Why My Website is Closed on the Sabbath

The internet is not outside of space and time.

Hello, readers! Before today’s post (next paragraph), I want to strongly encourage you to attend a virtual conversation I will be having next week with Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter. Schacter has been a major Orthodox thinker for decades, but public conversations about Judaism and technology don’t happen all that often, in part because they are still seen as marginal. You can change this by showing up! Register here.

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As many of you know, I run a small independent publishing house. Recently, I made the decision to modify the website so that it will not process credit card payments on Shabbat. You can still browse the site, but you cannot buy anything. If you go to the website during that time, you’ll see this banner:

To give you some context: this is not standard practice in any Jewish community. The only other websites which do this, as far as I know, are B&H Photo and the Artscroll publishing house—both of which are run by Orthodox Jews, which I am not. It’s also out of character for my level of Sabbath observance. I’m the sort of observant Jew who doesn’t stress about whether playing Scrabble is a violation of the prohibition on writing, and I don’t care that my Instant Pot makes a noise when I open it (yes, there are people who care about both of these things). Still, I felt strongly enough about this that I paid a web developer to create a custom solution.

If you got to Artscroll.com on Shabbat, you’ll see a message like this (I captured this screenshot while in a different time zone).

In other words, I didn’t do this because I am super pious. Instead, I did it because it began to feel unconscionable to treat the internet as something that exists outside of space and time. Let me explain what I mean.

“The cloud” has been misunderstood

One of the dominant metaphors for the internet today is “the cloud,” a phrase which suggests that online resources live in some ethereal, placeless (and perhaps invulnerable) realm. In reality, of course, “the cloud” is just somebody else’s computer, usually belonging to a large corporation, sitting in a rack alongside thousands of other computers in a data center that consumes massive amounts of energy. Data centers are the backbone of the internet; they’re the information equivalent of power plants. Information might be redundantly stored in more than one data center, but it still exists in a finite number of locations.

A Microsoft data center (source)

So how did something so grounded come to be “the cloud?” I had assumed the term was a marketing ploy, but its origin turns out to be much more interesting.

In the 1980s, telecom companies began using clouds in diagrams of network connectivity to describe interactions between their own systems and external networks whose inner workings were out of their control. One such cloud can be found in US Patent 5485455A, which contains the image below. In the accompanying documentation, element 70 (“network”) is described as a “cloud.” (If you’ve seen patent drawings before, you’ll appreciate that this is a beautiful cloud.)

This schematic noted in an exchange here.

“Cloud” here doesn’t refer to a place. It doesn’t even describe a process. It just means “yeah, this is really complicated and not important for our purposes right now.” It’s a way of telling people that it’s OK for this aspect to remain fuzzy.

Or…cloudy.

When the cloud metaphor moved to the internet it was initially used in a similar way. The thing is, a term that means “I am skipping over this” is easy to misunderstand, especially if the term you are using already has another meaning. This is exactly what happened when “the cloud” moved from technical parlance to the public sphere. Without fathoming the internet’s complexity, the public took “the cloud” to be a meaningful metaphor for the internet, when in fact it only signaled that the internet was complicated. (As an aside, negative theologians might argue that all terms for God are similarly misunderstood, because they are all just ways of talking about something we can never understand.)

The internet is just another place

Even if you know better, it’s hard to think about the internet as a place while you’re using it. This placelessness often works to the internet’s advantage, affording it an air of resilience and permanence that isn’t warranted; despite the fact that the internet normally does not show signs of wear and tear in the way that a room might, it nonetheless requires upkeep and it can break without warning (e.g. Meta’s outages yesterday). This placelessness also makes everything that happens online feel both a little more magical and a little less real than the events of the physical world. Placelessness can even make it seem as though the internet could simply be superimposed on physical space, to the benefit of both, when in practice it is often in tension with physical space. There’s more to say about all of this—I’ll get to the merits of and demerits of virtual space in another post—but I appreciate the sites that go out of their way to locate themselves physically.

Consider, for example, solar.lowtechmagazine.com. The whole site lives at a single physical location on a single physical computer, and that computer runs on nothing but a solar panel and a car battery. I love this website because it is in a place, and when I am on that website I feel like I am in that place, inside that specific computer. The place, too, is vulnerable: the site tells you how much battery is has remaining. If it stays cloudy for too long, sometimes it just goes down. (This is why the site shows you a weather forecast!)

The footer on Low Tech Magazine’s solar website.

This is how places in the physical world work: they’re vulnerable. They’re sensitive to local conditions. They require maintenance—and they are impacted by your presence. This is true for all of the internet, but the weightlessness of digital activity means you’d never know (for example) that the internet contributes more to climate change than the airline industry, or that Bitcoin miners in America expend as much energy as Utah and a single transaction consumes almost as much energy as the average American uses in a full month. Powering a website with the sun is a way of showing what computing really is.

It’s Shabbat on the internet, too

Within Jewish contexts, the internet’s supposed placelessness has made it acceptable to conduct commerce on Shabbat. People who wouldn’t dream of keeping their brick-and-mortar widget store open don’t think twice about keeping their sites open online.

There’s an argument for this position, but it requires you to treat e-commerce as a fancy answering machine. This isn’t an exaggeration: rabbis permitted answering machines to be used on Shabbat because you can’t control when people will call you, and that precedent has been applied to e-commerce. It’s true that you can’t control when customers will make online purchases, but on a gut level the two are just not the same: Answering machines aren’t inherently commercial vehicles, while e-commerce platforms are. And once you take seriously that the internet is just another place—my servers happen to be in New York and Toronto—the idea of e-commerce on Shabbat just doesn’t pass the smell test. (For those with some familiarity with Jewish law, you can find a rundown of the debate here; another take is here.)

Now, there’s one final twist and some of you are not going to like it. Even though I’m doing this out of recognition that my servers exist in a real place, what ultimately matters is my location, because I am the one who observes Shabbat. This means that I shut off credit card payments when it is Shabbat in Philadelphia, despite the fact that my servers are elsewhere. If I co-owned the business with someone in Israel, this might mean that the site would go down not for 25 hours, but for 32 hours: from the time Shabbat starts in Israel to the time it ends in Philadelphia. A business spanning from California to Japan might have an even longer pause period.

I don’t think that all commerce must grind to a halt on Shabbat. In the modern world, that is simply not possible, and it’s something that Jewish law has yet to adequately deal with. But this is an easy case: it’s a small business with one owner, and my customers are among the most likely to understand what I’m doing. The financial ramifications are minimal. Others can work out the tougher cases. I’ll start here.

Reminder: register for my conversation with Rabbi JJ Schacter here.