My head is hurting. I have been awake for 38 hours. It’s February 2020 and I’m marching to a hotel in Downtown Atlanta. I arrived last night on the redeye from Minneapolis to find out the 24-hour check-in advertised on their website was a lie. Police, a brand-new smartphone user, a wet winter, and the stage of sleep exhaustion that makes your knees knock and turns all your clothes to sheer linen don’t mix well. I was shouted into understanding the Lyft app at 3am. By 5pm, after an entire day at a conference, complete with presenting my own work on something to do with sex, politics, and the web, I officially check in, collapse into bed, and unwind at high speed.
High speed data, that is. I can’t fall asleep before I figure out how to use the SmartTV and scroll through the latest uploads from my favorite commentary YouTubers. I can’t dislocate myself from the dangers of sleep deprivation before I update my mutuals on SnapChat that my adventure to get to bed is finally over.
Five video essays and two guided tours of the room later, I’m knocked into a numb and dreamless state.
When I have to flee campus a month later, the stone cold that has encased my body, my thoughts, and my emotions since Georgia cracks open.Snapshots of my year at SCSU seem to emerge all at once and play out before my eyes.
Me, stuck in front of a laptop during class, in corporate plush library chairs, in my office, at the airport, while lounging on my shoebox dorm bed.
A crash course in email etiquette. Incorporating Twitter into every assignment. This is all I do, seven days a week.
Learning how to manage D2L in my sleep. Learning how to use Skype to stay in touch. Being out of touch as I watch my boyfriend cry when his childhood dog dies. Learning how to hug a laptop. Learning how to chuck a phone. Learning to leave my phone behind when I go explore the River Bluffs Park during my office hours and walk into the Mississippi up to my knees at night.
Back home, internet is $2.95 an hour. Making lectures into videos is now my job. My laptop becomes the laptop, the only way my brother can go to class and my dad can complete symptom accountability questionnaires before work.
The workload increases. The erosion begins. I feel sick logging into D2L; I avoid email at all costs; I’m buzzed when I log into Zoom and too ashamed to leave my laptop camera on. New technology isn’t fun anymore; I’m so afraid right now. April 2020 is the fourth month I’ve had a smartphone and I use up all my data checking Twitter and the John Hopkins coronavirus data tracker in the realest Fear Of Missing Out I’ve ever had.
When the semester finally ends, I stop using almost everything. I’m exclusive to Discord, a trendy groupchat app, for two months. The internet is a place where my friends learn where to be for the next night of protesting and where pictures are spreading. People have their phones out; cameras are everywhere; drones stick out flying overhead during the day. I bring my phone once and never again as I learn more about surveillance. It’s not a myth anymore. Once I-694 is shut down to intimidate protestors before curfew, the texts and calls slowdown and the rides come to a stop. By July, I’m almost always in the woods, checking anti-surveillance text messenger Signal for updates from friends, the rest of the apps I use designed to be offline.