Let us say the internet goes down, and can’t be fixed(the reason is unimportant to this conversation). What would the net effect be five, ten, twenty years down the road? How would politics be changed? Would newspapers come back?
Personally, I think the opportunity for lies and foolishness to spread as fast(or faster) than facts has done us a disservice. It has given the village idiot a chance to unionize and reach an audience that staggers the imagination, and gives hatred and ignorance a platform they certainly never earned or deserved. Rumor and fact have equal footing because they use the same mode of transportation. I think that, overall and in the long run, stepping back from instant and unearned gratification might benefit us.
What say you?
Can you define terms a little? What do you mean by the ‘internet?’ Just the web, or all high-speed data transmission? Where do we land? Cell phones? Fax machines? Land lines? Morse code?
If the internet went down permanently, civilization wouldn’t last 5 years. Everything depends on it at this point.
We could perhaps rework things with a great deal of warning, but if it went down unexpectedly it would be catastrophic.
I think generally speaking the internet has done more good than harm, it’s revolutionized many different industries, helped marginalized people find each other, and given new options for disabled people and everyone who has been shunned from “normal” society.
Nothing is ever an entirely unalloyed good, however, and generally people’s ability to abuse what the Internet gives us has expanded faster than our ability to combat it. Even today people are launching new social networks with no consideration given to abuse and harassment. Large corporations are capturing tools that were meant to be free for everyone to use and ruining them for a quick buck. Many of the problems given to us by the internet could be at least mitigated if it was built with protections against these problems. Robust government regulation written by people who understand the internet, new platforms built with tools to protect yourself and limit the spread of hate and misinformation, and free open source software built in the open and owned by no one person or company would be a good start.
Just the web. The method by which we spread false news, nasty rumors and movie spoilers at the touch of a few buttons and at no cost, financially or otherwise.
BTW, when was the last time you saw a movie without knowing anything except the title and maybe who were the top billed stars? No leaked footage, no plotlines and/or spoilers, no backstage gossip-months or even years before it ever came out?
I don’t think commerce could survive a hit like that. Rebuilding the physical structures and logistics of 20th Century retail alone would be monumental. Not to mention the increased traffic and pollution caused by the need for almost everybody to physically go to their job and shop. All of those difficulties far outweigh any improvement in societal civility.
All the time. Most recently with Oppenheimer. Actually, I didn’t even know the stars, just the director. It’s pretty easy to avoid all that stuff with a modicum of effort.
There was this thing called IRC (may still be usable) and this other thing called Usenet, both entirely not web-based. Usenet was a massive festival of acrimony and bullshit. Then there is e-mail, a lot of bad can circulate on that.
I say five weeks, but the general thrust of your reasoning is probably true.
The first (first infamous, at least) Internet spam e-mail went out in 1978. How quickly we forget! Though, the story was that the guy’s boss subsequently got a call from an angry Air Force general, or something along those lines.
The loss of the Internet would be a devastating loss. So much of what’s happened to drive progress forward in the last 30 years has been based off of being able to communicate with people around the world instantly.
Depends on your cutoff 
. But yeah, it would be quick (given the original statement about “the internet” rather than “the web”). Just about all production would come to a halt in short order, starting with electricity. It would be impossible to run a power grid without the internet, not to mention just about everything else. All phones would stop working, cell and otherwise.
Not only people with people, but even more importantly machines with machines. So much is automated today that we could not possibly manage without it. Logistics and power stations would collapse, things would blow up and people would starve without internet.
Nice to see we agree on this one.
Banking would collapse immediately, and that would leave a mark.
Logistics would go down the tubes, so you’ll have some pretty disastrous food and clothing shortages.
And, how would I survive without my smart toaster oven??
Yeah, I don’t think people quite appreciate the degree to which the internet has replaced all other forms of communication.
I don’t know if anyone’s still running a telegraph, but if they are, it’s running over the internet.
Well, we’d have to start worrying about the Russians launching a surprise nuclear attack and blacking out all of our computer communications in one fell swoop again.
There goes the plot of Independence Day down the drain. The aliens win.
What if we limit it to the public web, and give the world five years to prepare?
Facebook, X (haha!), whatever, have public websites, but their apps don’t use the “public web” any more than ATMs do. Are you just asking, what if we ban social media?
That would be fairly straightforward. Still a disruption, but there is plenty of older tech we could dig out, including just replacing the web with text-based screens like old BBSes. We could replace the important stuff with that in 5 years.
There’s still some gray area here. For example, taking down the web would eliminate Amazon’s front page. But you could still order through their phone app. Is that the web? Kinda; the app is basically just rendering a web page itself. But it’s not exactly the “public web” either.