Sandy and The Meta-storm
For all the pandemonium Hurricane Sandy unleashed on New York, there was one truth that spread as far as the arms of the spiral itself: nature’s power to stop “free” markets, and social media, offered many a much-needed, if utterly unanticipated, respite from the grind… at least for a few days.
Here was an event to post about, but thousands were unable to, as the Big Plug had been yanked. Did anyone think it would take five days for The City That Never Sleeps to restore power to everyone below 34th?
Gen Xers were fortunate enough to have their disasters happen in pre-social media days. We traipsed around oblivious to how under-networked our lives were. But when entire neighborhoods went black, the illusion of the greatest city on earth snapped into nightmarish awareness. No fridge, no phone, no internet, and no cable is one thing. But zero telecommunications infrastructure never crossed our minds as a possibility.
Cell phone batteries quickly drained searching for non-existent signals. And that was the last link anyone had to a normative existence. A smartphone can run a business when it’s working. But try doing so while piggybacking off a Wi-Fi signal from outside a Starbucks you can’t get into because it’s too packed, or lining up at one of the few city payphones with a pocket full of quarters, which happened everywhere there was one to be found. It was like a dose of what the breadlines must have felt like.
Without any way to dial out, plug in, or interconnect, there was a crisis of isolation. But it wasn’t all bad... In the bloated monstrosity that “connectivity” has become, the occasional helping of existential dread can swing from unpleasant to nearly euphoric with a simple change of perspective.
Imagine a full week where you can’t be reached on any device. You don’t have to lie, hide, or find some remote location where you’re off the grid. It’s just that suddenly, shit doesn’t work, and everyone accepts it. So you don’t have to update, or check in with every irrelevant communiqué, and best of all, you’re not being target-marketed from the second you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.
It’s laughable how quickly all those urgencies become irrelevant. And what exactly was it we ended up missing? It’s harder than ever to pin it down. We’re too embedded in this technological hegemony to remember. Life has become more metaphorical than ever. And events like Sandy remind us just how fragile the metaphor has become.
Social media is gossamer thin. And for all the work some of us do, for all that time spent perfecting our meta-narratives, we take for granted how quickly it can all evaporate, like actual clouds. Our physical structures are also vulnerable, but even after a storm, we have their foundations on which to rebuild.
Without social media, many of us realized we only had a few close friends with whom we wanted to share our victories and defeats. And when we finally heard the sound of their voices, we felt a wave of appreciation that would never have been the same had we all been posting ad nauseam.
It’s the LACK, the period of disconnect, that precious, delicate void, that is so rare these days. And so powerful. Someone should make an app for that.