USA, You Are Feeling Very Sleepy
Let’s give the internet a break
Am I imagining this?
Way back in the early days, maybe as far back as dial-up connections, the internet was slow. Not just by modern standards — it was slow.
And I had a fairly clunky internet connection because all I did online was look stuff up and send emails. [Come to think of it, so did everybody else.]
I did enough online, though, to notice that the internet seemed to slow down at lunchtime. And I decided that I knew why.
I changed my routine. In the mornings, while the USA was asleep, I did my internet business. In the afternoons, once the USA had woken up, I wrote stuff and phoned people.
Why aren’t we prosperous yet, with all these Gs?
A year or two back, we got however-many-Gs-is-impressive-now broadband in this neighbourhood. A little while ago, everybody started using the word “fibre” as though they knew what it meant. Fibre is here! Yay!
I’ve never bought into the whole “we’re all going to be madly productive and successful now because we’ve got one more G than we had yesterday” argument, because I’ve heard it all before, but this time I did upgrade my little wifi box.
My internet connection is no longer held together by a recycled scrunchie.
It’s still pretty basic though. Not quite old-style nineteen-nineties basic, but I’m pretty sure I have the most basic internet connection in the neighbourhood.
Which means that if all the 5g bandwidth gets used up, I’ll be the first to know. [It is still 5g, isn’t it? I remember celebrating 4g, and before that 3g…]
It’s déjà vu all over again
What I’ve been noticing recently is — my internet connection has gone back to slowing down at lunchtime.
Maybe I’m imagining it, or it’s solar radiation, or just the strange weather.
But what if there’s just too much content now? What if we can’t stop waking up and generating more?
There’s news. There’s analysis. There’s fake news. Surveillance capitalism, CCTV images, competing TV stations, streaming services both viewed and watching their viewers, facial recognition, advertising, e-publishing, algorithms, social media, messaging, online trading, forex trading, all that e-commercial blah-di-blah…
…self-replicating viruses, viral malware, hostile states and black-hat hackers, trolls, dark web, and all the while…
…large-language models are churning out more verbiage; blockchains are recalculating values; Big Data’s getting bigger and the heat maps are getting hotter…
…and in the “cashless economy” we’re all so keen to achieve, every single transaction requires a pulse of energy and yet another message to be sent through the networks...
…and all of it backing itself up to multiple data warehouses.
The internet is overloading. Everything is pulling down energy.
Slow will be the new fast
What if this internet slow-down that I’ve been noticing is more than just a little local problem?
What if it’s yet another canary in the coal-mine? But this time, for a whole new disaster?
Wildfires, torrential rains, rising sea levels — yes, I know, it’s as if the planet is trying to tell us something.
What if the internet is also trying to tell us something?
What if the internet is so overburdened that it’s close to — if not a total collapse, then a massive slowdown?
Imagine all those Terminators waiting while Skynet tries to log back in.
Imagine handing everything over to AI, and it freezes.
Imagine that we’ve somehow, accidentally, without meaning to, blundered our way into the early stages of a self-generating, cumulative, kind of somehow self-inflicted-by-tech, automated Butlerian jihad. Our online activity is swamping — killing — online.
USA, I know you’re awake now. It’s 3pm here, British Summer Time, and the internet slowed down an hour ago — suddenly; you all logged on at the same time. [2pm UK is 9am New York, 8am Chicago.]
Look, USA, I’ve had an idea. I’m not being frivolous here (and in case this needs saying, no offence), but what with everything going on, the news and the politics and everything else, why don’t you take the day off tomorrow?
Give yourself a lie-in.
Oh, and no screens in the bedroom. Give the internet a rest-day too.
Before it collapses along with everything else.
On a lighter note, here’s a useful guide to ignoring all that.
