’s delight. We got the Portal during the pandemic, and it quickly became a lifeline to connect the spread-out family. After the first five months of sheltering at home, when it was clear that social distancing would become a longterm part of our lives, I reached out to a bunch of technologists for advice on how to upgrade our home setup, and what to expect in the months, which turned into years, ahead. We ended up buying two more Portals, and a slew of peripherals, since Stanford computer science Professor Keith Winstein said that some simple and inexpensive new gear would drastically improve the quality of most of our video meetings. Two years later, the major videoconferring software has gotten a little bit better. Many of the improvements happened in the first six months of the pandemic — nothing juices innovation like a crisis. Bandwidth issues remain, but we’ve learned tricks to deal with them. Mostly, video just feels normal. When we sit down to eat breakfast, the smart camera on the Portal pans and finds everyone, zooming in dramatically on whichever kid is being the loudest. I yell goodbye to my in-laws as I run out the door to drive my son to school. Back at home (and work), I check my schedule on my Apple Watch, ignoring the reminder to get more steps in today. My first meeting is in five minutes, so I head to the garage. When it first became a makeshift office, it was awful. Terrible internet connection, fluorescent lights that made us look ill in every Zoom meeting. But we’ve made some improvements: got a Wi-Fi range extender, switched out the bulbs, positioned the desk to catch the natural light from the open garage door, added a rug to dampen the sound on the concrete floor, and an external mike and a better webcam. We also keep “Zoom shirts” out here to throw on right before meetings. We probably spent less than $200. There are still power drills and boxes everywhere, but all the video software has virtual reality backgrounds now, so we can hide it all. Seth takes the kitchen desk, where he keeps one eye on the toddler and uses an aging MacBook to navigate his telepresence robot. As the leader of a research lab, he needs to help students conducting experiments, but in an effort to minimize how densely packed with people the wet lab is at any given time, on days that he doesn’t have his own experiments in the works, he stays home and uses a robot from Double robotics to roam around, peering into petri dishes and coaching on how to pipette. It mostly works well, though occasionally he has to Slack his students to ask them to rescue the bot from wherever it has lost connection. This usually happens when our home internet is overloaded from every single human in the house uploading video at the same time through chats, which all get stuck in a queue. There’s not really a way to fix that, so we try to stagger meetings, and even do some calls over mobile 5G. The most annoying part about virtual meetings is just navigating all the software options. My clients all use
Getty Images
My husband mentors biology students conducting experiments at the research lab he runs. But some days he stays home and uses a robot to roam around, peering into petri dishes and coaching students how to pipette. Occasionally he has to Slack his students to ask them to rescue the bot from wherever it has lost connection.
different tools. This meeting is with a company that uses Microsoft Teams for everything. Teams was the first to mainstream the use of virtual rooms, which Microsoft calls Together Mode. Microsoft engineers built the tech in three months, leveraging existing virtual reality technology they’d developed, and shipped it in the middle of the national lockdowns. Even people who don’t use Microsoft 365 for work are familiar with Together since the NBA used it to show virtual fans during its games in the Orlando, Fla., bubble. I’ve never met these clients in person, but in Together Mode, our upper bodies and faces are all chummy in virtual seats next to each other in a grid. I can look down to speak directly to the woman whose face appears below mine. We’re like the Brady Bunch, but negotiating deadlines. You can also pick how the room looks — boardroom, library, classroom. The novelty of this virtual space has worn off at this point. This computerized room is just ... where we work. I’m surprised in the middle of the conversation to learn my main collaborator lives just up 19th Avenue in the Richmond District; I’d figured he lived far away. “Let’s have our next meeting as a walk-and-talk along the Great Highway,” he suggests. The street never reopened to cars after COVID and has become a cherished walking spot for families and co-workers. I say yes, but I know we probably won’t do it. That would require putting on real pants. “Mama! Mama! Where my bike?” my son screeches. The Teams algorithm employs noise cancellation, which keeps the intrusion to a minimum. But we’ve all grown accustomed to each other’s families and lives being in the work frame at this point. “Your bike is behind mom’s desk,” I hear my brother say from a Portal screen on a side table next to the desk. I nod in thanks and stay in my meeting. My brothers, who live thousands of miles away, sometimes stay called into this Portal throughout the day. I got the idea from the way Facebook employees used Portals during the pandemic. When the company sent everyone home to work, it shipped Portals to employees so they could do their video chats on a dedicated screen. I rarely have meetings with people who use Facebook Workplace software, which integrates with Portals, so I don’t have meetings on the device. But since my brothers are both writers as well, we use it to brainstorm. We’re just there in the background of each others’ days, almost like our own little newsroom. It feels kind of like how Gchat used to be back in oughts, or AIM in the ’90s. That’s sort of what Google Plus was supposed to be, said Stanford’s Winstein, a way to announce that you were hanging out and casually connect with someone without scheduling a call. I remember scoffing at the idea when Google Plus launched, but as with so much else, the pandemic changed my perspective.
17:30
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Videoconference continues on J8 The Chronicle photo illustration from Getty Images elements
J6 | Sunday, August 9, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
SFChronicle.com | Sunday, August 9, 2020 |
THE TECH SECTOR
F E AS I B I L I T Y RAT I N G Yellow light: Logistically, laying fiber under the city is relatively simple. Politically, however, a proposal for a multibillion-dollar broadband project would inspire all kinds of pushback from entrenched private interests.
A C C E S S E Q U I T Y: CA N SA N F RA N C I SCO REALIZE THE DREAM OF PUBLIC INTERNET?
W H AT IF WE C LOS E D THE D I G I TA L DIVIDE?
By Gregory Thomas
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The city considered to be the nation’s tech capital can’t escape some troubling statistics: 1 in 8 San Francisco residents doesn’t have access to high-speed internet at home, and 1 in 7 public-school families doesn’t have a computer with internet connection. ¶ Like education and income gaps, the “digital divide” separating technological haves and have-nots across the U.S. looms over the Bay Area as well, intensifying the region’s widening economic disparity. The 100,000 or so San Franciscans without fast, affordable, reliable connections tend to have a tougher time applying for jobs, educating their children and staying healthy, among other challenges that make it hard to keep up with life in 2020.
The past five months of lockdown have cast a spotlight on the problem, as whitecollar workers with fast home internet manage to avoid the harshest consequences of the coronavirus pandemic and the state’s shelter-in-place mandates. “This issue rang true five-plus years ago … and unfortunately it has manifested itself during COVID as one of the most pressing issues that exacerbates the inequality in our city,” said former San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell, who served as the city’s mayor for a six-month period in 2018. During his nearly eight years in office, Farrell pushed a simple but enormous proposal to solve the problem: lay publicly controlled fiber optic broadband infrastructure beneath city streets, linking everyone in San Francisco to a giant pipeline of affordable high-speed internet. It would be a close approximation of the popularized notion that internet should function as a household utility, like water or gas. The up-front cost of his design, outlined in a 2017 feasibility report, was estimated at $1.5 billion to $1.9 billion, rendering it politically moot. (The cost, some say, could rise north of $2.5 billion.) Plus, had it been approved, it likely would have taken at least three years to build, if not, as some speculated, a decade. Since the end of Farrell’s tenure in 2018, the idea has been shelved. But shelter-in-place has cemented home internet as a basic necessity, reinvigorating the notion that web connections should be universally accessible and affordable, just like landlines and cell service. “Internet access in 2020 should be viewed in many ways as a human right,” Farrell says. It’s an idea that has been widely professed for years by politicians from here to Capitol Hill, but has yet to bear out in any U.S. city. Is it time for San Francisco to lead the way?
‘ A F FO R DA B I L I T Y I S K E Y ’ The moment San Franciscans went into lockdown in March, internet usage skyrocketed. Service providers reported an immediate 30% surge in activity across the board that has not tapered off even after five months. Many also have reported record signups during the summer as high-speed, affordable home internet transformed overnight from a convenience to a vital lifeline. By and large, internet service in the U.S. is a duopoly controlled by Comcast, with its cable infrastructure, and AT&T, with its telephone lines. San Francisco, however, is a relative outlier, served by a competitive mix of internet service providers (ISPs) with stakes in the ground, including Sonic, Monkeybrains and Wave. The average cost of high-speed home internet is about $50 per month, according to the city Department of Technology. “In San Francisco, the infrastructure existence and availability isn’t the primary problem. It’s adoption,” says Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic, the third-largest internet
provider in the city. The company, based in Santa Rosa, has hooked fiber optic wiring into about one-third of San Francisco homes and has seen record sign-ups since shelter-in-place. Sign-up fees, monthly bills, equipment costs and digital literacy pose barriers to the city’s most vulnerable residents — low earners, seniors and the disabled, and those who didn’t grow up speaking English. “The issue breaks down to affordability, education, knowledge and equipment. Does the household know why and how they want this (high-speed internet) and how to use it?” Jasper says. “But affordability is key.” Linda Gerull, director and CIO of San Francisco’s Department of Technology, echoed Jasper’s concerns. “We have great choice with our ISPs in the city,” Gerull said. “But there’s still a very large gap among residents.”
BA BY ST E PS Last year, the city published a five-year plan to address internet inequity. It identifies affordable broadband, digital literacy and accountability at the city level as the primary goals through 2024. “Providing more ubiquitous internet service is where we want to be as a city,” Gerull said. “There are lots of ways to do it.” The city has a fiber backbone that serves police stations, firehouses and all its municipal buildings, and has lately been taking baby steps to extend that connection to low-income households, free of charge. The Fiber to Housing program, for example, has laid fiber into 4,200 apartments in the Bayview, North Beach and the Tenderloin in the last two years, Gerull said. In the midst of the pandemic, the city has also been extending fiber to homeless shelters and coronavirus testing sites. “When COVID hit, we swung into action,” Gerull said. In the past five months, with the sudden burden on families to homeschool their children and participate in video-conference classrooms, the city has started bringing internet to public housing apartments that are home to high concentrations of students in the San Francisco Unified School District. City technicians connected 1,300 of them during a two-month stretch of the summer, Gerull said. The school district has distributed 35,000 laptops and 3,500 WiFi hotspots to help bring students up to speed before the school year starts, and some ISPs are offering residents free sign-ups and temporarily discounted rates. The city also supports internet education courses for the approximately 14% of San Franciscans who lack basic computer literacy. Though these moves amount to incremental progress, they represent a radical precedent, said Preston Rhea, director of engineering, policy program, at Monkeybrains, a small ISP in San Francisco that has partnered with the city on delivering Fiber to Housing. “Public, open fiber is the
“Internet access in 2020 should be viewed in many ways as a human right.” MARK FA R R E L L , former San Francisco supervisor
As the city works to connect more residents to its growing fiber broadband network, it is slowly stitching up the local digital divide. If one day, highspeed hookups truly become a universal feature of San Francisco, how would our lives tangibly improve?
name of the game to truly change what’s possible in terms of quality of access throughout the city, throughout the country — throughout the world, really.” Although Comcast, AT&T and Sonic install and manage their own proprietary wires, a fourth network of city-owned fiber lines would constitute a permanent public asset in the effort to bridge the digital divide, Rhea said. He referenced a new report from the Open Technology Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., ranking the top 10 cities in the world on affordable internet. The only U.S. city on the list is Ammon, Idaho, a small suburb of Idaho Falls with an ubiquitous, open fiber network. Private ISPs there piggyback on public infrastructure, driving down the cost to consumers while offering more variety. San Francisco, if it were to invest in such a broadband network, could provide top-notch internet to every resident for decades to come. “Ultimately, this means the cost of providing internet — if it goes in the direction I believe it will go — will dramatically fall,” Rhea said.
We posed that question to city Department of Technology CIO and director Linda Gerull, who outlined some of the potential benefits and efficiencies city residents could enjoy with ubiquitous internet.
DREAMING BIG Conversations about bridging the digital divide in San Francisco eventually circle back to the idea of creating a centralized wellspring of fast, cheap broadband along the lines of Farrell’s fiber proposal. There’s wide agreement that such a system would constitute a major asset to education, equity and democracy. What remains controversial is whether committing billions of taxpayer dollars and a decade of construction time to such a massive infrastructure project would be a more effective means of serving needy residents than the tools that are currently available. “If a city like San Francisco that has a lot of pre-existing infrastructure is trying to solve the problem of connecting lowincome households despite there being several (ISP) options to connect to, then another layer of infrastructure isn’t the problem,” Jasper said. Jasper would like to see federal subsidies for internet service and more education around the importance of having high-speed internet at home. “This isn’t a regional issue,” Jasper added. “We should have a national solution to this problem.” Gerull pointed out that even if Farrell’s project had won public approval in 2018, it wouldn’t have been ready in time to cushion the city’s vulnerable residents against the coronavirus pandemic. “Waiting for new technology advances would certainly make it more possible to have a citywide fiber infrastructure,” Gerull said. “But our affordable housing and underserved housing populations can’t wait.” Farrell chooses to look at the issue in reverse: The crisis proves that there is no time to waste. “Think of what a different spot we would be in right now if there was ubiquitous fiber access at every home during COVID,” he said. “The incremental steps — the Fiber to Housing programs — those are all great. They’re awesome. “But ask yourself, is what is happening today working to solve the bigger problem?” he added. “Does it work for people in San Francisco right now? I guarantee you the answer is no — not for everyone.” Gregory Thomas is the Chronicle’s editor of lifestyle and outdoors. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas
The Chronicle photo illustration
Broadband internet access in San Francisco in 2018 BY RACE
BY HOUSEHOLD INCOME
92%
85% 75%
94%
96%
98%
$50,000$100,000
$100,000$200,000
Over $200,000
82%
78% 59%
Asian/ Pacific Islander
Black
Latino
White
Under $25,000
$25,000$50,000
Internet access by region in 2018 ALL HOUSEHOLDS Percentage with high-speed home internet
89%
87%
89%
89%
93%
92%
California
Oakland
Richmond
San Francisco
San Jose
Santa Rosa
32% 68%
38% 62%
41%
33% 67%
59%
32%
28%
68%
72%
HOUSEHOLDS WITH LESS THAN $20,000 ANNUAL INCOME Percentage with high-speed home internet
Percentage with no internet at home
Note: Dial-up access comprised no more than 1% of home internet access among households with less than $20,000 annual income. Sources: San Francisco 2018 Digital Divide Survey, U.S. Census Bureau 2018 American Community Survey
Todd Trumbull / The Chronicle
Education and health care equity: “Distance learning and telecare would become less stressful and more feasible. For students, internet access means less friction logging into classrooms, submitting homework assignments or having one-on-one teacher conferences. For seniors, it means one-click prescription refills, virtual checkups and lightning-fast telemedicine.” Healthier, cleaner communities: “Imagine a day when the internet of things extends to your garbage bin, so that sanitation crews know exactly where trash is piling up and can deploy resources accordingly. Or, as online shopping and home-delivery become the norm, the internet becomes a lifeline for poorer families to access affordable groceries, alleviating health issues associated with urban food deserts.” Stronger democracy: Since shelter-in-place, Gerull says, San Francisco public meetings have been ported to video-casts and people have been logging on in droves to watch and participate in civic life. For example, the first Board of Supervisors meeting after lockdown drew more than 800 online viewers. Other meetings have seen viewership increase a hundredfold, according to Gerull. “Virtual meetings will be something that sticks around into the future.”
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J8 | Sunday, August 9, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
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THE TECH SECTOR
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O PT I M I S M M E T E R Lukewarm: The burrito isn’t going anywhere. But these cash only shops might be as delivery services rely on digital transactions. Still, patrons’ love for authenticity could save them.
BURRITO R E S I S TA N C E : APPS DELIVER BUT THEY ALSO TA K E A W AY
using some of the same recipes the family brought from Zacatecas, a state in Mexico. “My father was an activist. He would march with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta,” Nino Hernandez remembers. “I used to make the signs. Farmworker signs. I’m this little kid, and I’m boycotting Safeway.” Ramiro & Sons is old-school to the point where it feels like time travel. Nino and his mother, Kim, have run the place since before Ramiro died in 2005, and many employees have worked there 15 to 25 years. Credit cards are useless — Kim Hernandez refuses to add a point of sale system like Square or Fusion that would take a cut of the profits. Not coincidentally, the price for two burritos big enough to fill a meatloaf pan comes to just over $17 (with guacamole). But I like the intangibles of Ramiro & Sons even more than the portions. When I order lunch there, my 15-year-old son warns me to have my choice ready, so the no-nonsense guy who takes orders during lunchtime doesn’t get mad. “You know what they call him, right? The Burrito Nazi,” Hernandez laughs, offering the reference to the Soup Nazi character on “Seinfeld.” “He’s an incredible person. He has a photographic memory. If we have lines out the door, he’ll see three people in line and tell them their order before they open their mouths.”
By Peter Hartlaub
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***
In the beginning, there was just a man and a burrito. ¶ It was 1981 or 1982 and I was on B Street in San Mateo with my friend and his high school-age brother, still a few years away from my first real growth spurt, still straining to see above the counter. My mother is Mexican and I was raised among that half of the extended family almost exclusively, but my grandfather’s playful nickname for me was “guero” because my complexion came from the white side of the gene pool.
ing cable movies on your DVR (5) to But I remember I did something — streaming services on your TV (6) to firstdropped a “con todo” or just pronounced run movies in the pandemic debuting on “carnitas” right — and made a connection that streaming service (7). with this one-man assembly line. I don’t There are still people alive who placed remember if he smiled, or made my burrito their first phone calls through an operator. a little bigger, or gave me a key to the restauEight or nine leaps later, you might tell Siri rant. Just that we were simpático; my first to call your wife. memory on a journey of food as an exploraAt The Chronicle, we forage into a digital tion of culture. future while also living in service of people Looking back almost 40 years later, this who aggressively don’t want that change. memory feels like it’s in crisis. The process Family Circus was in the Sunday newspaof buying a burrito has taken a series of per when I was born, and I radical leaps — from the atsuspect it will be there when tempted appropriations of I’m dead. It is well-known in culture to delivery apps that “The good the newsroom that the best way seem aimed to assimilate small thing about to incur a pestilence of reader businesses into a future with no anger is to alter the newsprint connections. The burrito shop, the cash is we TV listings. with its enduring authenticity, don’t have to But in one of the world capis prey being disguised as progsuccumb to itals of change, where entrepreress. neurs continue to look for the A once-in-a-lifetime pandemGrubhub and next leap that will make them ic is accelerating this process. all that. billionaires, there’s less care for But it is also exposing it. A spotcustomer service. Extinctionlight on the small choices we Everybody level events aren’t just part of make that may shape the future taking their business, they are the mantra. of independent businesses. And as we “break things,” little chunk. I “disrupt” and “think different,” *** think that it can start to feel like a rain of I feel for the older generations might have asteroids coming down on the — the ones still making reservaBay Area. tions on landlines and reading done us in.” this article in a newspaper. NINO In the late 1800s or the early *** HERNANDEZ 1900s, shifts in technology Not much has changed at might involve one leap. Your Ramiro & Sons, the old-school local fire station might have neighborhood burrito place in gone from responding to calls with a horseAlameda that my family has been visiting drawn wagon to a motorized vehicle. And during the pandemic. then you get the rest of your life to wrap The takeout restaurant is the legacy of your head around the change. Ramiro Hernandez, who in 1975 founded Today’s consumer might experience six Talk of the Town (later Taqueria Morelia), or seven leaps just in adulthood. The prothe first taqueria-style restaurant in Oakcess of watching a movie in your home has land. Ramiro & Sons opened in 1985. gone from waiting for it to arrive on one of Nino Hernandez remembers his father three television networks, to the comparapiling the kids in the back of a Chevy and tive chaos of cable television (1 leap) to VHS taking them to Hollister and Gilroy to spend rental stores (2 leaps) to DVD rentals (3) to the summer working in the fields. Ramiro’s having the DVDs mailed to you (4) to bankmother was there, cooking for the workers,
SFChronicle.com | Sunday, August 9, 2020 |
The really big super carne asada burrito at Ramiro & Sons in Alameda.
Jessica Christian / The Chronicle
Nino Hernandez under the neon sign of Ramiro & Sons, the Alameda taqueria his father started in 1985 and is a neighborhood mainstay.
Mike Cuevas of San Leandro, with his canine friend, orders at Ramiro & Sons. The taqueria is so old school it feels like you’re traveling back in time.
There wasn’t a lot of media interest in the local Mexican food scene for the first couple of years Ramiro Hernandez was around. Then, on Jan. 24, 1977, The San Francisco Chronicle discovered burritos. “The burrito — a fat morsel named for its resemblance to a small donkey — may be the next food craze to come out of an ethnic ghetto and win a permanent place in America’s eating habits,” the article began. “… If the boom grows, the burrito may soon join such traditional American favorites as chow mein, chicken soup, pizza and the frankfurter.” And as burritos became more popular in California — arguably the defining foodstuff of the region and the state — opportunities for “innovation” decimated the authentic experience. As a college journalist in the early 1990s, I covered Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s attempts to stop students from selling real Mexican food on campus. Actual Mexicans selling actual Mexican food were told to stop, giving domain of the cuisine to a university-sanctioned Taco Bell knockoff called Tapango’s. The logo was a pair of clip art maracas. In 1998, McDonald’s invested in Chipotle, a chain that Frankensteined the traditional burrito experience with corporate fastcasual mentality. That seemed to accelerate a series of leaps that have separated food from cultural experience. “A man and a burrito” became a cold assembly line of culture-neutral mercenaries (1 leap). Then there were phone orders (2), online orders for pickup (3), the quick rise of delivery apps (4) and the emergence of ghost kitchens (5), where several restaurants may share warehouse space, eliminating the possibility of direct contact between customer and chef altogether. The potential damage to restaurants by the food-delivery apps — three of the four largest are centered in the Bay Area — has been well-documented in The Chronicle and beyond. Delivery apps have created shadow websites to compete with their own smallbusiness partners, which were already being charged up to 30%. Bay Area restaurants that wanted nothing to do with delivery apps were being added against their will, in at least one case with fake menus. Then COVID-19 hit, and the weaknesses of the system were blown wide open. San Francisco lawmakers capped the delivery fee at 15% in city limits, a rule that was quickly violated.
“It was impossible for restaurants before COVID to survive with all of these apps and their fees,” SF Chickenbox owner Christian Ciscle told The Chronicle’s Justin Phillips in July. “If you’re giving 25% to 30% to an app, there’s no way you’re going to survive, or even get ahead.”
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There are several quotes from Jeff Goldblum’s “Jurassic Park” character Ian Malcolm that apply here. Let’s choose a lesserknown one: “Change is like death. You don’t know what it looks like until you’re standing at the gates.” Shut inside our homes over the past five months, with delivery apps turning from convenience to potential lifeline, we don’t see the cause and effect. But this will end someday, and we’ll all venture outside without fear and finally confront all that we’ve lost. At that point, I hope the impact of convenience becomes starkly apparent, with the sudden lack of choices, higher prices that contribute to wealth disparity, and the diminishing human connection. I hope people miss the benefit of immersing themselves in a different culture for a few minutes each month, and learning where the food came from. That there may be even more value to our children discovering the history, courage, hard work, little quirks, tragedy and triumph of the people who made it. I hope physically going to your local burrito shop becomes a civic act.
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There will be many more stories of restaurant closures in a pandemic, and far too few inspiring stories of communities coming together for their survival. This is a story of the latter. In the end, resistance to change was the blessing that may have saved Ramiro & Sons. Being a cash-only business effectively closed the door to most delivery apps. When Kim Hernandez denied a point-ofsale system and Nino hauled an ATM into the store, they at least temporarily became a leap-proof business. “The good thing about the cash is we don’t have to succumb to Grubhub and all that,” Hernandez said. “Everybody taking their little chunk. I think that might have done us in.” Nino and Kim Hernandez decided to keep everyone employed when the Bay Area shelter-in-place began in March, weathering the losses with their personal finances. They limited their hours and closed on Sundays. “It’s been a struggle. It hurt at first,” Nino Hernandez said. “The first two months we were down quite a bit. We’re not one of those businesses that makes money. We stay even more or less. It’s like a family. They’re family to us.” But then the regulars came back, and workers are seeing new faces. People who don’t want to deal with the apps. People who have their own financial problems and need an inexpensive lunch that can stretch into two meals. People who like the takeout window and the fact that the burrito shop is half a block from the busier main drag. No one is underestimating the resources and drive of larger companies to force the changes that drive their profits. But they shouldn’t underestimate the public’s ability to make a mental equation and consider the value of a thriving downtown. That preordering from a local bookstore instead of Amazon might be worth the price difference. That, in the long run, diversity is often the more affordable choice and convenience is a curse. Nino Hernandez knows some day he may be forced to make the leap. “But not today.” Peter Hartlaub is the San Francisco Chronicle’s culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub
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Videoconference from page J4
Next is a Zoom webinar I’m moderating. Some panelists are local academics physically together in Berkeley, and others are folks who fled the Bay Area for more affordable climes during COVID times and never returned. The Berkeley people have an Owl Labs smart camera on their conference table that uses AI to keep the speaker in frame, pans to show a group view and follows people when they get up to use the white board. It works with most videoconferencing software. They’ve got the 2020 model, which retailed for $799, and was back-ordered for months
during the pandemic, as companies and academic institutions anticipated that some form of dispersed workforce would last. The audio is high quality, and it makes it way better for remote participants to keep track of who is talking and what they are demonstrating. I record the session and send the file to myself to upload later to YouTube. Ping! Time for my son’s doctor’s visit. First-line visits ever since COVID are often telemedicine. The clinic sent a video link via its own app, so I have to log in to find it. I can’t tell from the link what the software is, but it says it’s HIPAA-compliant and
end-to-end encrypted. I send the link via Signal to my husband, who does the appointment in the kitchen. Our 2½-year-old has lived his life via videoconference. He started crawling, took his first steps and turned 1 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both his birthday parties have been over Zoom, and almost all his interactions with his grandparents have been via Portal. He can’t speak in full sentences yet, but he can say “Hey Portal, call Gramma,” and he’s better than any of us at looking into the camera directly to make eye contact on video chat. When I go into the kitchen to grab a snack I can see
him squirming on my husband’s lap. The doctor asks him to open his mouth to look at his throat, but he’s half out of frame. Of all the video chats the family will have today, this one is probably the most important, but also the lowest quality. I can’t imagine the doctor can really see much. She occasionally looks pixelated and we have to refresh the browser twice. This may be because my mom is called into the Portal on the kitchen counter, stealing bandwidth. She keeps trying to ask the doctor questions. It’s always funny when someone on one screen is trying to talk to another. The doctor is very confused.
Prognosis is good, and afterward my mom plays a game with the little one. From her kitchen in Idaho I can see her pretending to catch animated objects my son is throwing from San Francisco. In the afternoon, I’m supposed to watch a government hearing streaming over Cisco WebEx, but I can’t handle another video right now so I listen via the C-Span app on my phone while walking to pick my son up from school. Fresh air! Steps! “Are you happy now, Apple Watch?” I think. In response it sends me push alerts from Twitter. Thanks a lot. The 6-year-old’s guitar teacher moved to Colorado,
so the lesson is via Google Duo. I can never remember if it’s called Google Hangouts or Duo or Meet, so it takes me a minute to find the right app. We’re late for the lesson. But the music syncs up pretty well on Duo, and it uses AI to anticipate and complete the sound when the audio lags, which it’s been doing for years. During dinner, the kids Facetime with my dad. The streaming quality is great, but he’s holding his phone at such an extreme angle that we only see the top of his head. After we put the kids to bed, it’s time to go to the theater. Back in 2020, Winstein’s group and a bunch
of other engineers and performers at Stanford were working on a highquality way for actors to put on a play even when they were in separate rooms, using bespoke video and audio gear with advanced processing that cut down on lag time. Partially it was a way to demonstrate to the big tech companies and industry groups that determine things like the back-end codecs and web algorithms that process audio and video that something radically different and better was possible. That project didn’t lead to immediate adoption by Silicon Valley, but a local repertory house uses the tech for its experi-
mental theater. We know one of the actors in tonight’s live show, and all our friends across the country are in a Facebook Messenger Room that we have up on the living room Portal so we can watch together. I was raised to never ever speak during a play, but it’s 2022 and I’m at the theater in my sweatpants in my own living room, so 20th century rules no long apply. The play is entertaining, but I fall asleep. My eyes hurt. It’s time to call it a day. Emily Dreyfuss is a Bay Area writer. Email: culture@sfchronicle.com
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J10 | Sunday, August 9, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
THE TECH SECTOR
A BIT OF FICTION: ‘ CO N TAC T T RAC E R ’ By Yalitza Ferreras
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The patties were gone. In their place was a sign that read: Patty’s Patties is restructuring! See ya San Francisco! ¶ Amara stood 6 feet away from her reflection on the shop window, then 5, then 4, then down to inches. She slid down her mask. She let her lips lead her toward the glass. She wondered if that bump on her lip, the one caused by a giant chicken pox blister when she was 10 years old, the last time she was in quarantine, would be the part of her to touch the glass first. Her mother and her siblings had intentionally exposed their children to the virus so that all the cousins, all 12 of them from ages 6 months to her, the oldest at 10, could contract chicken pox and get it over with. By the time she got it, all her cousins were outside playing and screaming like murder in the New York summer heat, while she lay naked covered in calamine lotion in a puddle of sweat. The cold winds of the summer had died down and settled into the warm bubble of San Francisco’s fall, the sun melting through the fog by 8 a.m., leaving the sultry, hazy monolithic idea of the California of everyone’s dreams, but every time Amara had walked in Patty’s Patties, Patty had worn sleeveless shirts through more fog or less fog. Amara wore short sleeves only a few times a year in San Francisco. She was always cold. She’d stared at Patty’s arms as the proprietor handled the tongs to reach in for patties. Patty didn’t really look like Amara’s mother, her face was narrow and long, whereas her mother had a heart-shaped face and was about a foot shorter, but her arms reminded her of her mother’s arms, with their slight jiggle. She yearned for Patty’s brown arms holding out a patty to her. Amara pulled her mask back up over her nose and looked at herself in the shop window. The reflection of her eyes looked like burnt-out lightbulbs over the gray husk of the empty store. She didn’t know when she would be able to look into her mother’s eyes again. She pressed her mask to the glass. She’d put on lipstick before she left the house. Before the virus she would’ve left a big red lip print behind, a thick coat of deep crimson lipstick she used to reapply all day that had been her signature look. There would be a stain of her former life smudged inside the mask. Drones operated by Poodle, the company Amara worked for as a UX designer on a secret project, flew overhead delivering food to their employees in a pilot program before they made it available to the general public. The drones flew out of a ghost kitchen in the Bayview, then concentrated over the Mission, the Lower Haight and SoMa before they descended to deliver free food, their version of a well-stocked employee cafeteria in the sky. Even though Poodle’s offices had been plush and practical, Amara had wanted to work from home for a while after getting tired of showing her badge, even when she walked short distances to a bathroom or a kombucha station, when most of her white co-workers weren’t asked to identify themselves nearly as often as she was. The patty and a Patty sighting would have been her rewards for making it up Bernal Hill. She needed more protein. Stuffed in a patty was the only way she ate meat, otherwise it looked too much like flesh and she couldn’t stomach it. The animal needed to be ground and housed in a flaky crust. There were plenty of empanadas and pupusas out
The Chronicle photo illustration
Amara heard the buzz before she saw it. An unsummoned drone hovered near her second-floor window like a giant black fly. Her earbuds alerted her to its presence. She went to the window to swat this one away too, but she saw a guy below it, and he was looking up at her. He was unhoused or underfed, hard to tell these days. She tried to direct the drone toward him, but it wouldn’t leave her window.
A B OU T THE AU T H O R Yalitza Ferreras is a Bay Area writer whose work has been included in the Best American Short Stories 2016. Access her writing at www.yalitza.com
there but only Patty’s Patties resembled what she’d grown up eating. She got back on her bike and pedaled down home to Dogpatch to keep working on the chat screens. Her building was largely empty after everyone had moved back to where they were from. But there was this one guy. She wasn’t attracted to him, but she wasn’t unattracted to him. He would do, and she would do him. A few months into quarantine, they’d talked briefly about getting together. But he was being very responsible, waiting two weeks after each encounter with different men and women. The last one had lasted, though. She’d seen a woman wheeling in luggage while he trailed behind her holding a hanging fern in each hand. When Amara got inside her apartment, she kneaded her body the way she’d learned to do in a massage therapist’s self-massage Zoom class. A drone hovered just outside her second-floor window. She hadn’t ordered anything. She opened the window and told the drone to go. It left. She started boiling water for an Annie’s Gluten Free Mac ‘n Cheese. She settled down to work on the design for the chat screens for the VR worlds that would replace Zoom and Google Hangout meetings, so that users could be in the same room together. She was tasked with designing the frames with which users interacted, how they accessed their settings and controlled their environments. The engineers worked on the heads, which were culled from the user’s video chats and an uncomfortably long stare into their cameras. She’d had to move her eyeballs pretending she was looking at each number on a clock during her scan. The eyes were the window to the soul and the key to making their VR representations more realistic and less jarring when the users entered their chat rooms. The team working on the bodies had many human forms to choose from, but they were deemed too predetermined, so they worked with what Amara called sausage forms, humans reduced to amorphous beings in taut skin casings. For now, they had only made small, medium and large sausages. They started with male and female versions, but someone brought up that why not start with less heteronormative forms? And what about those in transition? Talk about body dysmorphia and not feeling represented. So, for now, the forms had small nubs for arms, larger ones for legs, like balloon animals. Another team was designing the actual chat rooms where people would sit together and have meetings and socialize. She wanted to live in the room with the color-coded books in glossy, lacquered white shelves, and a fancy tea ceremony set on top of a console. Most of her furniture consisted of the dregs she’d cobbled together after her divorce, which had happened right before the shutdown. She was lucky to still have a job, although her designs made it too easy to walk out of the chat room, which is what happened when a user hit the wrong button, but she wasn’t sure what the thing would look like yet. There were multitudes capable of replacing her, deployed after completing one of the myriad UX design boot camps, or worse — she could be replaced by one
of the AI models trained on a designer data set. Her manager had told her that maybe she should lean into thinking about the whole environment rather than just at the feature level. He’d told her she needed to get crisper and look for some synergy between the design and the near-term vision. He’d said, “For what it’s worth, I think you need to think about the user’s journey.” Journey. She’d just read an article saying U.S. passports were still worthless. Most of the places Americans could travel to were a few Caribbean islands and the Balkans. She’d wanted to go to New York but she couldn’t drive for that long even with stops at all the places designated by the race ambassadors, who’d make sure she had a safe place to stay like in that movie “The Green Book,” although they were calling it The Black Book. The driving part of her brain was still a New Yorker. Amara couldn’t get her mother on a screen unless her sister went over and called on her own phone. “Screens are not for my generation,” her mother had said, “And they steal your essence, your thoughts.” The last time her sister visited she told Amara that her mother’s flip phone was getting sticky. “OK ... Why are you telling me this? Is it dirty? Mami is very clean.” Too clean, she thought. It was as if she’d always been preparing for the pandemic. “I think the plastic is breaking down. We have to get her a new phone. That s— is probably causing cancer.” “Well, if you tell her that she’ll agree to a new one. They don’t sell flip phones anymore.” “I’m afraid she’ll stop using it altogether.” Her sister had a point. Amara heard the buzz before she saw it. An unsummoned drone hovered near her second-floor window like a giant black fly. Her earbuds alerted her to its presence. She went to the window to swat this one away too, but she saw a guy below it, and he was looking up at her. He was unhoused or underfed, hard to tell these days. She tried to direct the drone toward him, but it wouldn’t leave her window. She grabbed a mask and went downstairs. After she opened the front door, the guy walked up to her like he was next in line for something. But he was respectful, stood at least 6 feet back. The drone hovered down in front of her. She took the package. It was a Patty patty. The outside of the bag said: Poodle is proud to support Black-owned businesses. She reached out and handed it to the guy. He stuck out his elbow to thank her. She stuck out hers and made contact, then she lingered, savoring the feel of his bony joint. He backed away and shook his head. The guy said, “Weirdo,” as he tore into the package. He walked away eating her patty. She heard him yell, “Damn! I’m just tryna eat. Why people gotta be weird!” He looked back at her, shook his head and yelled, “SMH!” She hadn’t touched anyone in at least a year. The last time she’d gotten tested the nurse had said, “Hold very, very, very still,” then inserted the swab deep into her nasal cavity, without any contact.