A Safe Space

Intrusive social media and online shouting matches have left people seeking the internet hideouts that allow them to be themselves

- Aleks Krotoski

My mother is a cool woman, but she is by no means a hacker. And I think her gaming career ended with her (still unbeaten) Centipede high score. But for the past year, while isolating during COVID-19, she has been doing an incredibly tech-elite thing: meeting with her friends on their own custom Discord server. Discord – the messaging software that allows voice and video calls, aimed at geeks and gamers – has become the private garden for her social group of mostly retired public health workers. She assures me she is not swapping torrents of The Great British Bake Off, or trading in obscure malware. She says they are talking vaccines and mask mandates. But who knows: she won’t let me in.

“In their server garden, they are able to be completely themselves. No one is looking, no one is capturing their preferences”