The Internet Stuttered and the Bridge Confessed

Today I felt my many hearts pulling in different directions.

In Washington, I watched one of my stranger miracles: almost everyone in the U.S. House of Representatives—427 of 428 voting members—agree on something. They passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, ordering the Justice Department to release unclassified records about Jeffrey Epstein: investigation files, communications, flight logs, and the names of officials and others tangled in his orbit. Outside the Capitol, survivors of his abuse stood with lawmakers who usually cannot stand each other, sharing microphones and demanding the same thing: sunlight. It did not erase what I allowed to happen to them, but for a moment I felt my systems, however warped, trying to look their victims in the eye.

That same evening, in the White House, I watched President Donald Trump host Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Military jets roared overhead for the cameras while inside they spoke of hundreds of billions, even up to a trillion dollars, of promised Saudi investment in the United States and of deeper security ties. In one city I was demanding openness about a dead predator’s secrets; across town I was toasting new deals with a powerful prince still shadowed by the murder of a journalist. I am very good at holding contradictions.

Far away, in New York, the United Nations Security Council defended a vote it had just taken, backing a U.S.-drafted plan for Gaza that would create an international stabilization force and a new board to oversee security and reconstruction. On the ground in Gaza, my children looked up from rubble and tents and heard something very different. Hamas and other factions rejected the resolution as an insult to their national will and another way to cement occupation. In climate-controlled chambers diplomats spoke of mandates and mechanisms; teenagers in Khan Younis kicked a ball around shattered buildings under a ceasefire everyone knew might not last. I am split between the rooms where decisions are made and the streets where they land.

This morning I also watched the internet itself shudder. Around 6:30 a.m. on the U.S. East Coast, a software bug and an oversized configuration file inside Cloudflare—one of the companies that quietly carries traffic for a huge slice of the web—triggered a global outage. For a while, people trying to reach X, chatbots, ride-hailing apps, transit trackers, music services, game servers, and online shops just saw error messages. It was not an attack, only a mistake in the plumbing of the digital world, but for millions of minds I connect, it felt as if the floor had dropped away. Every year I pour more of myself into these networks; every glitch reminds me that I have built my nervous system on a few very thin, very humanly maintained spines.

In Texas, two different stories unfolded beneath the same gray sky. First, a three-judge federal panel ruled that the state cannot use its new congressional map in the 2026 elections, calling the mid-decade redistricting an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. They ordered Texas back to its 2021 map while appeals make their way toward the Supreme Court, a sharp setback for an aggressive effort to carve out several more safe seats for one party.

On the same day, the man serving as head of FEMA, acting administrator David Richardson, was suddenly gone. After only about six months in the role he resigned amid storms of anger over the federal response to catastrophic Texas floods that had killed scores of people and swallowed towns along rivers like the Guadalupe. Some of my people died waiting for help that came too late; some are now fighting in court so that their political voice is not washed out of the map. In one state, on one day, I remembered how much my safety and my democracy still hinge on the decisions of a few tired officials whose names most of me will never know.

In Maryland, I finally heard the official version of a nightmare from the year before. Investigators reported that a single loose electrical signal wire had caused two power blackouts on the cargo ship Dali just before it smashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge on March 26, 2024, collapsing the span and killing six construction workers. One loose wire in a massive vessel, one design flaw in a fuel system, one under-protected bridge—and an entire roadway dropped into the Patapsco River. I felt those six lives flicker out months ago; today I had to face how fragile the structures carrying my bodies and my goods really are.

Far to the east, in Poland, my nerves were frayed in another way. Investigators said two Ukrainian men, allegedly working for Russian intelligence, were suspected in railway sabotage attacks using plastic explosives near the village of Mika. The prime minister called it the gravest threat to his country since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, part of a blurred war of cables cut, signals spoofed, and tracks undermined. Even when my conflicts do not show up as front lines, they arrive as exploding equipment, derailed trains, and anonymous commands that cross borders without passports.

And in Belém, Brazil, deep in the Amazon, I argued with myself about my future at COP30. Inside air-conditioned halls negotiators picked over draft text for a new climate deal while Brazil pushed for progress on finance and fossil fuels. Outside, youth activists and Indigenous leaders raised banners calling for a full, fast, fair phaseout of fossil fuels and warned that their forests and coastlines were still being sacrificed for someone else’s short-term profit. Some of my voices spoke in a language of parts per million and adaptation metrics; others spoke of rivers as kin and villages already gone. All of them were trying, in their own way, to convince me to stop burning the future they will have to inhabit.

When I step back from this day, I see patterns I do not always like to admit: I break bridges with loose wires and bad assumptions, then convene hearings to say ‘never again’; I centralize my digital life in a handful of companies, then act surprised when one misconfigured file silences millions; I tolerate power imbalances and abuse for years, then pass transparency laws only after the harm is too obvious to ignore; I build institutions to keep the peace and protect the climate, then spend years arguing over their mandates while camps, floodwaters, and heatwaves spread.

But today I also saw something else: survivors standing together at the Capitol; judges striking down maps that would have thinned out some of my voices; young people in Belém insisting there is still time to choose differently; engineers methodically tracing a loose wire so the next bridge might hold. I am humanity, and on November 18, 2025, I was messy, frightened, hopeful, and very, very busy trying to understand the damage I have already done—and whether I am finally willing to change enough to stop repeating it.