What If They Turned Off the Internet?

theodp writes "It's the not-too-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope? Cracked.com asked readers to Photoshop what life would be like in an Internet-addicted society learning to cope without it. Better hope it never happens, or be prepared for dry-erase message boards, carrier pigeon-powered Twitter, block-long lines to get into adult video shops, door-to-door Rickrolling, Lolcats on Broadway, and $199.99 CDs."

Comments

(And now with more Pants!)

[Anonymous Coward]

If it gets Idle off /., it wouldn't be a complete loss.

Re:(And now with more Pants!)

[sopssa]

Sad thing is that this story *is not* in idle, but entertainment.

Uhm... wrong site.

[nametaken]

What is this, digg? Cracked joke pages don't belong here.

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[wizardforce]

Idle and Slashdot 2.0 don't belong on Slashdot either. Unfortunately, someone behind the scenes thought that the best way to lure new users was to emulate Digg instead of doing what Slashdot did best; allow nerds and geeks to discuss interesting articles and thus provide intellectual entertainment. I think that they'll find that the whole charm of Slashdot was the discussion after the article and it is what made Slashdot worth returning to on a daily basis.

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[altek]

+1000

I have been on /. since it launched (yeah, back then we nerds were quite resistant to ever creating logins for sites, hence my non-low account ID). And it seems in the last 6 months or so it's been going this way - I have gone to reading it in Google Reader and also have Gizmodo and Engadget in there as well. It seems like at least a third of the posts lately are just regurgitated from Giz and Engadget, a day or so later.

My thought is that the internet has grown so huge, that /. can't compete with sites that have pageviews hundreds of times higher, and this is their way of sucking in some extra pageviews.

The content on here has definitely changed. I still find some engaging comment threads, but it just seems like the truly geeky content has gotten watered down with posts about new products, jokes, etc.

Part of it may just be that the tech world as a whole has transformed from what it was in the mid-nineties. Back then, everything was awe-inspiring and amazing in the tech world, and now it's all pretty pedestrian, we've become quite jaded.

And, our attention spans have gotten so short, that spending a half hour reading an article about a distributed network cracking the latest encryption algorithm gets pushed under the three posts about new cell phones. And a simple yet brilliant idea is no longer brilliant, it's just expected from middle management in the outsourced development sweatshops.

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[Anonymous Coward]

While much of you may lament the current days of slashdot, when I started visiting it ~4-6 years ago it was filled with memes (I havn't seen a soviet russia joke in quite some time), first post jokes (GNAA) and dupes. Now it seems like most days most of the memes have rightfully left for reddit/digg. So while the comments have gotten better, the articles have probably gotten worse. What slashdot needs to do is evaluate the story submission process and the mods currently in control to emphasize less bullshit and more tech.

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[JustOK]

What slashdot needs to do is evaluate the story submission process and the mods currently in control to emphasize less bullshit and more tech.

What slashdot needs is a beowulf cluster of hot grits poured over Natalie Portman

Re:Uhm... wrong site.

[ZipprHead]

Being a long time reader myself, I'll have to say /. does have some strong competition of late with Engadget scooping stories first and BoingBoings editorial staff. But what makes this site awesome, is the commenting, moderation and user community. To this day, I often get what I need to know from the article and summaries. Engadget and other sites can not hold a candle to this community.

Kudos to us all!

Re:It's not so bad.

[eln]

True, life was just fine before the Internet. Now, though, the Internet has infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives. Given that, if the Internet were to be shut off permanently, we would have to do without a lot of conveniences we've become accustomed to, which would make it a lot more painful than life before the Internet was. To throw in the requisite car analogy, life without cars probably wasn't all that horrible (at least, not due to the lack of cars specifically). However, now that cars are a major part of the fabric of our everyday lives, it would be substantially more painful to give them up completely now.

Add to all this the fact that a large percentage of us would have to find something else to do for a living, and many of us would have to emerge from the basements we've been in since 1987, and you have a real problem.

There is no point in this.

[Hurricane78]

Because it would never happen.

Why I'm so sure? Because there is no "they" in the Internet. Everybody can connect to his neighbors' wifi router, if needed. And the moment when no company on the planet is interested in using the now unused wires and cell phone towers, to sell services to customers, is the moment when humanity itself ceases to exist.

I don't see a point in imagining not having the Internet. And I know how it would look anyway, since I already lived when there was no such thing. I even know how life in a monastery without electricity is. Or in a hut in the middle of nowhere.

Now, that we know of the concept of a Internet, as long as there is a critical mass of humans exists, there will be such a network. :)

What would happen if Microsoft turned it off

[Animats]

All it would take is one really bad Windows Update to turn off 70% of the Internet.

Question for Homeland Security: who has access to the master signing key for Windows Update? Who does the background check on those people?

Re:It's not so bad.

[warGod3]

Which side of the fence?

I was in Cuba (Gitmo) in the 80s. We went to the beach, we played D&D, we skated, we did all kinds of things. You read a lot. Hell, we didn't even have cable or a McDonalds until 1986 or so. You really have to make do with what you have.

It's amazing what you learn to live with and what you find to entertain yourself with.

Re:Slashdot

[PFI_Optix]

Right up until someone decides that "misbehaving" includes "submitting content of which we do not approve." The last thing we need is for the internet to give some powermonger the tools to easily silence dissent.