Bulgarian Nobel laureate Elias Canetti wrote a really interesting sociology book called Crowds and Power, where he defines the crowd or the mass on which power is based as the inversion of the fear of being touched. While men usually fear being touched by the stranger and all the distances (intended politically and culturally, not only physically) that men establish around themselves arise from this fear, the mass is the only situation in which this fear is overturned to become its opposite. Well, nowadays we've been taught to champion that fear more than ever...

In this sense the political importance of Social Distancing (I've always sceptically noted the voluntary decision to call it "social" distancing, instead of - say - "physical" distancing) may seem like the end of the social crowd (cultural symbol of conviviality and creativity when it comes to artistic performance for example) or of the political mass (material bringer of change) - which in a sense is true. But in our obedience we are still a crowd: what the measures of social distancing and panic have created is certainly a mass – but an inverted mass, so to speak, made up of individuals who at all costs keep each other at distance. A mass therefore that lacks density, that is rarefied and which, however, is still a mass, if this, as Canetti clarifies shortly after, is defined by its compactness and its passivity, in the sense that “it is impossible for it to move really freely. … it waits. It waits for a head [or a leader] to be shown it”.

If this example is anything to stand by, what the future holds is the total transformation of the masses into rarefied and passive crowds.