Matt Taibbi writes in Substack:
“The star [Tim Robbins] of films like The Player and Bull Durham opens up about two tough years of pandemic politics, and worries society is purposefully phasing out the common meeting space… After the COVID-19 crisis began, actor Tim Robbins was like everyone else in suddenly having both more time to think, and more unpleasant things to think about.
‘I wondered,’ [Robbins] recalls now, ‘What happens when you eliminate the water cooler conversation?’
Would we miss that ‘difficult conversation with someone who’s not one of your friends, but a coworker and a human being,’ who’s ‘saying something that is not the way you see the world, but he’s right there and you have to hear it?’ Robbins felt we might, because confronting a live human being forces people to use parts of their brain the Internet encourages them to bypass… Robbins goes on: ‘These last few years, they’ve taught me so much, about what is right, what is wrong. There’s so much empowerment of people that feel that they are being incredibly virtuous and generous, yet are doing things that are not very kind to other people. I think we’ve lost ourselves during this time. Just a brief stroll through social media and you’ll find that out. (laughs) The internet has become like a bar that you go to, and you open the door, and everyone yells, ‘Fuck you! Get out!’”
Read more: Tim Robbins and the Lost Art of Finding Common Ground