New York City. Sunset: 6:32pm. A damp Monday with dull grey air, and a waning crescent moon. High of 72, light drizzle, and a low of 64 degrees tonight. I spent twelve hours behind a screen today, fiddling with the code for my website and untangling some domain names.
Meanwhile, the internet buzzed with the news that Facebook’s lights went out for several hours, highlighting just how far its tentacles reach. Transactions failed. Employees were locked out of their offices. Thermostats stopped working. There was a flavor of joy in these reports, not just schadenfreude but tentative hope that we’d been released from the grip of some leviathan or terrible dream.
Today’s outage was a crucial reminder that we must maintain our little stations in the digital ether and control our own signals. I’m not giving up hope that one day we will return to the chaotic, polyglot promise of the internet rather than Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1947 prediction that our culture industry would one day grant us only “the freedom to choose what is always the same.”
