For all the use I get out of social media, one painful “gift” it’s given that I don’t like having is the ordeal of having to see old friends psychologically crumble over time. Like, you could remember onetime friends as they were, instead of beholding horror of what they become. Like, say, seeing an old friend metastasize into the kind of person who is all “end lockdown now!” and thinks that antivaxxers are the optimum source for critical assessments of how epidemiologists are doing these days, because Niall Ferguson’s affair or something.