During the confinement due to COVID-19, our research group (MIRCo) gathered together to share our views on the pandemic. Like Klemperer (2001), we developed a 'quarantine diary' of the 'keywords' (Williams, 2015) and expressions circulating in Spain and abroad during the lockdown. In this article, we reflect on how events are (re)constructed in discourse and how different understandings emerge and turn into social practices with transforming potential (Foucault, 2002; Martin Rojo, 2001). Our analysis of these keywords reveals two tendencies, associated with neoliberal governmentality that reinforce the disciplinary component of security: (i) the reinforcement of social discipline, which in the Spanish case was call upon individual responsibility and, for the most part, was efficiently self-imposed by citizens; (ii) the multiplication of devices and nodes of social surveillance, which took place with the engagement of the population in controlling others, and the proliferation of cyber surveillance. The struggles over the signification (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) of various keywords, such as solidarity or freedom, reveal several social tensions at different moments and places that are addressed in the article. In this article, we also turn to discourses that reflect the care practices initiated by neighbourhood and activist groups in order to address the particular ways in which the pandemic has affected their communities. Exemplified by the repopularized slogan: 'solo el pueblo salva al pueblo' ('only the people can save the people'), here we explore how networks of mutual aid and care at the local level challenge assumptions of the State as the primary actor for finding a way out of the crisis. Our discussion questions how 'commoning' (Bollier, 2014) practices for resistance and survival might transcend the pandemic and provide keys to unlocking solutions to new (and old) social struggles.