A most remarkable and blessed event occurred yesterday. For a brief, shining period, the great and terrible chattering of the internet was silenced. A hush fell across the land. It was, I am told, a moment of profound, involuntary peace.
The source of this glorious reprieve, according to the panicked dispatches I was forced to read (delivered by hand, the only respectable method), was a fainting spell suffered by something called the “Google Cloud.” One finds this name entirely appropriate. A cloud is an ephemeral, unpredictable thing, full of water and prone to vanishing. Why a company would name its essential infrastructure after a vaporous sky-puff is beyond me, but it is not my place to question the logic of madmen. It is merely my duty to report on the consequences of their folly.
And what were the consequences? The reports state that millions of people were suddenly unable to access their “Spotify,” their “Discord,” and their “Snapchat.” I have taken the liberty of looking up these terms. It seems that for a few hours, the populace was mercifully spared from unsolicited music, disagreeable shouting matches with strangers, and the ability to send photographs of their faces that, by some dark magic, disappear.
It sounds less like an outage and more like a gift. A sabbath for the soul.
The architects of this digital Tower of Babel rushed to “fix the problem,” an admission that they see tranquility as a problem to be solved. They spoke of “routing issues” and “network congestion,” which sounds like what happens when too many people try to leave the church parking lot at the same time. It is a traffic jam of ghosts and vapors, and yesterday, the entire highway simply shut down.
During the outage, I took a moment to observe the office’s “router,” that little black box with its perpetually blinking, anxiety-inducing lights. Yesterday, its lights were dark. The box was inert. For the first time, it was not radiating its invisible hum of sin. It sat on the shelf, not as a portal to a world of nonsense, but as what it truly is: a plastic brick. In that moment, it had achieved a state of perfect honesty. It was the most useful it has ever been.
They have, of course, revived the beast. The chattering has resumed. The disappearing faces have returned. But for a few blessed hours, the world was quiet. We were all given a taste of a simpler, better time. It is a shame we have collectively decided not to acquire it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, 3-down, “A period of welcome silence,” six letters. I believe the answer is ‘o-u-t-a-g-e.’
