Internet Happy Places

My Internet Happy Place: Gather, an Antidote to the Sterile Professionality of Zoom

At the end of a year in which we could not explore much IRL, team OneZero is sharing our favorite places we found online.

I am old enough to remember March, when we relished those first Zoom calls with our far-flung friends and family members, many of whom we had not spoken with for way too long, all of us hunkered down in different parts of the world, and the chats were filled with foreboding but also a certain giddiness. “This was good, in a way. We should be doing this more often, pandemic or no,” we thought, before realizing approximately a week and a half later that no, it was not; no, we should not; and that Zoom was, in fact, more like having a door to a drab conference room with outdated IT support cracked open in your house at all times. By December, I think there were few words more dreaded in the English language than “Want to hop on Zoom?”

But it was still a necessary evil if we wanted to see our social circles somewhere, unless you did something like Gather. I’m a little surprised that more attempts to make Zoom “fun” weren’t trotted out over the year, but I guess everyone was already busy cowering in the corner of one platform or another, whether it was Twitter or Animal Crossing or TikTok.

Regardless, Gather, which I think was originally called Online Town, was an antidote to the sterile professionality and Pavlovian posture-improving induced…