I put AI into production
for a living.

Two earthquakes struck Yaracuy thirty-nine seconds apart — the strongest Venezuela had recorded since 1900. More than 1,900 people were killed and hospitals across La Guaira and Caracas were damaged or running at partial capacity.

The detail I could not stop turning over was one that happened 1.8 kilometres offshore. The South American Crossing submarine cable was severed. Roughly half of the country's international bandwidth ran through it, and repairing it took a month.

Nothing about the knowledge itself had changed. Every medical reference still existed. Every repair manual, every textbook, every article still existed. What broke was the path to them — one cable, in one place — and a country's worth of schools, clinics and factories was on the wrong side of it.

The communities that stayed dark longest were the ones already living on weak, intermittent connections. Some access was eventually restored by volunteers running more than two hundred hotspots off satellite terminals, batteries and solar panels — which is a fairly exact description of what a fallback layer for this ought to look like.

I started building this in the evenings. Nights, weekends, whatever the week had left over.

Seven weeks later, at half past seven in the morning, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck at San José del Palmar, in Chocó. Fifteen of Colombia's thirty-two departments were affected. Among the hardest hit were Quibdó, Cali, Manizales, Armenia — and Pereira, which is where I am from.

The damage to the things this project exists to serve is almost too on the nose: 2,838 schools and 285 health centres damaged, along with 407 roads and 44 bridges — the connections of every kind that let a place ask for help and receive it.

And then Chocó. The epicentre landed on the poorest department in the country, one reachable mostly by river, where officials have been candid that the full picture is still not understood. That is the part I keep coming back to. The hardest place to reach after an earthquake is the hardest place to reach on an ordinary Tuesday. It is last to be connected, last to be assessed, last to be helped — and first to be cut off.

The first earthquake was something I read about with a professional interest in the failure mode. This one is home.

So I stopped treating this as something I get to when the week allows.