Inspired by: reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine this week alongside Ludwig von Mises’s The Anti-Captialistic Mentality.

Addendum (7/28): Here’s my review of The Shock Doctrine. If you want to know what I thought of the book, you should probably just read the review and ignore the dumb fable that follows.

I tried unplugging the router and plugging it back in, messing around with my DHCP settings — everything I could think of. Still no Internet. Hours passed, then a day. In desperation, I finally called the tech support number for my Internet service provider, Laissez-Faire Solutions. After putting me hold for an hour with Brahms and Beethoven, “Ayn” finally picked up the phone.”I don’t know what to tell you,” she said curtly, after I’d explained the situation. “Your connection ought to be working perfectly.”

“But it isn’t.”

“It ought to be.”

“But it isn’t! Look, isn’t it possible that there’s some failure on your end?”

“You don’t understand, sir. There can be no such thing as a failure on our end. If a failure exists, then it must by definition be on your end and your end alone. What is provided to your home qua home is Internet access qua Internet access. It follows, then, as surely as A is A, that either your router is not configured properly, or your cable is disconnected, or in some other way your own stupidity or incompetence have prevented you from getting online, a failure you now seek absurdly to blame on the Internet itself.”

“I’m not blaming anything on the Internet. I’m blaming it on you, my ISP.”

“Let me ask you something,” said Ayn. “Did anyone hold you at gunpoint, or otherwise coerce you to sign up for Internet service with us?”

“Well, I guess not…”

“Then what exactly is your complaint?”

“That the service you agreed to provide isn’t working.”

“As I explained previously, it is working, by definition. If for some fanciful reason you think otherwise, obviously you have the freedom of switching providers.”

“But all the others suck as much as you do.”

“That is not possible. Were it the case that every Internet provider sucked, a provider that didn’t suck would have arisen and driven all the others out of business. The market abhors a vacuum.”

“Yeah, I’ve been waiting more than a decade for this particular vacuum to be filled. Until it happens, what else would you suggest I do?”

“Did you try going to Google again?”

“I’m still getting a ‘Page Not Found’ error.”

Frustrated, I decided to call the Tech-support Cooperative of the People’s International Proletariat (TCPIP). Karl picked up the phone. As I related my conversation with Ayn, Karl doubled over with laughter. “You mean you actually believe they want it to work?”

“Who exactly is the ‘they’ we’re talking about?”

“All of them — the service providers, the government, even the academics who designed the Internet in the first place. We’ve amassed mountains of evidence that they’re all conspiring to keep the Internet broken, in order to force people like you to sign up for expensive, exploitative ‘solutions’ — solutions no one would ever agree to under normal circumstances! Won’t you join us this weekend? We’re going to carouse around some rich neighborhoods and slice their fiber-optic cables. Maybe the fatcats will finally get it, once their precious Internet connections work exactly as well as ours do…”

“To be honest, I really just wanted to check my email and blog comments.”

“This is not about the individual; it’s about the community! There can be no truly reliable connections until the Internet as a whole has been demolished and rebuilt from scratch, until we’ve established a new social order on this planet where everyone is responsible for everyone else being able to get online…”

“Until the millennium comes, can you put me in touch with someone who specializes in fixing Internet connections now?”

“Traitors! Don’t you see Internet access has to get much, much worse before it can get better? That fixing your connection would just be a ruse to lull you into complacency and dim your justified anger?”

So what did I end up doing? Well, until my connection starts working again, I found this unsecured wireless in my apartment building that I’m sometimes able to leech off of, as well as a nearby cafe that offers free wireless from 10 to 4 on weekdays. And when all else fails I use my Blackberry, pecking out emails on the microscopic keyboard (though that connection, too, has become finicky lately).

I talked again this morning to Ayn and Karl, and they completely agreed with each other that I was beyond hope. By focusing so obsessively on “fixing” a “problem,” they explained, I’d become distracted from the real goal: namely, comprehending a universal principle that explained why my Internet access wasn’t working, as well as every other question that I might ever want an answer to. Maybe they’re right. All I know is, at least for now I can usually get my email when I have to.