Tethered to the Cloud
Last week’s onslaught from Typhoon Pedring and the day-long power outage that followed reminded me among millions of other Manileños how dependent we are on our digital devices, which are in turn, dependent on what the poet Dylan Thomas might have described in another time as “the surge that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
We carry our business and social lives with us in these devices cell phones, laptops, cameras, etc. which are technically tethered to us but which, in reality, we are tethered to. We’ve become calves and piglets suckling at the breast of Mother Cloud yes, the great, vast, ethereal Cloud that Apple, among the other corporate deities of the 21st century, has created for us to feed from, dispensing our daily doses of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, e-mail, the news, and various objects of desire.
This dependence afflicts even and especially the young: when I asked my undergraduate students what it was they could least afford to lose in their lives, the runaway answer was the cellular phone a device which, for most Filipinos 20 years ago, didn’t even exist.
Today you even have cell phones designed specifically for Facebook, bringing to a new extreme the implementation of that buzzword from a decade back “convergence,” which meant that a phone could no longer just make calls, but take pictures, play music, play games, organize your daily schedule, and wake you up in the morning. As the 2000s wore on, your phone also began to deposit and withdraw money, track auctions, carry whole libraries of books, buy tickets, make friends, lose friends, and, in certain places, divorce your wife.
All these chores and pleasures consume loads of battery power, and again Pedring gave us all an analog-style wake-up call about how our lives today run not on carbon but on lithium-ion, counted not in the years but in the hours, if not the minutes. You become acutely aware that hours have minutes when the power timer on your battery-fed device starts blinking with that red “low-battery warning” logo, and you’re in the middle of composing an important e-mail message on which some six-figure project depends, or in the middle of a nasty argument where you’re trying to have the last word.
My solution to the battery problem and having gone through the drill in these brownout-benighted islands dozens of times is to have lots of them, or to have some kind of standby power source, just in case. I haven’t come around to getting a generator yet, although I think the idea is pretty cool, if also annoying to the neighbors imagine your house being lit up like Christmas when darkness falls on everyone else. Short of a generator, I really should get one of those UPS or Uninterrupted Power Supply thingies, but since I work mainly with a laptop whose internal battery is its own UPS meaning that the onboard juice should be enough for me to save the file and work a little longer I haven’t picked up one of these clunky boxes yet.
I do keep other batteries galore half a dozen spares for the point-and-shoot and the DSLR, rechargeable triple A’s for the clocks (I’m something of a clock freak, and have at least one in every room in the house, and I can’t stand a clock with dead hands), and for the iPhone whose internal battery isn’t user-replaceable, an external charger that, of course, also needs to be charged. And this brings us all back to what the Brits call “the mains” electricity coming right out of two or three holes on the wall, without which, sooner or later, those blinking lights and cursors and everything else in our lives that depends on them will come to a crashing halt.
When Pedring’s slashing winds tore down the power lines, I stewed at home, getting crankier by the hour, utterly heedless of the rustic charms of the pre-electrical age. Without Wi-Fi, I felt painfully disconnected from the digital universe. My phone was still alive and it theoretically had a full-time Internet connection, but even the network seemed to be down on the other side. Just trying to check for mail ate up more precious battery power. I rejoiced for a moment when I remembered that I had a USB charger that could run off the cigarette lighter in the car, so I hurried to the garage to turn on the engine and plug in the contraption only to discover that I had bought a cheap Chinese dud. Sighing, I snapped on the external charger, which served me for the better part of the day. The network came back on, and I got my e-mail and Internet fix like an addict in withdrawal driving a needle right through his skull.
When even the external charger gave out, I roped the phone to the flickering laptop, and sucked the last of its juice (the other USB port was feeding a digital recorder with a built-in FM radio, which I needed for the news). I felt like a mother in a tiny lifeboat having to decide who among her children she would toss overboard. It never occurred to me, of course, that the biggest piece of baggage in the lot was me and my insatiable need to be attached to the Cloud by any kind of lifeline.
One of these days, sometime in the year 2025, I’m sure they’ll invent gadgets that can run off something like the oxygen in the atmosphere (and why not, since even now you can recharge your phone wirelessly, over the air). Perhaps the same Cloud we all want a piece of will give something back of itself and power up the batteries and cables by which we remain its faithful subjects.
Until then, more conventional clouds like Pedring’s will have dominion over us, and the only twitter we’ll be hearing in the wake of the storm will be that of sparrows drying out their wings.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.
