Occam's Razor

As you sit at home twiddling your thumbs, imagine how much worse all this social isolation would be without the Internet. There’s not much you can count on these days, but if you at least have a high-speed Internet connection, social isolation and boredom shouldn’t be among them.

It is likely that the Internet will only become more vital in the months and years ahead. That’s because contrary to what you might hope, most of aren’t going anywhere. Those of us who can work from home are going to keep doing so, and many will never return to the office.

“The office” may be one of the casualties of this crisis. If you make it into the office at all, it will probably be to a cubicle of the day. The new normal for white collar people will be what many of us were doing before all this started: working from home. We’ll be using VPNs (virtual private networks) to securely work remotely.

Our social life will evolve to what is already happening: Zoom meetings. This platform seems to be emerging as the go-to online meeting platform. Here on our hill of 55+ people, our association paid for a Zoom account. It sounds silly since we all live in the same neighborhood, but it’s a very socially active neighborhood. Many of these meetings are now virtual. Meeting in person in groups is probably at least a year away.

The ramifications of all this are still being sorted out. We can see one of them today: your Easter service if you are attending one is virtual. Our country was moving in a more secular direction already; this COVID-19 crisis will do more to accelerate it. After a while you may forget why you went to church at all. You can save a lot of money if you don’t have to tithe to your church, and since it can’t provide much in the way of spiritual services, what use is it?

It looks though that in our crazy, upside down world you can at least count on the Internet. Not that it isn’t under stress. Where I live, the only provider is Comcast. With everyone home all the time, and with neighborhoods sharing bandwidth over the same coaxial cable, latency issues are happening from time to time. Sometimes when we stream we get the dreaded hourglass. I’ve looked into this. We were getting 35 megabits per second, but are paying for “up to” 800 megabits per second. Sometimes Comcast can’t do better than 4% of the speed we are paying for.

It will be a wake up call to some that the Internet is not now just a nice-to-have thing, but an absolute necessity, and that we pay way too much for it. For a couple of years I have been trying to persuade our city to create a municipal network to compete with Comcast. The effort has been going great. We were all set to select a vendor to study the viability and costs of the network, then COVID-19 struck. It’s on hold, but I’m betting when our mayor and city council have a chance to catch their breaths, they will prioritize it over a lot of other things going on; indeed, it may be crucial to our city’s recovery from this. Ten years from now, if you are not getting Internet from your local government, you may be thinking you are living in the dark ages. In short, I don’t think Comcast stock is a good buy for the long term.

Most haven’t studied the history of the Internet, so we tend to take it for granted. While there is nothing miraculous about the Internet, the story of how it was created is indeed amazing. It’s the story of the success of long term investment, the sort of thing we rarely do in government anymore. Basically, we threw money at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960s (then known as ARPA) to try to get military installations and educational institutions to be able to communicate electronically.

The genius behind it was a core group of radical thinkers (something you don’t associate with our Defense Department) that the network should be super reliable. By creating a public packet-switching network using open protocols, we created a super fault-tolerant network. If it breaks down at all, it’s in local neighborhoods like mine where the pipes provided by a single provider aren’t sufficient to meet the demand of the traffic that streams across it.

Imagine how socially isolated you would actually be if there were no Internet. You would be limited to telephone calls, probably from a landline. Since you could not afford long distance, it would be mostly to people on your local exchanges: one at a time, no conference calls. Imagine searching for work without the Internet. You would not be able to go out and knock on employers’ doors in the midst of a pandemic. You would be limited to local want ads in the paper, but even so what jobs that are available would largely be work from home jobs while the pandemic rages. Without the Internet, finding jobs at all is pretty much impossible.

The Internet provides a robust platform for information and knowledge exchange about pretty much anything, any time, and on demand. It just works. The Internet made much of my career possible and continues to provide me with income even in retirement. Now I help clients with their IT problems over the Internet, and have since 2006. I never leave home to work; it’s all done virtually. Most of my clients are from overseas. Without the Internet I would have never had their business. Yesterday, I was charging a client $60/hour to work on a site they are upgrading. Going to the office means going upstairs. That’s my office now and since I retired in 2014 it’s been my only office.

We’ll get through this in time. It’s going to be painful to get through it too. But if you think you are in pain now, imagine what life would be without the Internet. If nothing else, it can keep you fending off boredom pretty much indefinitely. If you are wise, you can use the Internet in this downtime to train for that next career, and emerge a winner in what is likely to be a new, more socially isolating age.