As often as I’m on the internet, if it went down for any extended length of time. I think I’d be ok.
I’d go outside. Take a walk. Make a sandwich. Dust off an old print-on-paper book and do some reading. Maybe play some Scrabble with my wife.
Moderating: I’m going to leave this be, but please don’t post bare link OPs with cutesy non-informative titles. Please provide a summary of why the link you posted is important, interesting or worrisome in the future.
I’d be pretty stoked if it went offline. At this point, I’m not sure if it’s even a net positive anymore. Certainly the world is worse now than the 80s and 90s. Our species never evolved for this sort of hyperconnected always on propaganda deluge.
I would be in a world of difficulty because all of our work databases are online and need internet connection.
As amazing as the internet is, it’s (IMO) directly responsible for the mess we’re in.
At this point I’ll take 1991 back. I had email, USENET, and word processing, and that was enough.
Someone pointed out recently that some browsers don’t display the Oneboxes, so those users are not seeing the preview.
You’d be just fine up until the time you wanted to get groceries or do much shopping, even real life shopping. Or take a trip somewhere. For me, the toll bridges wouldn’t work since they all work on transponders read by internet connected readers. Forget banking. Forget a lot of bill paying.
But, like you, I have a lot of real things to keep me amused as the world collapses around us.
Yes, and I wouldn’t be able to do my actual job as it currently exists. But, even if we couldn’t patch together the internet and get it working again anytime soon, I’m sure we could adapt to pre-internet means of commerce and communication. It might be messy for awhile, but I don’t think the world would completely collapse around us. In any case, I got plenty to worry about already, but I’m not adding the potential failure of the internet to the list.
If the entire internet really magic-wand disappeared tomorrow and wasn’t restartable, civilization would probably collapse. Once the grocery stores are empty in 2 days, and no resupply is coming, people start getting very very nervous.
Don’t forget that most of the old-fashioned landline phone system now runs over the internet for at least part of the journey. It’ll be down too.
That’s before we consider various countries’ politicians and militaries either panicking when they go blind and deaf, or engaging in adventurism while they perceive their enemies are preoccupied.
My Wife is retired, and I retire in a month. While it would suck if it went down, my wife and I have sort of planned on this as we looked at retirement together. We will both be home most of the time.
We play -
- Chess (about 2 games a day)
- Cribbage
- Darts
- Rummy
- Bought a real nice Yamaha electric piano that we are trying to learn to play.
- Now live in an elevation that you can actually garden. We are planning on cucumbers and tomatoes so far.
- We have two dogs to walk.
I may become MORE busy.
The internet is literally how every business communicates with every other business about everything. And how substantially every business communicates everything internally too. Commerce will stop when the internet does.
Its impact on consumers’ immediate personal entertainment options is negligible compared to that.
If every household had 6 months of food, fuel, and all other consumables and nobody needed electricity, natural gas, or propane, we could probably restart doing the barest of necessities ( = agriculture and food distribution) by postal mail and personal courier before mass starvation set in. Probably.
Since substantially nobody has that level of prep, humanity in the modern world is screwed. Rural India, rural China, and central Africa might be mostly unscathed immediately. That’d be about it. But even they depend on regular shipments of fuel and technological goods & parts from the more modern internet-dependent world.
In happy news, North Korea would be almost unaffected. Heck, they may end up taking over the world. Or what’s left of it. 8 billion humans will starve neither quietly nor calmly.
This. It would be the beginning of the apocalypse, and other than maybe the North Sentinelese we’d all be screwed.
The Internet is a little more resilient than that article and some posters are giving it credit. It was built in the first place for surviving war and major disruptions. It has a lot of redundancies and shouldn’t stay down for long. Many stupid modern features (10,000 ads per page) would have to go away until fully restored, but supply chain stuff and communications would be the first priority to get back up.
We’re nearly all old enough to remember that the Internet worked at much lower speeds 25 years ago. Most companies have some idea how to send flat files to suppliers to make orders happen. EDI is still strangely common and takes nearly no bandwidth.
I would hate to have to go back to sub megabyte speeds, but we won’t die. Well unless you’re a successful influencer or the like. I’m getting a 912Mbps speed right now, 128Kbps would feel like molasses.
“Can think of scenarios that could bring it all crashing down”? So can I. One involves Godzilla, and another features molasses men emerging from Mount Rushmore. Why isn’t this article interviewing ME?!
Good point.
This is one of the reasons that TPTB at where I work have kept things internal. All our data is on our in house servers. Not in the cloud.
In retrospect though, I’m sure we would all be screwed. My wife and I can starve while playing chess, so I have that going for us.
We are working on solar power. Net metering. Getting our own batteries is looking better and better. And then, we need more ammo. I hate thinking that way, but there it is.
I had 12 guns. All inherited. I kept 3 and gave the rest to a neighbor (largely due to a move to suburbia). I just had him give one back. It would be pretty good defensive weapon for my wife.
Agree the article is sensationalist clickbait.
My point wasn’t about how likely comprehensive internet failure is, but how dependent we are on it in more or less the current total throughput and reliability of connectivity.
The modern internet isn’t really all that redundant. It’s mostly built on cheap shared services from like three or four providers. If an AWS data center goes down, half the internet goes with it. If Cloudflare pushes out a botched update, most consumer facing sites go down. If Gmail goes down for a few hours, there goes the GDP of a few small countries.
Sure, in theory you could build numerous redundancies. In practice very few big companies do to any sufficient degree, and yet consolidation and cost cutting means much of the internet is owned by just a few companies and their sub-brands.
A botched update here, DNS mistake there, combined with a cut undersea cable or two, and you’ll have a major international incident.
But, on the plus side, you won’t hear about it because all the news sites would be down too. Good day for a hike.
There’s too many people making too much money off it for it to stay down for long.
True. In the early days of the internet an outage somewhere wouldn’t affect very many people. It would be routed around, and you mostly used the net for communication. Today is different.
Beyond what the other people have said, the stock market would crash, and no one would be able to get their money out.
The last place I worked we put data on our own cloud, as management was justifiably paranoid. But depending on the reason for the internet going down, your local net might go down also.