Symptoms of the COVID-19 pandemic include a dry cough, a high fever, and an unprecedented influx in the use of networked technology. Illustrating the latter trend is the increased use of the popular videoconferencing platform Zoom, which grew from 10 million meeting participants in December 2019 to over 200 million in March 2020 when nearly every educational institution in the United States shifted to remote learning (Yuan).

When I say that Diane Davis' Inessential Solidarity “comes after” community, you might assume that this book suggests the possibility of a “post-community” world. You might also put it in a certain category of books—say, with Terry Eagleton’s After Theory—that evokes a temporal after, suggesting that community is something we can “get over” or “get past.”