Not long ago, I posed the question: could you live without The Machine? A reference to E. M. Forster’s story of the same, the “Machine” is the modern, interconnected world, with the internet reaching into every aspect of our lives.
Well, the gods not being without a certain sense of humour, the very next day I found out.
Tasmania has experienced chaos due to a statewide internet outage, with businesses, government and commerce disrupted for much of Tuesday.
The Australian
As it happens, my little town has been plagued with internet outages for months, due to the ancient state of its underground cabling. It just so happened that on Monday, National Broadband Network techs fixed the faulty cables. Needless to say, when internet connections vanished mid-Tuesday, I was not happy. But, then I realised that even mobile data had disappeared. Trying to check the news was no help, as digital TV also went south.
Messaging apps were all-but useless, but over the next hour or so, text messages and phone calls from friends around the state all said the same thing: Is the internet out for you?
Finally, resorting to the absolute stone-age technology of free-to-air tv, my son caught a news item that carried the awful truth: the entire state was plunged into pre-digital darkness.
In what one expert described as an “unfortunate confluence of events,” two fibre-optic cables connecting the state to mainland Australia were cut within the space of two hours on Tuesday, resulting in an outage which lasted over five hours.
Inbound and outbound flights were delayed, banks and ATMs shut down, businesses lost access to EFTPOS and people were unable to access social media.
In a perfect storm of idiocy, not one, but both of the cables linking Tasmania to the Mainland were cut.
The disruptions were caused by two separate cuts to two of the three cables connecting Tasmania to the mainland, occurring within two hours of each other.
About 11am, one of Telstra’s fibre cables across Bass Strait was cut at Frankston, Victoria, by what the company later said was “civil construction” and a failure to “dial before you dig”.
Then, about 1pm, the other Telstra cable was damaged on the Tasmanian side, with the company again blaming “third parties”.
A Telstra spokesperson told the ABC the damage on the Victorian side was due to a “big drill” auger rupturing the cable, with technicians having to haul and reconnect nearly a kilometre of fibre.
Just to rub our noses in it, the next day, idiocy struck again.
But on Wednesday, less than a day after Tuesday’s calamity, Basslink confirmed a fibre optic cable from Tasmania to the mainland was “operating at reduced capacity, due to a third-party fault on the network”.
In a statement, Basslink said the problem was “entirely unrelated to yesterday’s wide-spread outage”.
ABC Australia
If the piece of string joining the tin cans at Point Wilson and George Town had been cut too, we’d have been in real trouble.
So, how did I manage, when The Machine Stopped?
The biggest disruption to me was its impact on my workflow. As a freelance writer, an internet connection is critical to being able to carry on my work. Not only can I not contact clients and send out finished work, but the capacity to research is cut off at the knees. It’s startling to realise just how much we’ve come to depend on being able to instantly look up information on anything and everything.
Other than that, its effect on my daily life was minimal. It’s instructive to realise how little social media really matters. More importantly, as a writer, it’s also instructive how detrimental the constant lure of social media is to concentration.
But if the outage had gone for days, then things may well have got more dire. Most EFTPOS services were knocked out: it’s a reminder that there’s a good reason I always carry a small amount of cash on me, even if it stays untouched in my wallet for months. The old days of having a stash of money under the bed suddenly don’t look so nutty.
Also looking less nutty are the Preppers. In fact, I’ve written before that, conspiracy theories aside, Preppers are a sober reminder of just how essentially helpless so many modern people really are.
It’s not until the machine stops that you really realise how much you depend on it.
