On a recent Saturday night, Derrick Jones, a D.J. who performs under the name D-Nice, live-streamed himself working his turntables from his home in Los Angeles, where he was self-isolating. He started early in the afternoon and played deep into the night, pausing only to sip his drink, take the briefest of bathroom breaks and change into a new flamboyant hat. Despite all the chaos outside, here, online, was a safe harbor. The only thing contagious was the mood, which was jubilant. As names of friends — and increasingly, famous people — floated across his screen, he would grin and call out their names in greeting: Rihanna. Dwyane Wade. Michelle Obama. Janet Jackson. As the night stretched on, the party shifted into something more meaningful than a celebratory distraction. Time and space collapsed as tens of thousands of people experienced the same song, the same shared spirit, no matter who or where they were. Kind of like Covid-19 itself.

At one point, apparently inspired, Jones shouted out thanks to all the nurses, doctors and hospital workers. His eyes drifted to the number of people in the “room,” surging toward 150,000, and paused, amazement shaping the contours of his eyes and mouth. “We should raise some money or something,” he said.

What D-Nice seemed to realize in that moment was something many people have realized since Covid-19 gripped the country: Social media could be mobilized for something far greater than self-promotion. Artists have taken to You-Tube or Instagram to provide some relief, to allow us to gather together and listen to an opera, or hear a standup set, or watch a poetry reading, all of us separate but still together. But more remarkable, it has become the medium by which people have organized to help others.

On Twitter, writers like Shea Serrano and Roxane Gay helped raise money for bills and groceries for those who are struggling. Programmers connected online to create a tool to schedule cooperative child care. Prison-reform organizations worked to bail out incarcerated people and send hand sanitizer to prisons and jails, where the virus is rampant. Google Docs files began circulating with information on food pantries and how to apply for unemployment. Go-Fund-Mes quickly popped up to distribute money to people hit hardest by the crisis, including sex workers, restaurant workers and underinsured artists. Healing practitioners made meditation sessions, yoga classes and other mental-health assistance available free online. Sewing patterns for masks and surgical caps were circulated online, and everyone from the rapper Future to the designer Collina Strada began efforts to produce them for front-line workers. Copper3D released its pending patent for 3-D printed masks, allowing anyone with a printer to churn them out and distribute them. In my own neighborhood, someone created a Slack channel where people shared strategies for deferring credit-card payments and rent and offered to run errands for families in need. Even the online performances, like D-Nice’s dance party, felt as though they were really less about pure entertainment and more about serving a nation, a world even, that was suffering in isolation and fear.

For a time, futurists dreamed, optimistically, that cyberspace might exist as a place where humankind could hit reset on society. The idea was that the arrival of networked computers would create an imaginary space where bodily markers of difference would be masked by a Utopian fog. In 1996, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, John Perry Barlow issued a manifesto titled “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which stated, “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of birth.” Barlow continued that the civilization he and others hoped to create would “be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.”

By now we know that those dreams were a fantasy, informed by the same imperialistic and colonial urges that underpinned the creation of the internet itself. No dream internet Utopia ever emerged. Instead, societal woes have been compounded by the rise of technology. The internet has been oriented around an axis of maximizing profits, almost since its inception. In “The Know-It-Alls,” the journalist (and my former colleague) Noam Cohen documents the emergence of Stanford University (nicknamed “Get Rich U.”) as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, a place where a “hacker’s arrogance and an entrepreneur’s greed has turned a collective enterprise like the web into something proprietary, where our online profiles, our online relationships, our online posts and web pages and photographs are routinely exploited for business reasons.” Today, it feels almost impossible to imagine another way of thinking about the internet.

And yet, in the aftermath of the arrival of the novel coronavirus, one has emerged that feels, at least for the moment, closer to John Perry Barlow’s embarrassingly earnest speech. It’s worth noting that he also said that cyberspace was an “act of nature, and it grows itself through our collective actions.”

Historically speaking, new infrastructures tend to emerge as a response to disasters and the negligence of governments in their wake. In the 1970s, for example, an activist group called the Young Lords seized an X-ray truck that was administering tuberculosis tests in East Harlem, where the disease was prevalent, and extended the operating hours to make it more readily available to working residents. In the days since the crisis began, I’ve been turning to Adrienne Maree Brown’s 2017 book, “Emergent Strategy,” which offers strategies for reimagining ways to organize powerful movements for social justice and mutual aid with a humanist, collective, anticapitalist framework. She describes the concept as “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.” Her book asks us not to resist change. That would be as futile as resisting the deeply embedded influence technology has on our lives. It’s the same as resisting ourselves. But rather, it asks that we adapt, in real time, taking what we know and understand and applying it toward the future that we want. The internet will never exist without complications — already, many of the tools that are helping acclimate to this new cyberreality have been called out for surveillance — but perhaps people are learning how to work the tools to their advantage now.

A few days after his marathon set, Jones talked to Oprah (over video) about his experience. “I’ve been in the music industry for over 30 years … but nothing felt like that, helping people.” Shortly afterward, he announced that his next party would be a party with a cause: a voter-registration drive. In one night, he helped motivate 13,000 people to start registering.