After being mildly unreliable for a couple weeks (seemingly, especially when I was trying to play Destiny online), my internet finally gave up the ghost Thursday night. Then it came back for a bit, died again last night, and has been out of commission most of today. After multiple chats with customer service, my internet provider’s sending a technician to check it out tomorrow, but for now, the only access I have to the World Wide Web is through my phone (it’s how I’m posting this).
I gotta say, it’s odd being without internet on my computer (and being unable to play Destiny over a three-day weekend). Not because I need the internet to kill time on the weekend — I’ve got books to read and LEGO to build — but because of how reliant on it we’ve become. There are TV shows I’ve been meaning to watch, but like the cord-cutting Millennial I am, I haven’t had a television in years. I use Netflix, Disney+, and other services for it; now without the internet, I can’t finish Derry Girls. Most of the games I play don’t rely on an always-on connection to the internet, but I can’t grab a new game since I almost always get my games via the PlayStation Store. Even when writing this blog post, I can’t just pull up a google search to find an article or something about how much day-to-day things are done online now.
Being disconnected isn’t the worst thing ever — and I’ll admit this whole post reads as one long first-world problem. But I do feel like we’re at the point where we rely on the internet for so much. It’s how I communicate with my family, it’s where I pay my bills, it’s how I get my news. I suppose then it’s frustrating when something that’s arguably nearly as vital to everyday life as electricity and running water doesn’t work and there’s nothing you can do about it except wait while bemoaning the monopoly ISPs have and that there’s only one provider I can use and it just so happens that they’re the worst. I’d conjure up a moderately-researched post about ISP monopolies and how they hurt consumers, but I can’t pull sources on that either because, well, internet’s down. So instead here’s a blog post about having an internet outage in 2023.
But let me tell you, I am glad I’ve insisted on keeping my music as offline MP3s, else I’d really be losing it.
Essays, Not Rants! 