It’s terrifying how much we rely on wifi

James Moore, The Independent

Lovers of vinyl are aware of and accept eccentricities, such as the occasional jump on records. It’s one of the joys of analogue. Except that digital isn’t exempt from this either. Alexa can play grasshopper, too. Oh yes.

I became acutely aware of this phenomenon after I retired to bed with a filthy cold that left me so blocked up that breathing had become challenging. It’s not only COVID that can do that (and yes, before you ask, I repeatedly tested negative for that).

You can often fix jumping vinyl by giving it a judicious clean or changing the stylus, but a malfunctioning broadband service is a mite harder to deal with. It was the latter that was causing Alexa to behave like the proverbial mad March hare. Not that the jumping lasted long, as Alexa was soon kaput. Gone. And so was a lot more, as our router gave up the ghost.

It led to the shocking realisation of just how reliant we’d become on the blue light being on. As well as the music subscription, there was no Netflix, no gaming. The grocery order nearly didn’t get delivered because the doorbell stopped working so we didn’t know it had arrived. We were more or less spared floods of anguish through the children being unable to do homework — that too frequently requires an internet connection, especially when it involves maths — but only because the end of term was rapidly approaching.

More troubling was the fact that I rely on an internet connection to work. I found a way around the problem by exploiting the wads of data I’ve built up on my phone and using my personal hotspot to send this to my editors. But working that way for a couple of days felt a bit like swapping the Porsche of internet connections for an East German Trabant.

Now, I know what some people would say: you’re banging on about a first world problem. But then, we live in the first world where a huge array of things are now done online. Bills are paid, necessities are bought, the government is interacted with, prescriptions are ordered. Vital ones. The pressure to do more and more things that way is intense, which makes having the router wink out quite uncomfortable.

Bear with me now, because I promise this isn’t one of those ridiculous “when I were a lad” moments some people like to indulge in as if they grew up in the middle of one of those bloody Hovis ads (check it out on YouTube if you don’t know what I mean and your broadband is actually working).

But my wife and I grew up in an era when the launch of a fourth TV channel was a huge deal. Almost nothing was digitised. The Christmas present of an Atari VCS was like receiving a magic box from the as yet unwritten Harry Potter novels.

Fast forward to today and there we were going, “oh God, oh God, oh God” upon losing the interweb — or more correctly, the fancy connection to the interweb — for just a couple of days. The realisation we’d become just as wedded to this stuff as our digital-native children came almost as an addict’s moment of clarity.

Actually, our kids handled it better than we expected. How come you’re gaming, I asked my son, upon the realisation that there was digital carnage coming from his room as usual. He looked at me with one of those classically teenage, superior stares and then said: “I do have offline games you know.”

However, maybe having our reliance — perhaps our dependence — on tech revealed to us was a good thing. Maybe it sent a worthwhile message. We could do with a little more independence from it because tech goes wrong. All the time.

The tech companies that provide all this stuff hardly have our best interests at heart. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen made clear that big tech wants us to be addicts and creates its algorithms to seduce us with that aim in mind.

Gosh, we’d never survive the zombie apocalypse, I thought, in the wake of the mild panic that ensued when the router went pop. Then I thought, but we are zombies. They’ve turned us into them with our willing complicity. That’s what (normally) good connectivity will do for you. Clearly a mixed blessing.

Time to call a halt? Not quite. I’m no Luddite. But I think I’ll be passing on those smart home gadgets Amazon and Google are selling. Thanks, but I’ll switch the lights on by hand. Same goes for turning the heating up. Sod the app you’ve got for that.