A white pixel.
A single, stray white pixel drifting across the front page of the BBC website.
At first I thought it was a problem with my monitor, but I switched tabs to the New York Times and the pixel disappeared.
I scratched my head.
I looked around, including out the window, where people were passing along the sidewalk, engrossed in their phones.
I switched browser tabs back to the BBC:
More than one white pixel now; three, four, “falling” diagonally across the page. I followed one all the way down.
It settled on the bottom, remained.
I went on social media.
I wasn't the only one who'd noticed. People all over the world were asking what was wrong. What's up with the news? Is it a hack or something? Why’s it freakin' snowing on the BBC?
So began the winter of the internet.
The BBC may have been the first—or merely the first-noticed—but it wasn't the only affected website. Soon most were; then all. You'd open YouTube or your banking site to find it obscured by a blizzard of white pixels…
The screens themselves turned cold.
Then links began to fail. They stopped pointing to coherent urls.
Then the incoherent links turned brown (#A52A2A), fell off; fell and disappeared, buried perhaps in the accumulations of already fallen snow—leaving eerie spaces on their pages.
Text became incomplete. Navigation, difficult.
Soon, bookmarks suffered the same fate, pointing to pages that could no longer be found.
Cursors shivered.
Videos and animations froze over like lakes of liquid information.
Around this time, I remember listening to a song using one of the streaming apps on my phone. They still, intermittently, worked.
The song was The Beatles' “Let It Be.”
Thirty seconds in, the track began to skip, sound garbled. Paul McCartney's vocals were laboured, as if he was running out of breath.
The earphones started letting off rhythmic bursts of steam.
Then, mid-song, the singing abruptly ended, even as the music continued, oddly slowed; and I had the deeply uncomfortable feeling that I was listening to the death of something…
It made me sick to my stomach.
For a while you could still type in a url and see the resulting site, but loading was slow and the contents were increasingly impossible to understand, riddled, as they were, with gaps, uncanny staticity and neverending snows that reached sometimes almost to the browser bar.
The code itself was as bare as a December tree.
The device didn't matter.
There was no serious explanation.
Or maybe there was and most of us couldn't access it, because how would we access information except online? How else could we even communicate, congregate, disseminate our knowledge, on a mass scale…
Television? Radio?
Newspapers?
But those required organization, communication, infrastructure, all of which now relied on cyberspace; which the winternet denied us.
We couldn't buy groceries, clothes, tools or books online.
We had to go to the store, but the store couldn't accept our credit card payments because the systems were frozen. Not that much was available, even for those with cash, because the delivery schedule had been interrupted. When trucks did arrive, there was hardly anything on them.
Even information saved or printed off the internet broke. Images became corrupted. Paper frosted over and thawed until the ink ran.
Even our memories of websites, and what we'd learned from websites, were remembered through walls of frigid static.
It was shocking how much we didn't know; how much basic knowledge we had lost. It was painful too, the feeling of sudden, helpless disconnection. If we had a question, there was no one to ask for the answer but each other and ourselves. We were children without a parent, cells without a structure. We were leftover parts. We were apes.
A trade in books developed.
People stole them, killed for them, hoarded them so they could dispense their wisdom piece by piece, for a price.
There sprang up an economy of expertise.
People who knew, or remembered, were valued; or forced to give up their knowledge—to share it—by writing it down. It was lucrative but dangerous to be known to know something.
Strong knowers protected their worth, defended their territories, strove ruthlessly to establish regional monopolies of information and eliminated their rivals to keep supply low.
Weak knowers were exploited, squeezed like fruits and left juiceless to dry out and die.
For the majority of us, it was prudent to publicly deny knowing anything, while privately trading what we knew in local networks of trust, bartering with the contents of our minds.
One of the first things I bartered for was an old stereo system and a box full of audio cassettes, one of which was the Beatles album Let It Be.
As soon as I got home, I boiled myself some water, steeped a few herbs and put the album on.
The first five tracks played flawlessly.
It was bliss.
Then the sixth track, “Let It Be,” failed to play at all; the tape spun but all there was was four minutes and three seconds of silence.
But when I later played the audio cassette for my wife, she didn't know what I meant.
“You're gaslighting me right?” she said.
“I'm not.”
“Okay, well, I'm not sure what to tell you, I hear the whole song, just like I remember when my dad used to play it.”
My wife's father had been a professor emeritus of molecular biology.
He'd been beaten to death in the early days of the winternet by a despondent mother who wouldn't accept that my wife's father knew nothing about setting her sobbing child's fractured bone.
Until his final breath, she accompanied each blow to his head with the words, “Stop holding out on me you selfish old prick!”
In a sense, that's where we still are, wanting to believe that if winter then spring, and holding out hope for the coming of a season that, every day, seems further and further away.