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WE’VE been living in quarantine for almost two months in San Francisco, and lockdown tech is starting to drive us bonkers. We were initially full of hope that the internet would save us – but now all we want to do is go outside and run around. Unfortunately, “outside” will never be the same.

When we were only a week or two into this, things felt extremely weird, but those of us who still had jobs could do them. We had Zoom. We had Skype. Kids had Google Classroom. Amazon had masked workers to dispatch fresh produce to our doorsteps.

What happened next will not surprise you. Everything sucked.

Workers at Amazon started to . They wanted paid sick time, as well as protections like hand sanitiser and disinfectant wipes. They had become key workers – and they rightly wanted benefits that reflected that. Customers were complaining too. They would spend hours trying to get delivery slots. It got so bad that a college student created a program to Prime app on your behalf.

Meanwhile, parents who were already sick of Zoom meetings discovered that sending their kids to online school didn’t work at all. Archaeologist that school by app was a “joke” for her first-grader (year 2 for UK schools). She said that doing maths worksheets with her kid, while also juggling her own work, was “insanity”. So she pulled him out of school for an early summer vacation. Her tweets went viral.

And so, instead of embracing technology, many people are now retreating from it. They’re making bread from scratch, going on long walks, making forts in their gardens and reconnecting with their sewing machines. We know this because they’re posting it on Instagram, of course. But my point is that people aren’t using apps to maintain their old lives any more. They’re embarking on something new – if they can. And that’s a big if. Millions of people are jobless, and still waiting for government pay cheques.

“People are making bread from scratch, going on long walks, making forts in their gardens”

The hope is that we’ll be able to restart the economy by tracing those who have been exposed to the virus. In California, the state is hiring 10,000 people to track and notify everyone who has been in contact with an infected person. Apple and Google are developing an app that will use your phone to note who has been near you – and if one of them reports they’re infected, you will get an alert.

Contact tracing promises to transform our experience of the outside world as much as the internet changed our experience of staying inside. Though Google and Apple are promising privacy protections, the companies are still amassing a lot of sensitive data. We knew that our phones could be used as tracking devices. Now that fact will be unavoidable. It might even be desirable.

The internet is going outside. The data streams that once followed us from website to website will now follow us from park bench to kitchen table. There’s no legislating this away, or hoping that the public will wake up to the dangers of surveillance. Because now we need that surveillance in order to be safe.

So what will emerge from this period in history? Probably some terrifying new ways for governments to hunt down outcasts and undesirables. And some brilliant methods for resisting, by obscuring our data signatures at a political protest. It won’t all be cloak and dagger, though. There may be more phone-based geolocation games like Pokemon Go, which require people to move around outdoors to find virtual stuff and level up.

All of us who have been cooped up for weeks or months are going to crave the idea of leaving the house, maybe in a way that means we don’t run into anyone who is infected. But now, more than ever, we are tied into our technology and cannot let it go.