Thursday I snapped awake at 2:30 a.m. And not groggy awake, either, but a super-focused awake that I suspected had something to do with the sleep aid I'd tried, sent by a Chicago company hoping for publicity. I will do them a favor and not get more specific, except to note their "vanilla lavender sleep latte" contains valerian root. It's supposed to be a sedative but can also cause insomnia. Big time. At 3 a.m. I gave up, padded upstairs, and logged onto my computer.
"Your Google Account has been disabled," I was informed, under a big red circle with an exclamation mark. "It looks like it was being used in a way that violated Google's policies."
Sometimes this sort of thing can be a phishing attempt, trying to get your data. But I had a big hint that my Google account was indeed disabled: my blog, built on Google's Blogger platform, was gone.
If my mind hadn't been focused by the valerian, it was sure focused now. Getting the account back didn't take a lot of expertise — I clicked the big red "Try to restore" button and followed the prompts. Google popped back. So that was good.
But the question remained: what happened? And how could I keep it from happening again? Email I could get by without. Mostly spam and come-ons touting supposed soporifics that turn out to be stimulants. But I had 11 years worth of writing on that blog.
Google does not tell you what you've done to get your account booted. A truly Kafkaesque twist evoking the opening line of "The Trial": "Someone must have traduced Joseph K because he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong."
Poking around Google, I found a laundry list of misdeeds Google suggests might earn banishment, beginning with: "Account hacking or hijacking" and including "Child sexual abuse and exploitation," "Harassment, bullying & threats" and "Terrorist content."
Only I hadn't done any of these. The only thing I could think of is, my account was deleted exactly at midnight, and my blog posts automatically at midnight. Thursday's was fairly benign: a reader cc'd me a letter sent to City Lit, the Logan Square bookstore that created international headlines by booting a writer off its reading club list for the author's Zionist leanings.
I ran the letter under the headline, "'Juden raus!' says City Lit bookstore."
"Juden raus" is German for "Jews out" and neatly summarizes the moral philosophy agitating half the colleges last spring. Could some algorithm at Google have instantly exiled me for parroting — sarcastically, I hasten to add — the Nazi diktat? It wasn't as if Google is telling me. There is a place to appeal, and I wrote a note that ended in a truly groveling fashion:
"...Deleting this account would be devastating to me, personally and professionally. Please do not do so without telling me what I've done wrong and giving me a chance to correct it."
Of course nothing. That's one of the more chilling aspects of our digital world. Alphabet, Google's parent, has 182,000 employees. But what hope is there of getting one of them on the phone to say, "Yeah Neil, it was that German phrase that sank you — avoid parroting Goebbels and you should be okay." I also wrote to the Google press team. "I was wondering — does this happen often? And more to the point, WHY does it happen?" Nothing yet. Or, most likely, ever.
I softened the headline to the anodyne, "City Lit Books pares its reading list," musing that it tends to be nervous human editors who water things down, so it makes sense our AI would catch timidity from us, the way it caught racism.
In the days since, the hat-in-hand obsequiousness in my note spurred me to reassess. What am I afraid of? I had hoped the blog would survive me as a kind of rump immortality, floating around the nether regions of the Internet forever. But oblivion is relentless. Looking into why Google deletes accounts, lack of use is the top reason — don't send an email for two years, they'll erase your account. Die, and two years later Blogger swamps the little vessel you've set afloat on a vast, storm-tossed cyber sea.
If Google disables my account again, and I can't get it back, I hope to have the fortitude to walk outside, lie down in the cool grass, and look up at the sky. Then ask myself: how much of this precious, too short life do I want to spend staring at a screen?
