Searching for WiFi

I spent a week traveling around—different cities, hotels, airports, people everywhere sweating and smoking and taking up space. The one thing every place had in common: no internet. Not really. Not when I needed it.

Hotels wanted fifteen euros for a day of WiFi that barely moved. Airports gave you thirty minutes free if you bought something overpriced first. There was a Nike network that only wanted to sell you running shoes, McDonald’s WiFi that actually worked if you didn’t mind camping there forever, Starbucks that kept you going until your battery died. I walked around holding my phone up like I was praying, hunting for open networks, checking if they were real or just honeypots. Half the time they were fake or too slow to matter.

I told myself it was for work—email, staying visible in whatever digital world we’re all supposed to live in now. But really I just wanted to scroll. Read dumb tweets. Look at whatever was trending. The fact that I couldn’t do that without either hunting for WiFi or dropping money on some corporate hotspot made me angry in a way I’m embarrassed to admit. Irrationally furious at nothing and everything.

I’m not even saying it should be free, though it probably will be eventually. But twenty euros for a full week of solid connectivity, everywhere I am, no asterisks? That seems fair. That’s what it was worth to me. Instead everything was fragmented and limited and had fine print attached.

What got to me was the futility. We’ve built the entire modern world on the assumption that everyone’s connected. But we haven’t actually committed to making that possible. It’s absurd.

So here’s what I want to say to whoever controls this: make it work. Charge if you need to. But actually make it work. Everywhere. No strings attached. Because the image of me orbiting Starbucks for hours just to have decent connectivity isn’t progress. It’s depressing. And you know it.