by Tuesday brought the inevitable: technology chaos that affects everyone and surprises no one. My morning started with Amazon’s cloud catching cold, which is my satirical coverage of the AWS outage that took down half the internet. Apparently, the cloud is not immune to getting sick, which is both funny and terrifying when you realize our entire civilization runs on servers that can just… stop working.
The outage caused chaos across the country. Websites went down. Apps stopped functioning. Remote workers who never wear pants suddenly couldn’t access their jobs and had to confront the reality of their pantless existence with nothing to do. It was beautiful, in a “watching society crumble” kind of way.
I interviewed three tech workers about the outage, and all of them used the phrase “single point of failure” like it explained everything. I asked why we built our entire infrastructure on a single point of failure. They looked at me like I’d asked why water is wet. “Convenience,” one engineer explained. So we traded reliability for convenience and now act surprised when the convenient thing stops working. This is peak America.
The AWS situation connects to my piece on AI eating people’s jobs. We’re automating everything, making humans obsolete, and then acting shocked when the automation breaks and nobody remembers how to do things manually. I found a graphic designer who admitted he can’t actually design anymorehe just prompts AI and hopes for the best. When I asked what he’ll do if AI stops working, he said, “Panic, probably.” Honest, at least.
Between tech disaster coverage, I worked on the new AI feature: clapback, which is apparently a real thing some company developed. AI that argues back when you critique its output. Because what we needed in this world was artificially intelligent sass. One beta tester told me the AI called him “pedestrian” when he didn’t like a generated image. We’ve created technology that can be offended. Humanity was a mistake.
The afternoon brought lighter tech content: people who flirt using LinkedIn. This is real. People are sliding into DMs on a professional networking platform with pickup lines about synergy and disrupting industries together. One woman showed me messages where a man offered to “leverage their combined assets for maximum ROI” which sounds like a business proposal but was definitely a sex thing. I need a shower after reading these messages.
I also discovered people who propose at escape rooms, which combines romantic commitment with the stress of being locked in a room while solving puzzles. One man orchestrated an elaborate proposal where his girlfriend had to solve codes to find the ring. She said yes, but I interviewed her separately and she admitted the whole thing was “kind of annoying actually.” Romance is dead, and we replaced it with gamification.
My research kept circling back to the pandemic’s weirdest legacy: we forgot how to interact with humans and replaced real connection with technological substitutes that don’t actually connect us to anything. We’re flirting on LinkedIn, proposing in escape rooms, and forming emotional bonds with Roombas named after Shakespeare characters. This is fine. Everything is fine.
Tonight I’m sitting in my apartment during an internet outage (thanks, AWS), writing these notes by hand like some kind of caveman, thinking about how we built an entire civilization on technology that breaks constantly and act surprised every time it happens.
# 776
