A recent Monday morning ambushed us with digital silence. There you were, scrolling mindlessly mid-bathroom break, when suddenly—no more Snapchat, no more Instagram. Or maybe you were sipping coffee when someone muttered that ChatGPT had flatlined. Perhaps you only realized something was wrong when the airport departure board froze, or when Capital One’s ATM stared back at you with a blank screen. The internet hadn’t just hiccupped—it had collapsed entirely.
Approximately 37% of the entire internet just… evaporated. Poof. Gone. Like my motivation to exercise after New Year’s, or Trump’s chances of getting into Heaven, or an ICE agent’s child-support payments. Amazon Web Services—the invisible plumbing holding up half of modern civilization—had suffered a catastrophic outage lasting over 12 hours. Even parts of the U.S. Army couldn’t talk to each other, which is either reassuring or terrifying depending on how much faith you have in carrier pigeons.
Here’s the thing nobody wants to talk about at dinner parties: the entire internet, that sprawling digital universe we pretend is infinite and indestructible, is basically run by a handful of companies. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle have carved up cyberspace like mob bosses dividing up Brooklyn. We’ve essentially put all our digital eggs in a small handful baskets, and those baskets are run by people who, like the rest of us, probably hit snooze three times this morning.
It’s only a matter of time before some poor intern named Kyle stumbles into work at 7 a.m., grande caramel macchiato in hand, trips over a server cable, and accidentally deletes Nebraska. Or spills his venti all over the Commodore 64 that controls, I don’t know, international banking, your Ring doorbell and Uncle Pete’s pacemaker. “My bad,” Kyle will say, as civilization grinds to a halt. Dammit, Kyle.
The moral here isn’t that technology is bad—it’s that betting your entire existence on it staying up is like assuming your phone will never die right when you need to show the flight attendant your boarding pass. The more you depend on something, the more you should plan for its spectacular failure.
So here’s my revolutionary advice: buy some books (I still have two on Amazon… when it’s up). Actual paper ones that don’t require charging. Keep cash in your wallet, because when the internet goes down, your contactless payment turns into a contactless nothing. Learn a hobby that doesn’t involve Wi-Fi—knitting, woodworking, or my personal favorite, staring pensively out windows like a Charles Dickens character.
And here’s a really crazy idea: you can go outside. Touch grass. Feel the sun. Talk to neighbors without a comment section moderating the conversation. The real world is still out there, running on the oldest operating system known to humanity—reality. It crashes less often than you’d think.
(Get more thoughts from The Rambling Moron on Twitter, where you’ll find him as @chriskamler)
