One night, back in 2003 when I was working on Sam Mendes’ Broadway production of Gypsy, the power suddenly went out. It wasn’t just my apartment that went dark, it was the whole city and, in fact, the whole northeast. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and even parts of Vermont and Ontario were plunged into darkness.
We were in the midst of an understudy rehearsal at the theatre which was just off Times Square. When the lights shut off, we all went out to the alley that runs between 44th and 45th streets. We stood around and waited for someone to tell us what to do. Eventually, we got word that the show that night was canceled and that we should all go home.
At the time, I lived up in Washington Heights near 181st Street. My apartment was nearly seven miles away from the theatre. Others who lived in New Jersey were offered couches to crash on by people who lived in Manhattan. My friend Ginifer, who covered the character of Louise and who had been rehearsing lived far to the north as well, so we decided to walk home together. She was wearing flip-flops.
The city turned into a big party that night. Once it got dark, people parked their cars in tight circles with their lights pointed inward and created impromptu dance floors. There was music everywhere. Delis gave away their ice cream which was only going to melt in the August heat. Ginifer and I still talk about how much fun we had that night, trudging uptown together through the carnival.
Throughout it all, I couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen the next day. Sure, a night without power was fun, but a week? New York is a vertical city. The more money you have, the higher up you live. Without power, a thirtieth-floor apartment is decidedly not a luxury. Not only would you have to get up and down via the stairs, but you would also have to carry everything up with you including water.
New Yorkers are a resilient lot. We are great in a crisis. It seems to me, though, that while one night without power engenders a celebration, after a few more days we’d be facing Armageddon.
We no longer know how to survive without electricity. Without refrigeration, everything fresh would begin to rot in our stores. We would need to rely on packaged foods and canned goods. Without functioning ATMs, we would either use the cash we had on hand or start bartering. Were we in a rural area, there would probably be plenty to go around – at least for a few weeks. Crammed together as we are in the city? We would begin starving to death in a matter of days.
There would be violence.
Yesterday, after I woke up, made a cup of coffee, and sat down on the sofa to check my mail, I found I couldn’t log onto Facebook. It wanted me to sign in. When I did, it didn’t recognize my password. When I tried to reset the password, I got an error message.
I switched to Instagram and the same thing happened.
I finally checked the news. There was nothing that I could see going on. Googling “Facebook down” finally got me an explanation. All Meta companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp were experiencing some degree of disruption. Thank goodness it wasn’t just me.
When I realized that the system was down everywhere, my first thought was, “What am I going to do?”
Every morning, I check in on my Facebook feed to see what is going on. Who has died? What has happened that affects the people in my extended circle?
While I have virtual friends in time zones across the globe, most people in my time zone are usually up far earlier than I am. Michael and I tend to stay up until about one or two in the morning and then I sleep in until about 10. At that point, my mother has already been up for nearly a full day. Many others, however, get up at a more reasonable early hour and start their days. The beginning of their days often involves posting online about whatever is on their minds.
Once I have checked in there, I switch to scanning through the news to see the official versions of whatever my online cohorts have weighed in on. After that, I write for a few hours and then post it.
“What am I going to do?” Even as I asked that question, I rolled my eyes at myself for even thinking to ask the question. Nothing is the answer. I will get on with my day without it.
Facebook and Instagram have allowed me to reconnect with people from the dim recesses of my past. I post pictures every Sunday largely because my mother wants to know what I’m doing and where I am. That, at least, was the original impulse. It’s become something more like a journal or a blog since then. Without the platform, the way I am working wouldn’t be possible.
Few of us understand how the internet functions. I get that there are servers, but I don’t have the slightest idea what those really are. My job these days is wholly dependent upon the Internet. If that went down, then my days would be extremely different from what they are now. I would be living on the phone.
Each time Patti LuPone or Mandy Patinkin plays in a different venue, I do what is called advancing. I talk, via email at the beginning, to each department at a particular theatre about what our needs are and discuss how best to achieve them. I can send one email to twelve people in the theatre and relate all our needs at once. We can communicate with each other at any time of the day or night. They’re busy and so am I.
The development of the internet has changed how the entertainment industry functions. On a basic level in my job, when I was touring with The Phantom of the Opera, we had to travel with a fax machine. We would be given a fax number in each city. At the end of a performance, we would fax the show report to one or two people who would then fax it on to whomever might need to read it. Now we can send the report to a hundred people, if need be, instantly.
If the internet suddenly vanished, we would have to figure out how to accomplish the jobs that we are relying on it to do now. We would figure it out, but it wouldn’t happen overnight. It took us years to adjust to having it, I imagine it would take even longer to learn to live without it. If the internet suddenly vanished one day, our society would simply fall apart.
I only dimly remember what we did before the internet. I have no memory whatsoever about what we did before faxing.
As it happened, the New York City blackout was over by the next morning. It took a few days to get power back to some of the more rural areas, but eventually, everything was back up and running. It turned out that the cause of the entire outage had been a software malfunction in an alarm system in a control room in Akron, Ohio.
Yesterday, Facebook, Instagram, and the rest were back up and running in an hour or two. Meta, the parent company issued the following statement, “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
They haven’t released the information about what caused it. There are already conspiracy theories abounding on the sites questioning why this should happen on the morning of Super Tuesday when everyone was out, voting in the primaries. During the outage, Elon Musk gleefully tweeted about the fact that his site, X, was still working.
We all rely on extremely delicate technology to live our lives. Sometimes the advancement in technology seems utterly unnecessary. How many times have we all been reduced to waving our hands like fools in front of water faucets and towel dispensers? Simply turning on a tap and ripping off a piece of paper is anything but a hardship. At the first sign of trouble, none of us are even going to be able to go to the bathroom anymore.
A couple of months ago, we rented a car in Scotland. Michael and I drove all over the place and ended up taking a ferry to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It was a new car and in place of a dashboard, it had a computer screen. The speedometer and fuel gauge were both virtual.
During the ferry crossing, the screen stopped working. I don’t know why. It just went dark. The car still ran, but I had no idea how fast I was going or how much gas we had. We were hundreds of miles and a three-hour ferry trip away from the nearest rental company.
I went online to see if it was something easily fixable. It wasn’t. The entire dash screen would need to be taken out and replaced. I couldn’t do that, nor could I get another car, so we just continued without it. We filled up the car with fuel every other day and I judged my speed based on the people driving around me.
Eventually LED screens in cars will be the norm. Everyone will forget that once there was a little mechanism that clicked off the miles and a physical arrow that pointed to the level of gas in the tank. I’ve never heard of either of those breaking. We still use my grandmother’s aluminum egg timer which must be close to being a century old by now. It works fine. It will outlast every electronic timer we have and keep working long after Michael and I are but dim memories.
I try not to dwell upon how vulnerable I think we all are. The more we progress the closer, it seems, we bring ourselves to the edge of the precipice.
Everything works until it doesn’t. There are things I can fix and things I will just throw away and rebuy if they break. Our landfills are overflowing with unnecessarily complicated and fragile electronic time-savers. Things that used to last lifetimes now need replacing every five years. Heaven forbid you go into an Apple store with a ten-year-old computer. They look at you as if you’ve brought in a broken stone tablet and a dull chisel.
Okay. Enough of this. I am now going to post this on Facebook and send it out on Substack and get on with my day.
It looks like it’s raining a bit, so I don’t know how far I’ll get on my daily walk. We have an assortment of umbrellas but each of them is falling apart. I am perfectly capable of fixing most of them, but it’s a pain in the butt. Maybe I’ll just go out and get a new one.
Two things, one useful, one a little story of my own:
(1) Useful: This link will allow you to check (more or less in real time) a variety of URL's to see if they are up and running. It is keyed to FB, but if you go up a level, it shows a number of other sites that you can check: http://downrightnow.com/facebook#refresh
(2) Story: I'm a rennie, that is to say, a Renaissance Faire playtron. One time at Stronghold Castle, in Oregon IL, a simple weekend faire, it began raining like a cow peeing on a flat rock. So everything had to move indoors. And it was absolutely magical. Musical acts were playing in the staircases, the sound could scarcely be more alive, as were the entertainers and attendees. So while I've never experienced anything as sweeping and catastrophic as the '03 blackout, I feel like I can understand a little about the magical part.
Oh, 1a) The rule is you should always have 72 hours of supplies on hand: food, water, pet supplies, first aid, medicine, etc. If the disconnect lasts longer than 72 hours, then the situation you're facing is more like "The Walking Dead" than "Weekend at Bernie's."
I was listening to a story yesterday about how new vehicles are too computerized and that we need certain functions to remain handles and buttons.