This article is a protest against the trend towards ever greater online contact at the cost of, or as a replacement for, in-person interaction. Increasingly, meetings and events are ‘hybrid’ or take place entirely online. Even when physically near others in shared spaces like streets, parks and cafes, we are often glued to our screens. But I argue that we lose something of value when online contact comes to dominate and crowds out in-person interaction. Our offline interactions are valuable in ways that, for the most part, our online encounters are not. I begin by defending the social value of our encounters with one another, drawing from literature in democratic theory, architecture, and urban theory. I then tackle the strongest argument in favour of online forms of encounter, on the grounds that they are a less costly and more inclusive alternative to their offline equivalents. I argue that enabling online participation is both an insufficient amendment to an ableist and patriarchal society, and a far from all-purpose one. The article then makes the case for putting down our screens, going in-person to meeting and events, and refusing to distract ourselves with our virtual lives when in parks, public squares, cafes, and the like. First, I argue that physical encounters are distinct in the proximity that they force and the subtlety of gesture they permit. Second, I argue that, by contrast to in-person encounters, online encounters permit only an attenuated form of the connection that we need with fellow citizens. Indeed, with the rise of AI-generated content, online platforms may fail to offer any connection to another human at all. Third, I draw attention to the ways in which the commercial nature of these online platforms threatens to subvert our online encounters far more systematically than the selling-off of public spaces that has often troubled democratic theorists.

There are many sorts of day-to-day choices that are such that, if enough people were to choose one way rather than another, serious harm could be avoided or reduced, and yet it does not seem that any one such choice will itself make a difference. Consider, for example, how our collective consumer choices have various serious environmental and social consequences, and yet for many products, it is doubtful that one purchase more or less will itself make a difference to these outcomes. How are we to understand what each of us ought to do in these sorts of contexts? This paper further advances and illuminates a thesis that I have argued for elsewhere: that a purely ‘non-instrumental’ approach to this question is not satisfactory. A necessary and central part of understanding how to think about an individual choice in these contexts is showing that it does matter for instrumental reasons - for reasons having to do with its ability to have an influence on the outcome. Once a core instrumental solution is found, other moral considerations can build on top. I argue for this by way of an examination of a new non-instrumental approach advanced by Wieland and van Oeveren: a participation-based approach. I also identify what I think is the main source of resistance to my thesis: a mistaken conflation of two different problems.

At the heart of the case for Brexit was the idea of 'taking back control'. The British people were no longer the directors of their own destiny and needed to reassert control over their own aff airs. Which aff airs, specifi cally? There were multiple targets, but immigration was central: 'Vote Leave', the British people were told, so that '[w]e'll be in charge of own borders'. 2 It was crucial, so the argument went, that the British government, and not individual migrants or Brussels, have the fi nal word over who enters the country. Writing before the Brexit vote, political theorist David Miller (2016) described this connection between immigration and self-determination as follows: