I’ve got into a bit of a bad habit. I wake up after shouting at my alarm in the form of a Google Home pod before grabbing my phone and checking the usual social media, getting stuck in a doom scroll of reels, before checking the weather and the news before checking my bank account to see if I've become a millionaire overnight. This morning, however, things were different. After the chime of the HomePod had been silenced by my usual yelling, 'Silence or I'll pull your plug', I grabbed my phone to find that most of my apps didn’t work.
I don’t understand IT and networking, things like DNS, IP and DHCP. To me, a gateway is something you walk through. But in the world of networking and the interweb, it’s something to do with connecting people to servers, sites and businesses. Every website you visit is held on a server somewhere, essentially accessing a page on a server somewhere in the world every time you want to have five minutes alone in incognito mode. There are businesses that specialise in making these connections, allowing other businesses to use their servers and cloud services for networking and website hosting and lots of other stuff I don’t even remotely understand. One of these businesses is the online store that shares its name with a rain forest, and as it turns out, it supplies cloud and server solutions for thousands of businesses, including some of the biggest companies that we interact with daily. So when they have an outage like the one they had this morning, it plunges millions of people into chaos, not being able to access their bank accounts and other sites and even, in some cases, unable to access their doorbell. What a world we live in, eh? One server went down, and hundreds of apps and websites and infrastructure all went down.
It got me thinking – what would we do if all of these servers went down permanently?
Excuse me for a moment whilst I put on my tinfoil hat.
You see, we have, whether we like it or not, become reliant on networking and smart devices. We’re at a point where the smartphone is an integral part of our daily lives, from texting and messaging on the countless messaging apps we now have to using apps that track your fitness and how many times a day you take a dump. We use an app to order food, and we use an app to park our car and all sorts of other ways of making it easier to separate you from your money whilst supposedly making life easier. We even live in a world where finding a date is done on an app, making judgements of someone based on a single photo. The more we can do without needing to look away from the small screen, the better, right?
I know this because I have Apple Pay set up, meaning that all I need to do is wave my phone vaguely near a card reader whilst pointing it at my ugly mug to buy something. I also use my phone to pay for parking; I use my phone to write and check sales and order components for projects. I do more on my phone than I do on the PC nowadays.
What’s more is we're at a point where we're expected to have a smartphone, with businesses getting rid of physical cards and tickets, instead having it all on the screen in your pocket ready to flash at someone when it's needed. We are, at the moment at least, heading for a paperless, cashless society. And to be honest, I’m not sure I’m ok with that.
I still think physically having a ticket for an event or a physical members card is better, especially a physical ticket to an event, because then you have something left over as a keepsake to remind you of that amazing day out or concert or whatever else the ticket was for. Train tickets and bus passes are now on our phones a lot more as well now, meaning that there’s now always a chance your phone will die whilst waiting for the bus or rushing to get that last train home. With a physical paper ticket, that can’t happen. Ok, you might lose it, but at least it’s not going to die on you whilst sitting in the bus shelter. Mind you, saying all this, I do think you can still get physical tickets at the moment, at least, but it’s heading towards a point where you won’t anymore.
I still think physically having a ticket for an event or a physical members card is better, especially a physical ticket to an event, because then you have something left over as a keepsake to remind you of that amazing day out or concert or whatever else the ticket was for. Train tickets and bus passes are now on our phones a lot more as well now, meaning that there’s now always a chance your phone will die whilst waiting for the bus or rushing to get that last train home. With a physical paper ticket, that can’t happen. Ok, you might lose it, but at least it’s not going to die on you whilst sitting in the bus shelter. Mind you, saying all this, I do think you can still get physical tickets at the moment, at least, but it’s heading towards a point where you won’t anymore.
It’s the same with things like paperwork and cash; physical cash can’t decline at the till, and cash doesn't randomly die whilst you’re paying for something. Your bank can't lock cash because you spent some money in a different town once, and they've decided to flag it as suspicious. With physical cash you don’t have to worry about banks' servers going down or being unable to get to your hard-earned money. I say this, but I use my card most of the time, very rarely having any cash on me. That and I’m always broke, but my point still stands. I feel like I’m going off-topic here, but the point is the more we rely on the digitisation of things that, in reality, would be better off as physical items, the more we put ourselves in the hands of these servers and networks that will inevitably now and again throw a tantrum.
But what if they went off permanently? Today was a perfect example of just how far we’ve progressed into living out of the cloud; a server had a wobble, and thousands of businesses were plunged into utter disarray. Imagine it. You wake up one morning to find that your bank doesn’t connect and your social media isn’t updating, and what's more, all the passes and membership cards you had on the countless apps you use on a daily basis are gone. Your train ticket was on your phone as well, so you now can’t access that, meaning that you can’t do what you planned. And that concert you wanted to go to? You’re not going anymore because the server that ticket was stored on has gone down, meaning that trying to load the page is just met with an error message and some friendly artwork apologising for the network error. "Oops, something went wrong, sorry!"
Now look, I know you think I’m talking absolute bull muck at this point, and I think so too because I am not qualified to talk about networking or cloud computing or infrastructure; I’m too stupid to even begin to understand most of that. But my point is this – I think moving things to be digital is a good idea most of the time, but we should still stick to having things that we use most of the time as physical objects. You shouldn’t have to have an app for everything to get on with life.
This is why I prefer physical books to e-readers. Don't get me wrong. An e-reader is a brilliant thing. It literally gives you the ability to take entire libraries with you. But having a physical book is so much better. A physical book can’t die; it doesn’t need to connect to a server either. Holding a book in your hand feels better as well – the smell of the paper and the feel of turning the page. Digital is great, but sometimes, physical is better.