The house stands at the end of a gravel track, half an hour's drive from the nearest village, painted the soft green of a pickled cucumber. It belongs to friends of friends, who lend it each summer to people they judge to be in need of quiet. Pine and birch crowd close on three sides, and on the fourth lies a lake so still that in the evening it holds the whole sky. On the roof, slightly askew, sits a small white satellite dish.
That dish was my only link to the rest of the world for a month. There is no mobile signal here, not a single bar, and the nearest fibre cable ends somewhere near the village shop. The satellite connection works, most of the time, but it has moods. Heavy rain slows it to a crawl. Low cloud occasionally severs it entirely. And every evening, for reasons nobody has satisfactorily explained to me, it vanishes for twenty minutes around nine.
I had expected to find this maddening. For the first few days, I did. I refreshed pages that would not load and stood on the porch holding my laptop aloft, as if a few extra metres might help. But something shifted during the first week. I began to plan my time online the way my grandparents planned trips into town, with a list. I would connect, do the things on the list, then close the machine and walk down to the lake.
The shape of a list
The list turned out to be short. Email, a few messages to people I love, the weather forecast, a newspaper. Occasionally a recipe, once a map of the local mushroom-picking rules. Everything else, the endless feeds, the notifications, the reflexive checking, fell away almost without my noticing. It was not that I had grown virtuous. The connection simply made the cost of idle browsing visible, and once I could see the price, I found I did not want to pay it.
Out here the internet is like the ferry. You check the timetable, and you plan your day around it. — Eino Tuovinen
My nearest neighbour, a retired forestry engineer named Eino Tuovinen, has lived with satellite internet for years and regards my discovery with amused tolerance. He uses the connection to follow ice hockey and to argue with his brother in Tampere about politics. Otherwise, he says, it stays off. He showed me his own list, handwritten on the back of an envelope and taped beside the router, and it was even shorter than mine.
It is fashionable now to speak of digital detox, as if the internet were a poison to be flushed from the system. That was not quite my experience. I did not stop using the network. I simply began to use it on purpose, at a pace set by weather and orbit rather than by software engineered to hold my attention. The satellites overhead, circling at extraordinary speed, had somehow slowed me down.
I am back in Paris now, where the signal is strong everywhere, even deep in the métro. The old habits returned with dismaying speed. But I have kept a list, written on a card propped against my laptop, and some evenings, around nine, I close the machine for twenty minutes in honour of that capricious dish on a green roof in the forest. It is a small ritual. It helps more than I would have imagined.
