The rooms everyone joined

Last winter, people across Cairo and the Gulf stayed up until three in the morning inside rooms made of voices. You opened your phone and found strangers arguing about startups, poetry, marriage, transfer gossip. Anyone could raise a hand and speak. Every week the rooms got bigger.

A year on, most of them are quiet. The people who could not put their phones down have put them down.

Looking back, it is tempting to wonder what came over everyone.

What came over everyone is about as old as people. We want to stay close to those we already know, and we want to be listened to by those we do not. A room where you could speak at midnight and be heard by someone in Riyadh or Amman met both wants at once. It felt like a door had opened.

Then the rooms filled up with noise. Nobody chose who spoke next. The one interesting voice was buried under twenty people promoting themselves. Hours went in and very little came out. The door was still open, but there was less reason each night to walk through it.

This is how it tends to run. A new way of being heard arrives, grows faster than anyone predicted, and fades once the clamour outweighs the reason for coming. Afterwards it looks like a strange fever that passed through a city.

We will shake our heads at it, comfortably and with some embarrassment, right up until the next room opens and we are among the first inside.