No Stupid Questions

I think it's important to understand that if the whole Internet just shut off in an instant, life as we know it would cease to exist. I'm not talking about a cultural change. I mean millions of people starving and freezing to death because literally everything you take for granted today is ordered, scheduled, and delivered using the Internet. That means no food deliveries, no fuel deliveries, no imports or exports, no trains, trucks, or planes moving, no payments or money transfers. Nothing. Oh, and all the emergency services that you're going to need will be unable to respond because no phones and no communication from dispatch centers. We don't know how to do business without the Internet anymore, so if it goes away, there goes your way of life. Building that back to the "old way" will take way longer than you or your neighbors are likely survive competing for essentially nonexistent resources.

But for those who manage to survive, I would say party like it's 1899!

I was thinking last night about how I used to go cash my paychecks and then drive over to the Verizon store and pay my phone bill. I wouldn't be able to pay my bills on the website anymore. I'd have to call and give my checking info over the phone or get money orders to mail shit in. I can't even order standard checks with the account I have now.

We would just be back to the 90s where the internet exists but isn't as widespread. The internet was a hell of a lot quieter then.

There was a time before the internet. It would be like that.

You mean people have to actually go outside? 😱

Nah I rather in my echochambers no thank you.

As someone who pre-dates the public Internet and spent a lot of time dialling in to BBSes when most people thought personal computers were for nerds…

The Internet will fracture, but not break down. What would happen is balkanization of the Internet, with physical areas running their own networks, and a bunch of poor “dark” areas. Some of those networks would likely have low bandwidth interconnections, such that digest data could still spread, much like the early days of usenet and fidonet.

Local culture and tribalism would increase, and information would skyrocket in value. The rich would still have access to, and control, the information. The poor would be left out completely.

I think we need to differentiate a bit between "no Internet" and "no open Internet". I have just enough grey hair and health problems to remember what life was like before the Internet really took off: you dialed into your ISP, like Compuserve or AOL, over a land line, and were charged per minute. And those services couldn't really talk to each other. But back then, computers also ran at 10 MHz and couldn't fit in your pocket.

So there was even connectivity back then, it was just very limited and each ISP had to provide it's own information, because they didn't really talk to each other. The same technological advancements would have happened over the last 50 years. Computers and networking would have gotten faster, cell networks would evolve to handle data and be more efficient, and broadband access to everyone's home and office would have happened. But if the Internet didn't happen in the open way it did, with an emphasis on open standards, its entirely possible each major media company would have had its own network to subscribe to, and it would be a lot more expensive.

But would that really be bad? Would social media really have eaten our brains if we paid for it per minute?

Since a great deal of essential services rely on the Internet. It would probably be a bit like New York during 9/11 or Canada when one of their biggest ISP died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_during_the_September_11_attacks

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/what-we-know-about-the-network-system-failure-that-led-to-the-rogers-outage-1.5982790

Politics would probably start to shift dramatically towards the left with the lack of echo chambers online.

No, it would not. The USA was not more liberal before the internet. Fascism rose without the internet in many countries.

It would be nice to not have Russian trolls though.

Everything would take time to be fine for the younglings but many of us grew up in the age of non internet connected computers and consoles so it would be completely fine. Might actually be nice to be fair.