stop the presses

Last night, the world stopped.

Or it seemed that way.

I have become so reliant upon the internet as part of the warp and woof of my life, that its absence makes me feel as if I had been abandoned to a deserted island with my man Friday. When the internet is gone, it seems as if the entire world outside the walls of my hopuse disappears like Brigadoon.

When I was working on my Master's Degree in England, I wrote a side paper about the possibility of a coup d'état in the United Kingdom. The idea seems fanciful now, but, it was the 1970s and there were individuals who believed it was the sole method to save the country from the government's economic and social policies.

I built my research around the process described in Edward Luttwak's  Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook -- a book I had packed around with me for years. Luttwak contends that one of the first steps any successful coup leader must do is to seize the centers of communication -- and shut them down.

Around 8 or so last night, my Netflix connection started acting up. Then it just stopped. I tried switching from my Telmex modem to my Telcel modem. Nothing. Even the data connection on my Telcel telephone was not working. For any data connection. No internet. No social media. No streaming. It was all gone.

Because I could not watch a movie, I decided to work on my Spanish. I couldn't. What I wanted to do required a connection. Facebook? Nope. Draft an essay on my blog? Not without a way to sign into Google. Catch up on reading The Economist? Same problem.

Luckily, I had just downloaded the latest edition of National Review on my Kindle. Had it not been available, there were plenty of books in the library -- or I could have watched a DVD.

Even with those options, I did feel deprived of information while the internet was down. Some people may criticize that reaction as some form of electronic dependency. I do not see it that way.

The internet has opened a brand new world of information to us. Much of it is nonsense, of course. But that is true of life in general. All we need to do is use our critical judgment and Sturgeon's Law* to ferret through it all.

Had I been living in one of several other Latin American countries and the internet went down (even for two hours), I would have anticipated reading newspaper headlines the next morning like this: "General Sandoval Introduces New President to Public."

Alas, it appears no one was reading Luttwak last night. The shut-down was far more prosaic -- system maintenance, according to Telcel.

But isn't that just the excuse that Luttwak recommends coup leaders to use when communications are shut down?

Maybe I should check the newspaper again. Or refer to Sturgeon.


* -- Sturgeon's Law, of course is: 90% of everything is crap.