Your device is offline

Michelle Bonnet Hale.

By Michelle Bonnet Hale

“Your device is offline.” 

Oh, thank goodness. A hidden benefit. My laptop is offline and there is no WiFi here and I am blessed. I am on a solitary spiritual retreat so I am actually doubly blessed.

I sip clear water from the glass tumbler on the desk. No perfect cup of coffee, no cup of tea, no (gasp) diet soda which I do admit to succumbing to on occasion. A sip of clear water.

The view out the window is of scattered autumn leaves not yet downtrodden by winter. In some areas they are interspersed with plants still green, but in other places the leaves form a puffy pokey quilt, a vibrant orange-brown amalgam, each leaf still itself and intact, often with the stem sticking straight up as if reaching skyward: “Not yet! Not yet!”

We can create offline space in our days at home, but I for one don’t do it often enough. I will begin, though. This is the beginning.

I actually don’t remember ever agreeing that it would be good for me to be online all of the time. Back when personal computers were just becoming a thing, and email was just becoming a thing, I don’t remember the social contract that said, “You will be online all of the time, and by the way, we will barrage you with ads cleverly disguised as ‘information.’” We will give you these clever social media apps that are designed to enrage you so that you keep clicking. We will addict you so thoroughly to connectedness that you feel panic when you suddenly can’t reach someone.

I didn’t actually sign that contract, but here we are. And we’re moving right straight toward the Borg, at breakneck speed. Recently I realized that storing documents on my computer resulted in copies of the document being stored on the Microsoft OneDrive, off in the “cloud.” Stunningly, my whole file structure is on the OneDrive. How did that happen? When did I sign that contract?

Fortunately, Reddit is out there with good pointers, but even with those smart brains, it has been a day-by-day struggle to finally turn off the synch to OneDrive, and to keep it from synching.

Tech folks are fond of pointing out that “the cloud” is actually just someone else’s computer. Microsoft is doing everything it can to store my personal documents on their computers.

In this era of rampant data breaches and insatiable artificial intelligence, I find this practice to be a violation of my privacy and deeply disturbing. If I choose to put something (like this column) on the internet, well, apparently the barn doors are open and that horse has left the barn. AI will gobble up my content.

But I can choose not to put my information on the internet or in the Cloud, can’t I? Well, only if I notice this OneDrive thing and then dig all over the place to turn it off. And I will bet that the next upgrade that comes along will turn syncing back on again. Ugh.

As far as I can figure out, the documents that Microsoft has been taking from me don’t yet feed AI, but I don’t even know that I will know when that starts happening. I discovered this OneDrive thing entirely by accident; I don’t remember agreeing to give Microsoft my content, but I must have clicked some box along the way. I’m sure their team of lawyers has created iron-clad layers of legal protection.

But the leaves. How do I describe these leaves? They are untrammeled. They move here and there with the wind. They were green and alive and they are now this most beautiful color that I cannot find a word for and that’s because they’re many colors, layers, light, dark, shadowed, layered upon each other, but with space between the layers. Orange-brown does not even begin to describe the vibrance of these leaves.

At lunch, one of the sisters suggested that if you took a close-up photo of the leaves you would see the beauty without even knowing what they are.

Had I been connected I might have missed the leaves, but I’d sure know the horrific news, up-to-the-minute. I wouldn’t have had that conversation with the sisters about the leaves because I might not have noticed their colors or spent time gazing at them or dug around in my brain looking for ways to describe them.

I never signed that contract of constant connection, but I can roll it back now. I’ve started with disconnecting from OneDrive and going on retreat. I can continue: The presence of WiFi doesn’t mean I have to hook into it. Smartphones have a handy feature called Do Not Disturb. When you look for me, search among the leaves.

• Michelle Bonnet Hale’s roots go deep in Juneau and Southeast Alaska. She and her partner share their household with various relatives and three dogs. She served for six years on the Juneau Assembly.