By candlelight

In the past couple of weeks, I've witnessed a bungled software upgrade that rendered email unusable for a day, a computer meltdown, and a denial-of-service attack that took out a social network for the better part of a week, in addition to the usual random errors, freezes, spam, phishing, and glitches that are a general part of digital life. This was topped off by a total power failure in my neighborhood last night.

I tweeted only a day or two ago--and this was before the power failure--that the current quality of our technology and our digital infrastructure makes me less than confident that we're ready to migrate our entire civilization to online platforms. 'Tis a fragile thing indeed, I reflected last night, while reading a print book by candlelight. (Yes, I was rockin' it like the nineteenth century!)

And let us not forget that