On Thursday, I woke up abruptly at 2:30 a.m. And I wasn’t groggy awake either, but super focused awake, which I suspected had something to do with the sleeping pill I’d tried, sent by a Chicago company hoping for publicity.
I’ll do them a favor and not get more specific except to note that their “Vanilla Lavender Sleep Latte” contains valerian root. It is supposed to be sedative, but it can also cause insomnia. A lot. At 3am I gave up, went upstairs and logged on to my computer.
“Your Google Account has been disabled,” they informed me under a big red circle with an exclamation mark. “It appears to have been used in a way that violates Google’s policies.”
Sometimes such a thing can be a phishing attempt trying to get your data. But I had a big clue that my Google account was indeed disabled: my blog, built on Google’s Blogger platform, was gone.
If my mind wasn’t focused by the valerian, it sure was now. Recovering the account didn’t take much trying—I clicked the big red “Try to recover” button and followed the prompts. Google bounced back. So it was good.
But the question remained: what happened? And how could I prevent it from happening again? An email I can do without. Mostly spam and advertising supposed sleeping pills that turn out to be stimulants. But I’ve had 11 years to write on this blog.
Google doesn’t tell you what you did to start your account. A truly Kafkaesque twist, reminiscent of the opening line of The Trial: “Someone must have lied to Joseph K. because he was arrested one morning without doing anything wrong.”
Digging around on Google, I found a full list of crimes that Google suggests could lead to expulsion, starting with: “Account Hacking or Hijacking” and including “Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children”, “Harassment, Abuse and Threats” and “Terrorist Content”.
Except I hadn’t done any of those. The only thing I could think of is that my account was deleted at exactly midnight and my blog automatically posts at midnight. Thursday was relatively benign: a reader sent me a letter to City Lit, the Logan Square bookstore that made international headlines by dropping a writer from its book club list because of the author’s Zionist leanings.
I posted the letter under the heading ‘Juden raus!’ says City Lit bookstore.”
“Juden raus” is German for “Jews out” and nicely sums up the moral philosophy stirring half the colleges last spring. Is it possible that some Google algorithm will immediately banish me for parroting – sarcastically, I hasten to add – Nazi dictation? It wasn’t like Google was telling me. There is room for appeal, and I wrote a note that ended really humiliatingly:
”… Deleting this account would be devastating to me, personally and professionally. Please don’t do it without telling me what I did wrong and giving me a chance to fix it.
Of course, nothing. This is one of the most chilling aspects of our digital world. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has 182,000 employees. But what hope is there of getting one of them on the phone to say, “Yeah, Neil, that German phrase got you down – avoid repeating Goebbels like a parrot and you’ll be fine.” I also wrote to Google’s press team. “I was wondering – does this happen often? And more importantly, WHY is it happening?” Still nothing. Or, most likely, ever.
I toned down the headline to anodyne, “City Lit Books Cuts Its Reading List,” thinking it tends to be nervous human editors who water things down, so it makes sense that our AI would pick up on timidity from us like it picked up on racism.
In the days since, the hat-in-hand slavishness in my note prompted me to reassess. what am I afraid of I hoped the blog would survive me as some kind of immortality floating around the nether reaches forever.
But oblivion is merciless. Looking at why Google deletes accounts, lack of use is the main reason — don’t send email for two years, they’ll delete your account. Die and two years later, Blogger sinks the little ship you floated in a vast, storm-tossed cyber sea.
If Google deactivates my account again and I can’t get it back, I hope I have the courage to walk outside, lie down in the cool grass, and look up at the sky. Then ask yourself: how much of this precious, too-short life do I want to spend staring at a screen?
