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What would happen if the internet was "switched off" for a substantial amount of time?

AGXStarseed

Well-Known Member
I was re-watching some episodes of Life After People and remembered about a similar show called Aftermath - which also explored the "sudden zero population" idea along with the population suddenly doubling, oil running out, etc.
As such, I thought I'd throw in this "thought experiment" and ask what do you think would happen if the Internet was "switched off" for a substantial amount of time - which I'd put anywhere between a few months to a year.

To paraphrase Life After People, this discussion isn't about how it could/would happen (I'm sure you could make up a logical or fantastical reason on your own), but rather what you think would happen to humanity and our world/way of life in the short and long term - considering how technology/internet-dependent many of us (and much of our lives) are.

I'd like to see the opinions that you guys may have regarding this scenario.
 
I'm guessing a lot of people would freak out and go through withdrawal. And the Kardashians wouldn't be famous anymore. Then we would start living like we did before the internet. Internet is pretty new, we lived for a long time without it so it shouldn't be a huge problem.
 
Please, yes. I am a bit concerned about the lack of regulation with regards to A.I., at least when it comes to internet-based A.I. and its ability to create convincing, believable false information, deep fakes, etc. Could it creep into our financial networks, military systems, etc. Things could go very, very wrong and once that cat is out of the bag, good luck trying to control it.

Basically, it would go back to the 1980's and before. A more simple time. People would have to write stuff down again. There would be a lot less divisiveness, fear, anxieties, and disinformation. A lot less monitoring of our behavior. People would be more likely to pay for things with money they actually had. We would have to actually talk to each other, in person. Children would have to go outside and play. We might develop some patience again. God forbid, people would develop "people skills" and "street smarts" again. LOL! ;)

For all the modern conveniences that the internet has given us, there is also the other side that has really led to a crumbling of our societies from a social, communication, political, and cultural perspective.
 
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No internet would save me a fortune!

The things I foresee should the internet vanish are:

1) people going nuts because they can't get their daily fill of nonsense from certain people high up in society.

2) rather than just the odd nutjob standing on street corners spouting crap there will be thousands of them.

3) a massive reduction in doom and gloom from people who have no concept of shutting up.

And the worst one of all:

4) NO CUTE PUPPY/KITTEN VIDEOS!!!!!
 
My family's resident conservatives would quit reading the dumbest possible content & then trying to engage me in unwanted political/religious conversations about said dumb content, which would be great.
And I would probably have to get a decent telephone directory.
 
Think about it. The original infrastructure that supported things pre-internet has slowly eroded to the point that without the internet there would be a total collapse of the worlds economy. Imagine going back to doing everything by mail. The stock market would crash. Currencies would destabilize and become next to worthless on the street. Mass hysteria and the end of civilization as we currently know it, if it went down for good. Without it, NFT's and Bit coins would not even qualify as paperweights. Once food became scarce, and it would, there would be armed gangs roaming the streets for survival. There is no backup for the internet and the world has become too dependent on it to conduct everyday affairs. I am actually surprised that no one has turned the idea into a movie, but that rather underscores its pervasive nature. It is too ingrained in everyone's lives, whether or not they access it, for anything good to come from it.

Our lives have become too wrapped up in it for our own good. Let's pray that it never happens for what is important in most individuals lives would suddenly no longer exist.

I am assuming here that whatever takes out the internet would also take out phone networks as well, for those have been created along the same model as the internet and lest we forget it also connects to the internet and foreign phone networks via satellites..
 
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People would adapt and get by without it. People can be surprisingly good at adapting. Sure, some people would complain, but then they would get used to it and may even start to enjoy the benefits of not having it.
 
Imagine if, when people wanted to learn something, they were forced to turn to books written by people who know what they’re talking about. Imagine day two of the outage, televisions blaring the body counts of ‘influencers’ who lost their mojo and jumped, after applying cement-appropriate makeup. Imagine millions of termite-skinned children, blinking pie eyed at the real world, their precious devices inert. Imagine actually dating the opposite sex becoming a trend. Imagine a clean inbox.
 
Think about it. The original infrastructure that supported things pre-internet has slowly eroded to the point that without the internet there would be a total collapse of the worlds economy. Imagine going back to doing everything by mail. The stock market would crash. Currencies would destabilize and become next to worthless on the street. Mass hysteria and the end of civilization as we currently know it, if it went down for good. Without it, NFT's and Bit coins would not even qualify as paperweights. Once food became scarce, and it would, there would be armed gangs roaming the streets for survival. There is no backup for the internet and the world has become too dependent on it to conduct everyday affairs. I am actually surprised that no one has turned the idea into movie, but that rather underscores its pervasive nature. It is too ingrained in everyone's lives, whether or not they access it, for anything good to come from it.

Our lives have become too wrapped up in it for our own good. Let's pray that it never happens for what is important in most individuals lives would suddenly no longer exist.

I am assuming here that whatever takes out the internet would also take out phone networks as well, for those have been created along the same model as the internet.

It would certainly be an interesting horror movie if done right. Imagine if it was done similar to Threads, but with the "Apocalypse" been the collapse of the internet instead of nuclear war.

Funnily enough, I read an article by the BBC in 2017 that said the following:

"Jeff Hancock likes to give his Stanford University students weekend assignments that let them experience concepts discussed in class for themselves. Before 2008, he would sometimes challenge his students to stay off the internet for 48 hours and then discuss how it affected them. But when Hancock returned to work in 2009, after a year-long sabbatical, things had changed.

“When I tried to introduce the task, there was a class revolt,” says Hancock, who studies the psychological and social processes involved in online communication. “The students emphatically said the assignment was impossible and unfair.”
They argued that going offline even for a weekend would prevent them from completing work in other classes, ruin their social lives, and make their friends and family worry that something terrible had happened to them. Hancock had to concede and cancelled the activity – and he’s never attempted it again.

“That was 2009, and now with mobile as present as it is, I don’t even know what students would do if I asked them to do that,” he says. “They’d probably report me to the university president.”
"

Source: What if the internet stopped working for a day?
 
I genuinely believe society would collapse. Internet is used for everything nowadays.
Millions of jobs would be lost. Most shopping would be impossible. Many many games, movies and tv would become unwatchable/unplayable. Internet archives of media and history would be lost. People would not be able to communicate with many loved ones anymore. Getting support for mental health would be so hard. Support networks would be gone. Many people would lose so many of their friends. Also you wouldn't be able to update your electronics anymore. I hope you liked the yearly phone release before because now we's have Monthly phone release. Look forward to the iphone 20 in december.
 
I think I would be ok with my life.
I genuinely believe society would collapse. Internet is used for everything nowadays.
Millions of jobs would be lost. Most shopping would be impossible. Many many games, movies and tv would become unwatchable/unplayable. Internet archives of media and history would be lost. People would not be able to communicate with many loved ones anymore. Getting support for mental health would be so hard. Support networks would be gone. Many people would lose so many of their friends. Also you wouldn't be able to update your electronics anymore. I hope you liked the yearly phone release before because now we's have Monthly phone release. Look forward to the iphone 20 in december.
Who on earth buys a phone every year? I'm still on an Android from a few years ago, and had landline service while growing up...it worked when the power was off.
 
I guess it could end up like this then:


But to me it's amazing that the world could grind to a halt and chaos ensue if the internet was turned off because when you look at the big picture, we have had internet for 5 minutes. It's so new. Are we really already completely dependent on it? That's a little scary, what happened?
 
I think I would be ok with my life.

Who on earth buys a phone every year? I'm still on an Android from a few years ago, and had landline service while growing up...it worked when the power was off.
Rich people. Or at least pretty well off people enough to be able to afford to do that.

For me, my last one lasted 6 years, the one before that lasted 5 years and I'm hoping this one lasts so long that I get to the point where they stop updating it.
 
That's the beauty and magic of landlines, it works even when the power is out. :D
I come from a time when the phones had rotary dialing and we had a party line.
Our party line was shared by four homes and each home had their own unique ringtone to tell them apart.
If you wanted to make call, often enough, you had to butt in on a conversation and ask them to free up the line :p
Screenshot 2023-05-25 163705.png

They usually came in this color or black or white and were not owned by the customer.
They were pretty much bullet proof.
The phone company could monitor the ringer load on the line to determine if you added another one without paying them.
Armed with that info, we had several phones with the ringers disconnected to beat them at their own game.

I worked with a guy years ago that was employed by Bell Telephone refurbishing returned units.
 
Completely agree with @Richelle-H and @Kisa the tea. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised by how blasé many of the responses here are.

Like it or not, society nowadays is almost completely structured around the internet. You might as well ask what happened if all the roads in the world would suddenly disappear. Even though car roads are not much more than a 100 years old, it would be complete chaos if they vanished. People wouldn't be able to go to work, sick people would struggle to find a way to the hospital and trade would break down. Shops would run out of food and farmers wouldn't receive pesticides and fertilizer.

I suspect that the consequences would be similar if the internet disappeared. Things wouldn't just "go back to the way they used to be". Hospitals would lose files on patients, and would really struggle to operate well without access to emails. Research would suffer, as you would be forced to fork out for exorbitant journals instead of stealing them from the internet. Still, the worst consequences are as Richelle mentions in international trade (which would completely collapse overnight) as well as in agriculture, as a consequence of the collapse in trade and paperwork systems. Crop cultivation is very dependent on getting required resources at specific points of time, and has been optimized to the point that everything should run very smoothly. As a few large agricultural companies produce much of the wheat and other crops used around the world, a single failed harvest would cause widespread famine which would cause further war and destabilization.

"Civilization ending" is not hyperbole at all.

I would also like to mention that specifically for autistic people, the internet is in many cases the only way we socialize. Autism isn't very common and many of us have difficulties communicating, so we often cultivate friendships online to compensate for the lack of in-person friendships.

Speaking for myself, all of my bests friends live in different countries than me, and some of them I have never seen. If the internet disappeared, I would be overcome with loss and worry about them. The end of the internet would likely cause widespread depression and anxiety as people would lose touch with family members and friends, and not know how to contact them (before mentioning the postal service, keep in mind that we generally don't memorize random addresses in other countries, and the internet would be gone, so it wouldn't be easy to easily look up).
 
For me, my last one lasted 6 years, the one before that lasted 5 years and I'm hoping this one lasts so long that I get to the point where they stop updating it.

I had a Nokia 1020, best smartphone I have had, it worked fine for many years and then they stopped updating it. Those bastards.
 
I suspect that the consequences would be similar if the internet disappeared. Things wouldn't just "go back to the way they used to be".

I was thinking that we wouldn't have a choice. That we would have to go back to how it used to be. People are resilient, we adapt and survive hard times. But I don't know.
 
I had a Nokia 1020, best smartphone I have had, it worked fine for many years and then they stopped updating it. Those bastards.
I loved my Nokia phones.

Nowadays I pretty much buy really cool cameras that can also serve as a telephone.
 

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