Good Mor... ☠️

—03.29.2000—

I had some computer drama recently that I haven’t shared. As I was about to send off the web page concepts to Erik, who was in Hong Kong last week, my computer crashed hard.

I had just backed all of the files up and ejected the disk when my laptop seized. When I booted it up again, a dialog box appeared on the screen to tell me what was happening but, before it could be filled with text, a another seizure gripped its circuits and it stared at me blankly. It succumbed to the same paralysis in restart after restart: everything fine, waking up, good morning, then the death mask of acute system failure.

It was 1am and I was in a panic. Erik had a meeting starting on the other side of the world in half an hour. I left a message for him at his hotel in my best everything’s-fine-and-under-control voice, “My machine just crashed... Have the problem isolated... Files may be a little bit late... My apologies.”

Through a process of elimination I worked out that the font manager was crapping out the machine. I reinstalled it (twice) to no avail. The laptop was still unconscious. In the end I patched the thing together by leaving the font manager out of the picture and just throwing the two or three fonts I needed into the system folder, raw. I still haven’t figured out what the real problem is.

Relieved, I gathered the relevant files together in an email, clicked send, and... no internet connection. “F*cking hell!” I thought. It took another ten minutes to sort out the missing code-limbs and software-appendages required to make that work. By 1:45 am my time, 9:45 am, Hong Kong time, the files were on their way. They arrived fine and I heard from Erik that the meeting went well. Relief.

——

I’m noticing that even in places like this—especially in places like this—the internet is starting to have a profound effect. It’s not just that people are building websites and getting on email. On St. Martin’s, one of the other off-islands, a family has been waiting for several years for a house to become available so that they could have a permanent place to live. The husband is a tree surgeon and, apparently, has a lot of business in Scilly. When a Duchy-owned house became available, they, and everyone else, thought they were a shoe-in, as they met all of the Duchy’s stated requirements: a local family who’d been in need of housing, had kids to boost the local school’s declining enrollment, someone who provided a needed service to the community, etc., etc. Who got the house? A family moving in from the mainland and working remotely via the internet. Why? The suspicion is it’s because they could afford to pay more. An often heard interpretation of the Duchy’s attitude is, “If you can’t afford it here, there are plenty of people on the mainland who can.”

It seems like a difficult situation. Family A still has no place to live and Family B unwittingly lands on the unpopular list upon arriving in a community of about a 100 people.

What will the implications of all of this be? How many net-connected professionals move out of cities? How will that affect rural communities like this one? What will become of the cities they leave? Will people migrate en masse to other countries? Will borders become tighter? I wonder if these thin phone lines will be responsible for massive population flows. I foresee them serving to make everyone a little more virtual. We may be working very shortly with people we’ve never met, depending on them for all kinds of services, and knowing them only through the ubiquitous new face of our age: email.

Of course, it’s having the same effect on industry. If commerce can find websites offering cheaper flowers in Israel and inexpensive printing in Singapore, then it will use those services. What will happen to Scillonian flower farmers and San Francisco printing presses?

Everyday we’re assigning more and more functionality to, and putting more and more of our faith in, the internet, this hyper-fast miracle-machine. What happens if this great machine lurches, stumbles or breaks down? I shudder to think. I know it was designed to reroute traffic in the event of a breakdown at any of its nodes and is therefore “unbreakable” but the Titanic wasn’t supposed to sink either. At least they had some lifeboats.

Here I am biting the hand that feeds me. Where would I be without an internet connection? Packing up to go home, that’s where. Nothing is clear cut.

——

Jon called about half-an-hour after I had finished the previous paragraph. Team PHILLIPS, the new, double-masted, carbon-fiber catamaran built in Cornwall to compete in an around-the-world sailing race, and currently undergoing sea trials off Scilly, had broken up and was being towed into St. Mary’s harbor. If I ran up to Kittern Hill, here on Gugh, I could catch a glimpse of it. I grabbed a coat and Jack’s high-powered binoculars (old navy surplus?) and headed out the door.

I laid in the barrow at the top of the hill. The pale, brown remains of the gift I made to the island in early February were still here. In the hazy distance, about a mile out towards Tresco, Team PHILLIPS was indeed being towed in by the St. Mary’s lifeboat. The wind made it hard to keep the old field glasses steady, but through the shaky, speckled optics I could see the shiny new catamaran, with its broad masts, be dragged along, sails lowered and barely moving.

The boat didn’t appear too badly damaged. It was really quite sleek, actually. Its long slender hulls had been designed to pierce the waves instead of riding over them. Later, on the news, I found out that the hulls were part of the problem. Apparently the cabin and “trampoline” part of the boat were situated too far to the rear leaving a large portion of the forward part of the hulls unsupported. It was this forward section that had snapped off on the port side, leaving a gaping cross section free to scoop up the sea. This I wasn’t able to see as, from Gugh, I was observing the boat’s starboard side. On the news though, I was able to see the severed hull section and the advertising slogan emblazoned on its side: “Let’s make things better.”

It may seem that my slightly mocking tone, indeed this whole journal, suggests an anti-technology or anti-progress mindset but I would disagree. It’s the blind, unquestioning devotion to that idea that new technology will always make things better that I find troubling.

That new boat just provided a convenient symbol for new technology going awry. Perhaps it was a poor choice to call attention to it. After all, the implications of faster wind-powered transport are positive ones, in my view, and failure is a natural step in any kind of progress. Perhaps I’ve fallen into the opposite trap of blinding maligning technology.

One thing I can say though, no one is betting their faith and livelihood on the success of that boat other than those directly involved in it which is more than we can say about the internet. I hope it stays afloat.