My internet went down last night around 8pm and was down until just now around
4:30pm until the cable guy fixed the line outside. We had some bad winds and
apparently the connector between the underground line and the line coming from
the pole broke. Thankfully it was a quick splice and terminate and I was back
online.
It's strange, though, how it feels now to have the internet go out. I don't
have good phone signal where I am, nor tethering as a part of my grandfathered
phole plan, so even though I could just barely send messages to some of my
friends, there wasn't much else I could do on the web. Still, I have tons of
books and physical movies and games, yet I felt paralyzed, treating it more
like the power was out than the internet itself (which to be fair is usually
the case when I don't have internet). Of course I eventually cooked and
cleaned and watched a Blu-Ray and played some games, but that stuck feeling
stuck with me. Part of it may have been anticipation that I would normally be
playing Minecraft with my friend at that time, part of it may have been "I
can't kill time by mindlessly opening TikTok or YouTube and stay on those for
hours". Frankly, despite all the physical media, the vast majority of my
consumption is online. It's sort of like being hungry and thinking "there's
nothing to eat" despite a cabinet full of canned vegetables and a fridge with
two dozen uncooked eggs. So you just sit with the hunger and think about food
you don't feel like cooking, or can't get until you go to the store.
I'm not that old, but unlike many people who are my age, I only had access to
over-the-air (analog) television and dial-up internet for most of my early
childhood. At my mom's house we got satellite television and 1mbps DSL
in I think late 2007 or early 2008 (when I was nine), but at my dad's I still
had 56K dialup and made the transition to digital OTA TV in 2009. So being
offline isn't a terribly unfamiliar feeling - or at least it shouldn't be -
but it was also a completely different world. Once upon a time not being
online didn't feel like a disconnect from societal access or access to most
media, but there's a different feeling now. Intentionally disconnecting is
like a meditative exercise -- a freeing and slow moment away from the world.
Yet, having your access cut off unexpectedly is a paralyzing moment in which
you no longer have access to society. Once upon a time connecting to the
internet was a fun activity; now being disconnected for any length of time is
a terrifying experience. It's the difference between simply being at home for
the sake of being home or being trapped at your home by fallen debris in the
road. There's a moment of panic to be had, even if you were going to stay home
anyway.
Personally I think access to internet is access to society, and so long as
that's the case, it should be a right to have access to it. Whether that be
through programs like the Affordable Connectivity Program or whether it be
freely available over-the-air LTE access. My power company and several others
have become internet service providers in the past few years, attempting to
run fiber everywhere there's run electricity, which I think is a positive
step. Hopefully that means that people finally WILL have options for internet
despite how rural they might be. My mother's still stuck on a maxed out
6mbps/512kbps DSL connection that's costing her an insane amount every month,
while two miles down the road I have 1000mbps/50mbps DOCSIS 3.0 cable
internet, reduced to an affordable $55 a month thanks to the ACP. Her internet
connection was once blazingly fast to me more than a decade ago -- even back
when we only had one megabit down -- but now it doesn't even qualify as
broadband. It's a worn out hamster trying to turn a wheel bigger than it can
handle. Soon enough once fiber becomes available to her it'll make a massive
difference, and I can only hope that same style program is rolled out
everywhere humanly possible. If we can electrify the world, we can connect it
too.
