Their idea of a revolutionary future didn’t go beyond gender balance on corporate boards, electric cars, vegetarianism. Not only had Anna and Tom not had the chance to fight for a radically different world, but they couldn’t even imagine it.

They inhabited a world where everyone accepted a line of coke, where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher. They spent all their time in plant-filled apartments and cafés with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.

They realized they had contributed to the problem that was starting to affect them, but they knew it in an unacknowledged, almost imperceptible way, like smokers when they think about cancer.

What was happening to the city – the replacement of its historical inhabitants with younger, wealthier newcomers, and the resulting price hikes and decline in diversity – was gentrification, a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it.

In their world, Barack Obama’s speeches and high school shootings existed far more vividly than the laws passed just a few U-Bahn stations away, or the refugees drowning two hours’ flight south.

young woman recorded all the times she was catcalled. Two African Americans were killed by the police. A man went around filming first kisses. A plane vanished en route to Beijing. A woman was beautiful. An apartment full of plants was beautiful. A vegan quiche was beautiful. A child needed money for chemo. Time disappeared.

Somehow, value systems that seemed completely incompatible on social feeds could find a middle ground around a table at a café. They would no longer smack so hard of toxic masculinity, or Eurocentrism, or privilege. The discussion would peter out into a joke, into an order for another round of drinks. Within a day or two, they would forget all

And it is a happy life, or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short-term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in

They could still remember a time when they only used Facebook to find out what had happened to their school crushes, and when Instagram was little more than an archive of people’s holiday snaps. Since then, they had followed the many evolutions of those websites from their dual perspective as both interface designers and users. They could name