When the cloud goes away, everything breaks.

I’m in Asheville now. I moved here about a year ago from California. I’m a web developer, and for the past year or so, I’d been thinking about the failures of the tech revolution. Tech was supposed to make us happier, more productive, more educated, more connected with others, etc. Instead it’s been used to addict people to nonsense and exploit the worst aspects of human nature. Now, stuck in Asheville, with a useless supercomputer in my pocket, I realize that it’s even worse than that. Our tech fails completely when disconnected from the cloud.

As a web developer, I don’t follow mobile development, but I kinda assumed that mobile developers focused on similar problems as us. In web there used to be a lot of hand-wringing in web about offline web apps. The story went if web apps want to compete with mobile, we’d need offline capabilities. So we got various forms of localStorage, IndexedDB, service workers, etc. We figured out how to save state locally, then sync when the network came back. All very nice. This is all old hat by now.

What I didn’t realize is that mobile developers don’t seem to consider offline capabilities very much, if at all. I have Google Maps and Apple Maps on my phone. Although both have the capability to download offline maps, neither considers that maybe, just maybe, a basic map should work offline by default. I wish I had thought of this before the storm and downloaded local maps, but when a storm is coming and you’re scrambling to prepare, you don’t think of details like this. For something so essential as a map, you shouldn’t have to think of this.

I also have a food intolerance and use an app that helps me know what foods I can eat that won’t make me sick. It’s a relatively small amount of data, all things considered. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t store the entire thing on my phone and update it if data changes, but that is also not available. So, when I’m running out of food and hear that MREs are going to be available, I’m stuck wondering if I should eat them or not. Being hungry for a few days would suck, but being hungry and sick in a disaster area would compound the disaster.

Actually, when I said that mobile apps don’t think about offline capabilities, that’s not completely true. As always in today’s tech, the goal isn’t to provide utility, it’s to stoke engagement. Here’s how. YouTube automatically downloads videos it thinks I’d like. So I don’t have a map or a list of foods I can eat, or locations of services, but I have a bunch of videos to keep me entertained while I run out of water. To be fair, buried in the videos of Conan O’Brien talking to Larry David, there was this one video by a wacky 80s French band I never heard of, Les Rita Matsouko. It’s fantastic. So, I’m unable to flush my toilet or buy gas and escape the area, but I can, for a moment, be transported to a artsy French Forbidden Zone for a few minutes as I watch my battery life dwindle. Ok.

Of all the disasters I’ve been through, the situation here in Asheville reminds me of 9/11 the most. For the first five days or so, the scarcest resource has been information. On 9/11, I was in NY and of course knew the general outline of what was happening, but all communication was down. People outside of NY, who still had access to cable news, knew more about the situation than we did. That’s what it’s like here.

I’m autistic and on the night of the storm, I was in a significant state of shutdown. The next day, I didn’t leave the house because I was too exhausted. Since all I heard was that we were getting a tropical storm, I never imagined that it would be very serious. On Saturday, I went out and surveyed the damage and talked to a few neighbors, and I started to see that this was kinda serious. But I’m in an elevated area, so still, I knew nothing about the severity of the flooding. Absolutely nothing. I turned on the radio for news and every station was still playing music as if it was a normal day. So, the power was out. No internet. No phone or texting service. And radio, which is supposed to be local and provide a public service (the airwaves are rented from us, not owned by the stations) had nothing. There was absolutely no news to be found. Probably because every station is owned by a national chain with no ties to the local community, so we were hearing music that was playing in 40 other markets at the same time. And since I had no phone/text or internet service, so I had no idea that friends and family elsewhere were trying to contact me to see if I was ok. I knew this was serious, and my neighbors agreed, but I had no idea of the scope of the trouble we were in. I thought maybe it’d go back to normal in a few days.

When we started getting updates from the county, still there was very little useful information or much to let us know the scale of the disaster. Reporters to the briefings seemed to want to know the death toll and details about the deaths the most. How many? Where did people die? Can you tell us anything interesting or grotesque about their deaths? Eventually, I Heart Radio started broadcasting updates on all radio stations. but trying to piece together useful information from that is difficult for me. I don’t know the area, so when they say, “There’s a gas station taking open on X Ave”, and I don’t have a map, I can’t really use the information. When the county says, “There will be MREs available soon”, I don’t know if I can eat them without making myself seriously ill. I don’t want to get sick right now. That would be a disaster. So I’m tapering down my food intake and might just do the fast I’d been meaning to do. It’s supposed to be good for you, right?!

Monday night, I made it to a wifi spot and was able to download maps, and talk to some friends in the outside world who were helping me find resources. By then I only had a few bottles of water and some carrots to eat.

All through this, we kept hearing “Be patient. Help is on the way”, but after five days of hearing that, and you get no help from the outside, by Monday night, things started feeling desperate. We finally got some water, but the only distribution points were a 20 minute drive from me, which means 40 minutes back and forth. With only a quarter of a tank of gas, I couldn’t risk burning that much gas.

Things finally came together on Tuesday. I was able to get a case of water, enough peanut butter and rice cakes for two days, and I was able to charge my devices and connect to the internet, and get what I really needed: information. Where are the gas stations with gas (that take credit cards)? Where are the supermarkets open and stocked (that take credit cards). When you only have a quarter tank of gas and $7.68 in your pocket, this is important information.

Every time we have a disaster like this, and people are cut off, needing information but not able to get it, we just kind of shrug and say, “What are you going to do?” What’s upsetting is that it doesn’t need to be so bad. Here are some suggestions.

It doesn’t need to fail this badly

Map apps should work offline in your home area by default. You shouldn’t need to opt in for this. Several times, I talked with people who were struggling to figure out how to get somewhere and without a map, they were having a hard time. This is unnecessary suffering.

After I was able to get to a wifi spot and download offline maps, it opened up an enormous amount of information and opportunity for me. And even though I didn’t have enough cell service for consistent texting or calling, road closure data started coming through, so I could actually see how to get to places in realtime. This was incredible.

Web based docs like Google Docs should be readable offline once you’ve loaded them. I got online and found a few Google Docs links with info, but then I lost internet. I went back to the same tab without reloading the page and I couldn’t get to the document. Why? Why did the browser reload the page? Why isn’t the data cached?

Crucial sites like Reddit should use service workers to show the last cached view of a page. There’s a Helene megathread that I can’t access right now. I’m pretty sure they have aggressive cache busting rules to make sure that users get the latest page and don’t get a cached version, because “engagement”, but at this point, Google and Reddit are utilities. If they want to be depended on as a utility, and extract rent like a utility, they should prioritize utility over fucking engagement.

In both of these cases, I knew to download the pages locally because I expected them to fail, but the average person might not know that 1) it will fail 2) there’s a workaround.

Ironically, a low-budget website like Gas Buddy just works. I can still see the last page I was on, showing the last gas map that I looked at. It’s not up to date, but it’s still informative.

Ok, if we had offline maps and we know that at least some data can get through, and we have crowdsourced data saying which grocery stores and gas stations have food and take credit cards vs cash, how long the lines are, we could be feeding this data to people in realtime. The information exists. The network connection exists. We just need to connect the dots. Apple and Google could scrape sites like GasBuddy and usahidi (What the hell is that word? Get a better domain name so that people can find it) and populate the maps. If we went a little further we could tell all grocery stores and gas stations to report their status to FEMA. Automatically send them a text with a few questions, a few times a day. Boom. We have (reasonably) up to date data, and a path to get it to people.

If anyone is reading this and saying, “That won’t work because of…” some reason, remember, this doesn’t have to be perfect. If there is some hard technical reason why these dots can’t be connected, explain to me why and offer alternatives.