How long do you think we would last?
I doubt it. We all want to believe that a quick loss of service will cause societal collapse but the reality is people are much more resilient.
Think back to the nyc blackout in 2003, you’d think it would result in mad max style craziness.
But what actually happened was most folks chilling out together with no real crime wave and the only issue was bodegas overcharging fools for ice cubes.
I say this provided that the blackout was temporary.
If the shit was permanent then that’s a different issue. At a certain point insulin goes bad, antibiotics go bad, everything rots and you have a different scenario entirely.
They said internet blackout. Which really wouldn’t be too bad in the long term. The world functioned fine without the internet for millennia’s before. The short term would be difficult, but lots of my industry would be relatively unaffected. Things would just take a lot longer, efficiency would be reduced, and there would be a lot more phone calls and hard copy files. Just like in the 70’s and 80’s, before computers were truly common.
It’s probably worth asking how the internet is blacked out. If LANs still work, lots of organizations could limp along at slightly reduced capacity until something was figured out. We’d probably see a resurgence in things like link local connections, data loops, etc… But if LANs go down too, lots of things will need to be rebuilt to continue to function. Lots of industries have heavy machinery that are entirely reliant on a stable LAN connection.
Sure, lots of fully online businesses would basically be killed overnight. But the world as a whole would continue, because the internet isn’t a hard necessity for society to exist.
To the point of ‘how the Internet blacked out’ - a lot of what you think of as ‘phone’ today actually goes via IP over data, not analog voice. It would mean we all have to turn back on our land lines, which would take ages and a lot of business and logistics would be pretty rough for a while. Those few places with working phones would have lines of people waiting to use them until it was restored more widely.
Depends how fast banking catches up, and how much cash is still around.
Immediate? no. Rapid, yes.
We have had mass communication since before the internet and those technologies still exist outside the internet. (TV, phones, radio)
The internet is not as fragile as people think, small pockets of internet will come back online independently of each other and will eventually become interconnected again. Maybe a month to get a country up and going and then a couple more months to get continents connected again.
I wonder how many would know how to get a radio if it came to it. “Okay, I just need to get a radio from Amazon… Shiiiiit”
Pretty much all cars come with radios… If not there are many shops that play the radio as in store music.
I’ve actually gone back to listening to the radio. The music is shit, but I don’t have to think about it, and the hosts chatter is surprisingly comforting. Great background noise for working or chores
I stopped listening to the radio cause it’s more ads than music or chatter
if there was radio without ads I’d probably like it
This was the original draw of Sirius Radio. The satellite thing was mostly for broadcasting range (meaning you could reliably get stations regardless of where you were physically located). The whole original point was that you paid a subscription so you didn’t have to listen to ads. You just got continuous radio.
But it’s also worth noting that was the original point of cable TV too. You paid a subscription so you didn’t need to watch commercials. Broadcast TV was supported by ads, but cable was supported by subscribers. But once they had enough users, they started changing their messaging. It shifted from “ad-free TV” to “better quality, more channels”. And once people got used to that (and forgot about the no ads thing) they quietly started slipping commercials into cable TV. Because they realized they could just double-dip, and not running ads was essentially leaving money on the table. But the initial draw of cable was that you didn’t spend ~16 minutes watching commercials every hour.
I see an immediate collapse followed by a quick recovery, personally. If the Internet goes down, a lot of other shit goes down too…until we get the old telegraph lines running again.
Those are just really slow internet cables.
Internet is just a really fast messenger pidgeon.
IPoAC
It sometimes can be a better option to move data, since storage density is pretty high. Like if Cletus needed a shitload of mp4s and only had POTS or pigeons lol
OP is on a quest to find a stupid question.
Define what you mean by “blackout.”
It’s a network of networks. If every connected device suddenly went offline, yeah, there’d be turmoil and a lot of deaths before things stabilized.
But if you really mean “all the backbone cables went offline” or “all the ISPs shut down” or “all the CDNs crashed” or “the top 20 services vanished” then the answers would be different.
The internet can technically run over carrier pigeon, after all. And some countries have already had “no Internet” days without collapsing.
Just internet? No. The world existed for a while before the Internet and many of the people who lived during that time are still alive and would know how to get by without entertainment. Of terrestrial television and radio are still functioning then the world will not lose much and continue on how it did 30 years ago.
Just because many people can’t imagine a world with the Internet doesn’t mean that it is critical to life.
☝️ this.
Please, if any of you honestly are entertaining the idea that the internet is necessary for society, I urge you to go outside and get some non-digital hobbies and/or meet some people offline.
It’s good for you.
No online pr0n? It would mean the end of the world as we know it. 😱
I have a friend with a meticulously curated collection (with its own Byzantine sorting system) on a massive hard drive he calls “the vault” because of this.
I have a few dozen GB of my own spank-bank saved… But that’s mostly an old habit from when I was a teen trying to beat off with awful WiFi reception in my bedroom. Admittedly, it is very nice being able to curate a collection that I know I like. It eliminates a lot of the “digging through five pages of things I’m not interested in, to find the one thing I like” decision paralysis.
I don’t know weather to laugh or cry
And here I thought I was bad for having a puny little LUKS encrypted USB stick laying around with “stuff” on it 🤣
Depends what causes it.
Nasty worm, no biggie, people will be confident it can be fixed quickly.
Carrington Event (think worldwide EMP), instant collapse, planes falling out of the sky, computers fried, cars since 1990 (guess) dead, hospitals destroyed and on and on.
Yeah, even a coordinated attack on physical networking backbones wouldn’t be TOO rough. We’d have to piece together what’s left and figure out what to replace, but there’s enough worldwide structure that we can do that in a pretty coordinated manner even without the Internet - it would probably just take a lot longer. I feel that a lot of the West would be the worst off, but surprisingly, a lot of governments already have plans for stuff like this. I feel even with incompetence, you’d be looking at 2-3 years max, but I don’t think you’d see Purge-style societal collapse or whatever you’re envisioning.
it would just be a reverse covid where everyone goes outside instead of staying in their houses lol
I don’t envision anything Purge style, but a C.E. (look it up, 1859) would be really bad and I expect significantly longer than 2-3 years, Means of Production (tractors, industrial equipment, semiconductor factories, transport) would all be fried too. Can’t see us avoiding mass starvation in even 2 years.
Don’t do it, JC! The Illuminati will use it to seize control!
If you’re worried about that, you should check out a Meshtastic node. Even if infrastructure fails, that network will remain online as long as there’s people using them within range and functioning GPS satellites in the sky.
Since everyone that uses one helps transport encrypted or unencrypted traffic, there is no single point of failure.
So. Its sorta impossible for this to happen and still have computers. The internet is mostly just logic systems on computers the transmission media can be kinda anything. Since databases have the records things might be slower but everything would still be there.
It depends how long it lasts. A day, two days, forever?
We can probably deal with a day, but it would be very very expensive and take a while to clean up.
Permanent? That would be extremely bad. Entire industries would collapse, with unemployment skyrocketing. Financial losses of unprecedented scale. I don’t even know where to start.
Medical systems would collapse and some people would die because if that.
Yep. A lot of things would go sideways in healthcare if the Internet was down for an extended period of time. Yes, there are paper-based backup processes and so on, but they can only hold for so long. I don’t think people realize how much stuff is already in the cloud that we all depend on.
No, but I’m working from home so would need to go to the office… as a software developer it would hit hard!
A financial collapse almost certainly and business would struggle until they find alternatives, especially the service sector. But manufacturing, construction and agriculture is not as dependent on internet for day to day operations.
Social I think it would probably be a boom and when internet get back online a lot of people might look back at the blackout as a refreshing experience.
At least that’s my take.
