Scientific research in years’ time will likely blow open the doors of truth regarding the rapid spread of Covid-19 in our postmodern cities: our built environment is encased in plastics. There is no friendlier surface to bacteria or viruses than the plastic that lines our everyday lives. Coronaviruses can live on plastics for up to three days, which is almost as scary as the fact that plastics take thousands of years to decompose. The rapid plastification of the city is the hasty expansion of real estate for biohazards.

Covid-19 rushed through our cities like the daily morning rush to work: grabbing hold of plastic lining on subway car doors, shoving them back to enter crowds of plastic purses and plastic umbrellas, searching for a plastic seat to rest upon and plastic Airpods to cling to. Covid-19 also nestled into our moments of rest: flipping on plastic light switches, turning plastic knobs on the A/C unit, gripping tight to plastic tupperware containers, punching an extra :30 seconds on the plastic microwave screen. This winter, we might as well wear plastic trench coats and plastic scarves to beat the snow.

So, how best to avoid the new artificial membranes of the city? One might recommend escaping to the countryside. Surely the natural environment contains no plastic interfaces? In our pastoral fantasies, humankind does not anticipate a disruption to the haptics of nature — running our fingers through tall reeds of grass, burying our toes in soft soil, twiddling pine needles between our teeth, grazing on sweet succulent berries and honeysuckle, worming our bodies into hollow tree trunks.

But what, if in fact, plastics are already so deeply rooted into our twenty-first century genome that we indeed are the interface? We’ve grown a fifth limb in the form of the smartphone, one that is almost always encased in a plastic protective covering. These new devices strain our eyes, so we need new contact lenses made of plastic hydrogels and hypergels. When we touch that tree, do we leave trace amounts of plastic on its surface? As millions of microplastics fill more and more of our drinking water everyday, how are we to truly be free from plastic’s intrusion into our bodies? Will plastics one day rule us from the inside out? Forget the Cyborg Manifesto — this is the dawn of the Age of Mannequin, a fully breathing, functioning plastic machine. Should we ignore our apprehensions that plastics will one day engulf the Earth? Should we fully accept a future in which humans not only lose touch with nature, but cocoon it entirely in cellophane?