Having never experienced a true computer emergency, it’s been easy to consider myself immune from them. It’s like how I had never missed a flight until I was almost 30, and thought I had some kind of superpower. But once I did, both miss a flight and have a computer emergency, it was the closest thing I think I’ve ever been to a survival situation. Which isn’t to demean people who face true physical danger in the world, but a statement to how my digital self has become a part of my identity to the point that a threat to my computer is a threat to myself. Earlier in the week, I packed up the corpse of my three-year-old MacBook and took it to the Apple Store in Back Bay around noon. I wrapped my external hard drive, which had everything I have in life, digitally speaking, backed up on it, in an old t-shirt. I entered a three-level store that looks like Spielberg’s Minority Report. All transparent or frosted plastic and glass. Brushed aluminum.