My mom is no doomsday prepper, but the prospect of sending her oldest across an ocean unlocked an impressive capacity for catastrophizing. I’ll admit I laughed at her apocalyptic advice before I left for my first semester at Wake Forest, especially the suggestion that I print out directions to relatives’ houses “just in case.” As if, in the wake of some undefined disaster, I should whip out a three-ring binder and set off on a 700-mile trek to extended family in upstate New York.

I’m still unconvinced of the utility of this specific idea, but after last Monday’s campus-wide power outage, I’m less dismissive of creating contingency plans in case of digital failure.

Campus-wide power outage

A normal weeknight was transformed into a calculus of how long I could use my half-charged laptop as a power bank. Basements became no man’s land and the glow of red emergency lights provided hallways with horror-movie ambience. 

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A brave Babcock soul hoisted a speaker to their window, and through unknown electrical means, hosted a block party as the sun set. Students either celebrated or mourned the forced disconnect from Canvas — Wi-Fi was down, and many were unable to access cellular service. Some of my friends were locked out of their suites. A university email urged students to preserve the precious heat our residence halls retained. 

Thankfully, the outage caused only mild distress for most. However, the few hours our campus endured without electricity unveiled our profound reliance on vulnerable technologies and demonstrated the continued relevance of analog backups.

The Cloud is not in the sky

In high school, I occasionally drove through Loudoun County, VA, home to hundreds of data centers that process 70% of the world’s internet traffic. My local friend would shake her head at each of those gargantuan, windowless buildings. One well-placed nuclear strike, she once remarked, could do untold damage to so many systems propping up our society.

The Cloud is not in the sky, and the idea that digital products are less fragile or exploitative than their analog counterparts is a convenient myth. 

Smartphones don’t spontaneously materialize in Cupertino labs; Congolese children risk their lives extracting cobalt for batteries. Conversations with ChatGPT are anything but ethereal, as the AI requires 16 ounces of water for cooling afterward. A severed ocean cable once marooned the entire country of Mauritania from the Internet. The same fires and floods that destroyed ancient libraries wreaked havoc on essential infrastructure in Western North Carolina during Hurricane Helene.

The susceptibility of online spaces isn’t limited to physical risks, either — the internet is defined by impermanence. Just this past month, influencers panicked when the short-lived TikTok ban undermined their livelihoods, while researchers raced to preserve health equity data as federal workers scrubbed mentions of race and gender from official websites.

As students discovered when we flipped light switches in vain, the current provision does not equal any promises for the future. I left Spotify after Joni Mitchell did, and I can’t say I won’t choose to migrate music platforms again. A glitch, a favorite artist’s fall from grace, a jacked-up monthly fee and those carefully collected playlists might all disappear. My memories of sitting on my best friend’s floor, enraptured by our favorite boygenius records, though, exist in an entirely different dimension. They’re anchored, embodied and real. 

Consider the emotional power of physical media. I attended a dilapidated middle school in Berlin, Germany, that my parents said felt like a time capsule from their own childhoods. Forget sleek smart boards; our “computer lab” had an original Mac. I doubt our librarians’ annual instructions on how to navigate a card catalog will ever prove useful again. 

Still, something was charming about the bowls of water teachers kept on their desks to sponge off chalkboards, the minuscule ink cartridge seals my friends and I collected, the mid-class manicure potential in bottles of Wite-Out. It’s an academic warmth that my younger brother, who spent kindergarten staring at an iPad while his teacher attempted to explain the alphabet over Zoom, may never experience. 

We should diversify our investments

Contemporary systems eliminate friction from reality. With enough resources, it’s quite possible to stay in bed indefinitely, using apps to socialize, hold office jobs and even order strangers to deliver food. Of course, we’ve played these games before. Online life is convenient, yes, but it is also utterly exhausting. Why else would so many reach for digitally irreplaceable hobbies — like sourdough or gardening — to escape the slog of quarantine?

I’m rarely in Farrell Hall, but even this humanities nerd knows how important it is to diversify investments. For our own sakes, let’s spread risk across digital and analog realms. Use a notes app and keep a journal. Know what you’ll do if you lose connectivity at 11:58 p.m. (I’m totally not speaking from experience) or spill coffee on a notebook. Enjoy having the lights back on, but remember where you put your flashlight, just in case.