In Need of a Connection
What would this pandemic be without the internet? Take the economic carnage—the unemployment, the closures, the bankruptcies—and treble it, at least. The impact of closed schools, already a cost nearly worse than the benefits, would be even more aggravated. I am positive that some relationships have been saved by memes or Netflix documentaries. Worst of all, you couldn't be reading this newsletter right now, the horror. All of this came to my attention when our modem broke last week.
If you put all of the data on the internet on a scale, it would weigh about as much as a large strawberry. It rankles me that this thing we are all completely beholden to has the mass of something my toddler obliterates in one or two bites. When ours bit the big one, it was as if the world had ceased to turn. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with Century Link before the hold voice informed me that I might have faster results if I went online to chat with a representative. So I went to their site on my phone and I want to share with you the Buñuellian results:
Reader, this thing informed me every two minutes for 50 minutes that my chat had practically started. It was like an absurdist play. I have never seen any word work as hard as the word "approximately" is working there. It's been 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang so in the grand scheme of things I suppose my wait time was approximately zero minutes. There are also approximately 13.7 billion pages on the internet, none of which I could access.
If I could have accessed those pages I would have found that 70% of the internet is made up of—say it with me—emails, actually. If you said "porn," be grateful that you are working from home where only your family could hear you. 70% is porn? My goodness, even if that were close to consistent with the laws of supply and demand, who could possibly stay hydrated? Less than 1% of the entire internet is made up of pornography. The problem was exactly zero percent of the internet was in my house.
I distinctly remember in third grade being asked to supply questions that we were going to send to a Russian grade school through electronic mail. We gathered in the library the next morning to turn on one of the school's few computers to see if the Russians had responded. This was 1993 and we were celebrating the peaceful relationship with our newly democratized Russian friends through a goodwill cultural exchange, it was going to be the beginning of a special relationship of trust and admiration between our two nations. As it turns out, it's possible that some of the students on the other end of the email grew up to place misleading political Facebook ads in the US using the same technology we sat in awe of in that little library. It's possible that some of my classmates grew up to fall for them. Anyway, it was a simpler time. I don't recall what my questions was but I'm sure it was "Do you like pizza?" which was more or less all I was curious about. I liked pizza so much I made sure it was one of the three things a reader would know about me if they read one of the books we used to make in class.
I'm not sure how much culture was exchanged during our electronic palaver with the Russians but the process was decidedly similar to the very first computer-to-computer exchange, made 24 years earlier, between a computer at Stanford and one in Los Angeles.The message was simply "LO." This isn't slang for anything, it was supposed to say "LOGIN" but crashed 40% of the way into it. Still, that was the beginning of the internet. It's end took place in my house on Thursday morning.
After hours of chatting with and calling the CenturyLink people it was finally deduced that my modem was broken and that I would need a new one, which promised days of a internetless darkness while the replacement shipped. This was a scary proposition with a toddler and a quarantine to grapple with. With no YouTube, no Spotify and no Alexa, I turned to the turntable, and put on the very record Mom would play when we needed dance breaks as kids: a collection of hits by the Beatles, complete with my mother's maiden name written on the sleeve. I can't say that Rocky likes the Beatles but I like it a hell of a lot more than Baby Shark and the "Yeah-yeah-yeahs!" and "Goo goo ga joobs" let him participate somewhat. It's also extra adorable to hear any two-year-old say "Ringo." While we were announcing with our feet that money can't buy us love, the modem sprung back to life as if by magic. It's been in working condition since then, and soon enough everyone was back on laptops, phones and digitally streamed Daniel Tigers. I won't deny I was relieved; what I do depends on the internet to say nothing of my sanity, but it wasn't terrible to be forced to break away even for a few hours. During the last few months we've gotten so disconnected from each other but even more connected to our devices, it was a nice reminder of how entertaining the analog world still is.
One last thing on the Beatles and the internet. When Montenegro gained independence from Yugoslavia it also gained a new Internet domain. Any message sent from Montenegro to its former country (until Yugoslavia dissolved entirely in 1992) was positively Beatlesesque. Just call on me and I'll send it along with love from .me to .yu.