If we had to go without the Internet

[stares at error messages]

Suggestions for technology that could be used in the event the Internet went away for any reason.

I'll start it off by suggesting that without the Internet you can't sell copies of software and other digital products with direct downloads or torrents, but you could have download vending machines. Customers could provide there own USB Drives, CD, or floppies (probably not now-a-days but if the Internet never happened) plug into the machine and pay with the machine then the digital content would be downloaded to the provided media. Instead of having publishers go out of there way to create hard copies that get sold in stores customers can come and provide the same USB or CD+R over and over again for all new purchase. Imagine something that looks a bit like an ATM but with customer available USB and CD and maybe SD card slots that can be opened to download the data to provided media. Customers would order their software and other e-goods the same way you would a softdrink and then pay cash or plastic at a vending machine.

• If your suggestion is alt-history, meaning the internet never happened, that's fine too.
• I'm not really thinking of this like a preper, but if that where you want to go with it I'd like to here what you think.
• If the Internet did go away for anyreason, we'd all ideally like to keep using digital computers (assuming something better doesn't come along), so how can this be made possible?

 

[Bongocat]

Whatever happens, there's one message we have to make sure is heard

 

[Milkis]

Do we have packet radio?

 

[Unassuming Local Guy]

Anything that could kill the entire internet would also kill computers as a whole. There are so many redundant connections criss-crossed around the entire world and into space that it would take a massive global EMP or something to destroy all of it. And if that happens, you're not getting your tech back. Time to start over. Technology evolution would look like the past 70 years at 10x speed and a lot of people would die in the beginning.

The only exception I can think of is government overreach. Think china's great firewall times a million. No globally connected internet, just one big country intranet. Of course, that would only apply to anyone inside that particular country. If that happens, depending on your country, your only option for getting data from the outside world would be satellites or physical media. Satellites have insane latency but they work, and it's difficult to track clients due to the purely wireless nature.

Physical media would most likely involve smuggling entire databases from other countries, installing them on your country's intranet, and encrypting the data so the illegal information can sneak by detection algorithms. It would need to be extremely well encrypted to the point where you'd need to be part of the inner circle to access the data, but from there people could distribute smaller storage media. Download from the database, burn some blu rays, become your local illegal information dealer.

 

[Feline Supremacist]

Anything that could kill the entire internet would also kill computers as a whole. There are so many redundant connections criss-crossed around the entire world and into space that it would take a massive global EMP or something to destroy all of it. And if that happens, you're not getting your tech back. Time to start over. Technology evolution would look like the past 70 years at 10x speed and a lot of people would die in the beginning.

The only exception I can think of is government overreach. Think china's great firewall times a million. No globally connected internet, just one big country intranet. Of course, that would only apply to anyone inside that particular country. If that happens, depending on your country, your only option for getting data from the outside world would be satellites or physical media. Satellites have insane latency but they work, and it's difficult to track clients due to the purely wireless nature.

Physical media would most likely involve smuggling entire databases from other countries, installing them on your country's intranet, and encrypting the data so the illegal information can sneak by detection algorithms. It would need to be extremely well encrypted to the point where you'd need to be part of the inner circle to access the data, but from there people could distribute smaller storage media. Download from the database, burn some blu rays, become your local illegal information dealer.

I read about how software and games from the West spread in East Germany. People would somehow get permission to travel to West Berlin and come back with all kinds of software/games and freely distribute it at computer clubs. Even the early hardware in the East was basically reverse engineered from hardware smuggled in from West Berlin.

Nerds will always find a way.

 

[FEETLOAF]

I remember when we used to trade cassette tapes.

 

[seri0us]

We'd have to meet up at the nearest lolcow's house.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I'm going to take this question to mean that the internet magically fizzled without warning and is never coming back, but we don't have a tyrannical government cracking down on information or anything like that. You can do whatever you want, there's just no internet.

Here's one: where's your encyclopedia? Wikipedia is now gone, and it's unlikely that anyone's going to make a practical offline version of it. And nobody owns a printed encyclopedia anymore. World Book is apparently the only place left making print encyclopedias. (Incidentally, it looks like Britannica kept making DVD versions till 2015. I should get one.)

Where are your movies and music? Netflix and all the rest are gone - so much for "you will own nothing, and you will be happy". There will be a gold rush in home A/V, and movie stores and rental places will come back.

Where's your software? Everything "as a service" will be dead, which now includes most versions of Windows as well as things like Steam, Adobe, Autocad, and so on. Not to mention every single cloud application on AWS/Azure. Better go out and buy a Linux distro on disc. This one might well be catastrophic if software manufacturers can't get patches out to everyone before Minecraft Minecrafts itself.

How do you communicate? Everyone you don't know some sort of IRL contact info for is now gone. Maybe people could set up some sort of distributed "Missed Connections" thing at internet cafes using sneakernet.

How do you shop? Amazon is now out of the picture, after they drove physical stores out of business. There will be a gold rush as businesses try to fill that void. Similarly, advertising will have a huge boom, because people will actually need it - they'll legitimately be in need of information on what goods can be gotten where.

How does cultural activity take place? Location will become more important again since you can't just go online for conversation and culture. I anticipate it'd become more important to live near a big city or college town if you want to participate in intellectual pursuits.


Honestly, it's not sounding bad if we avoid an apocalypse right off the bat.

 

[Glitched_Humanity]

I enjoy watching that play out.

 

[Idiot savant]

can you have a lan? if so i think computer cafes would really pick up for multiplay and floppyswapping.
obviously computer systems for offices would still work, magazines and radio and tv would come back stronger than ever,
lots of dnd type stuff where people write adventures and you download them and play at home.
it would be cool i guess, the forum would just be a newsletter or journal hahaha, i think id get used to it eventually.

 

[AmpleApricots]

If you wanna sleep bad at night look up "coronal mass ejection" and "carrington event". The funny thing is that it's actually possible to proof the global electricity networks against this but nobody does because it costs money. That'll be something to laugh about in the world after. The sun giveth, the sun taketh away.

 

[Burgerasssand]

If you wanna sleep bad at night look up "coronal mass ejection" and "carrington event". The funny thing is that it's actually possible to proof the global electricity networks against this but nobody does because it costs money. That'll be something to laugh about in the world after. The sun giveth, the sun taketh away.

That almost happened in 2012.

Solar storm of 2012 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Prince Lotor]

If you wanna sleep bad at night look up "coronal mass ejection" and "carrington event". The funny thing is that it's actually possible to proof the global electricity networks against this but nobody does because it costs money. That'll be something to laugh about in the world after. The sun giveth, the sun taketh away.

Another fun rabbit-hole to look at if you hate sleeping is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commissions history of "near misses". If you look back there are cases from the 90's and early 2000's where they would inspect a plant, identify unsafe shit, fine the energy company for the unsafe shit, and the company would just keep paying the fines without fixing it because it was cheeper to just pay the fines every time the NRC decided to do an inspection.
Many of our power plants have unreliable backup power systems. If the power grid goes down from a CME aimed directly at us because we decided we didn't need to shield the power grid we may have several dozen reactor cores melting down simultaneously

Near Misses at US Nuclear Power Plants in 2015

In 2015, three of the 10 near misses reported at U.S. nuclear reactors occurred at plants owned by one company—Entergy.

www.ucsusa.org

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/research/nuclear-energy-power-plant-accidents-united-states/

https://projects.bettergov.org/power-struggle/warnings.html

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

Another fun rabbit-hole to look at if you hate sleeping is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commissions history of "near misses". If you look back there are cases from the 90's and early 2000's where they would inspect a plant, identify unsafe shit, fine the energy company for the unsafe shit, and the company would just keep paying the fines without fixing it because it was cheeper to just pay the fines every time the NRC decided to do an inspection.
Many of our power plants have unreliable backup power systems. If the power grid goes down from a CME aimed directly at us because we decided we didn't need to shield the power grid we may have several dozen reactor cores melting down simultaneously

Near Misses at US Nuclear Power Plants in 2015

In 2015, three of the 10 near misses reported at U.S. nuclear reactors occurred at plants owned by one company—Entergy.

www.ucsusa.org

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/research/nuclear-energy-power-plant-accidents-united-states/

https://projects.bettergov.org/power-struggle/warnings.html

I feel like instead of paying the fine all the time, they (the offending plants) should be forced to update the failsafes. Sure, it's easier said than done, but it'd save a lot of headaches and a lot of lives. Same with the power grid.

 

[stares at error messages]

Do we have packet radio?

Yeah, electromagnetism still works. Just no ISPs or tech that the Internet uses now.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

I read about how software and games from the West spread in East Germany. People would somehow get permission to travel to West Berlin and come back with all kinds of software/games and freely distribute it at computer clubs. Even the early hardware in the East was basically reverse engineered from hardware smuggled in from West Berlin.

Nerds will always find a way.

Not just nerds. Even normal people will if the restrictions are repressive enough. Notel is a portable media player that has been popular in North Korea since 2005. Until 2014, it was illegal. It can be bought legally now, but you have to register it like it's a firearm that also plays Kpop videos.

All this just because it supports USB and SD cards. Some of them can also read PDF.

 

[Temporal Refugee]

Packet Radio (NBP) for networking over HAM
FreedomBox for an easily deployable (but limited without a lot of migraines) self hosting framework
FreeNAS w/ the Portainer plugin for a more in depth but resilient self hosted solution
There's a ton of resources laid out on the awesome-selfhosted GitHub page, though I personally think it suffers for including tons of information that varies wildly in terms of quality, usability, maintenance.

I have a small "home server" setup with FreeNAS + Portainer on an rpi 4 on which I experiment with these things. My goal is to eventually script out the installation of the things I find most relevent to the preservation of knowledge and the facilitation of proximate communication (ie talk to your neighbors), draw up plans for an EMP shielded CyberDeck + documentation for how to source power for the thing in several different ways, then publish it online somewhere.

I'm not usually much of a tinfoil type, but I think in the highly unlikely event that the internet goes down on a wise enough scale, those effected are thoroughly and completely fucked. We depend so much on the fucking "cloud" nowadays that I really do think we need a few people keeping critical information safe and ready to be shared with their communities, lest we regress hundreds of years or more practically overnight in the case of any event that would compromise the underlying infrastructure of the internet. I've known way too many people who have played part in maintaining that infrastructure to say such things are impossible. A lot of telecoms embezzled grants meant to bolster against this sort of thing, so even now we're still fighting to harden our networks to the level we identified was necessary 20+ years ago.

 

[Cheerlead-in-Chief]

I still have my books and comics
But socializing will be much more harder for me.
And new music in a remote rural area

 

[Cool Dog]

I used to think I would just use all the shit I got in DVDRs and my HDDs but nowadays most PCs and laptop dont even come with optical drives, and discs from the 90's and early 00s are already rotting which is some really bad sign

Also HDDs are getting shittier and more failure prone every year because the entire industry is just WD and seagate and they want to sell you more shit disks not protect your data. Also SSDs dont last long, and lose data when unpowered for a long time.

So not looking good unless you're a richfag with tons of LTO storage

 

[Kosher Dill]

FreedomBox for an easily deployable (but limited without a lot of migraines) self hosting framework

Well, this brings up a question of its own - I see that this software is based on Debian and still being constantly patched.
How safe would any modern software be after the downfall of the internet, given how bug-riddled it is and our current dependence on constant patching? 10 years later, would it be like an entire planet of Windows XP machines?

I think we should be looking into minimal, bulletproof software systems. Something where you can "set it and forget it" for 10, 20 years, modulo hardware maintenance.