The Risks Of A Digital Blackout

What we might lose if the internet goes dark

Part of a temporary existence means acknowledging the inevitable end of it. We grieve who we are today, knowing the micromoments will be gone by tomorrow. Life is so finite it leaves us desperate to cherish it, but it also makes us desperate to live on in some way: in memory, in stories, in writing. When there are billions of us, how do we differentiate ourselves? How do we avoid falling into the blur of time? It’s terrifying. From meticulously detailed autobiographies to drunkenly etching your name into the Aikman’s bathroom stalls, there is something unifying about the fear of being forgotten; the fear of moving on having left nothing behind. 

Gone are the days of relying on time capsules. Instead, we have terabytes of storage holding our every text chain between friends and family, the songs we listen to while putting away clothes, and our favourite — and least favourite — shows we can not stop watching. And then there’s social media, where we can post our sense of style and personal aesthetic to a 30-second soundbite of a song we really like, showing off our unique (but probably not too unique) sense of identity. 

With the popularity of social media, personality and individuality have become synonymous with how you can prove it. From posting your Spotify Wrapped to carefully curating your liked reels to show off your niche interests and sense of humour, it begs the question: if other people can’t see it, does your uniqueness exist? What would be left of you if the online world went offline? When every digital receipt of our own identity is gone and only the old material artefacts remain, who are we and what do we look like to those who never knew us?

Several years ago, due to a combination of user error and a lack of understanding of iCloud, I accidentally permanently deleted my entire collection of photos. These went back years, and it still scares me now to think there are memories I have forgotten about, their recollection now unprompted without any concrete reminders. Well, clearly not concrete if all it takes is the wrong two clicks of a button for them to disappear. I was left with the few physical photos I had printed on my dodgy home printer, their colours muddied due to a lack of magenta ink and wrinkled from where I had Blu-Tacked them to my bedroom wall. When I’m not here to fill those gaps with my memories, there won’t be much left of me from that time at all.

Less individualistically, what do we have left of ourselves as a species if the online world collapses? We are so far removed from our own physical reality. If future generations look back, there will be a cyberspace-sized gap. We will appear to have still used Walkmans or CDs since they were the last fully physical development in the music world before digitalisation. Wireless headphones will lie as an abandoned mystery without any clear function. Fax machines were the closest we got to instant messaging. We were not the generation of progress, and we did not leave any new marks. 

As easy as it would be to vilify the online world, it is a core part of our daily lives for a reason. It makes so many parts of our lives easier: communication, education, and the arts. Its value to our contemporary society is not inherently more or less than that of the material world. I just believe that we should not altogether abandon our physical footprints. Start a diary, make art, handwrite that letter, and print those photos. Or don’t. Maybe we don’t need to be remembered; maybe that’s shallow. The question if we should be remembered matters not; we simply want to be, and that is as human a trait as our short, finite lives.

Illustration by Ana Brockmann Aldasoro